The Aral Sea got almost entirely dried up because too much river water was diverted to cotton production. The dust on the former lake bed was filled with pesticide chemicals that blew around and ruined the health of the local population. It’s the world’s worst environmental disaster.
More like we could definitely support hundreds of trillions of people, each one with their own personal galaxy made of gold, with drinking fountains of fresh lemonade, unlimited hookers and blow, and a unicorn.
Because…
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
Goats can and do wreak havoc in certain ecosystems. Up north, here in the Boreal zone, I haven’t seen, heard or read of any long-term environmental damage goats would have been able to do, now or in the past.
Yes, I know it all sounds like bizarre fantasy, compared to the very sensible and reasonable estimates in other posts in this thread. But let’s look at the numbers.
A hundred trillion people would be 1014 individuals. The total amount of energy available in the Solar system is 3.8 x 1026 Watts. That means each individual could be allocated 3.8 terawatts at any one time; that could power some pretty impressive simulation machinery, and conjure up an almost arbitrary amount of virtual unicorns if that is what you want.
Once again I should point out that I’m not recommending this strategy - creating a vast simulated fantasy-land does not sound like a sensible use of resources. But with all that energy in our solar system, I sometimes wonder what we might eventually do with it.
I was only riffing on your use of the phrase “sufficiently advanced technology.”
So far all the posts seem to be about people acting ‘nicely’ and ‘reasonably’ and I have my doubts.
There’s a current thread about ‘how much is a human life worth’ with posts throwing around the figures one or two million per. I can believe that people value their own loved ones at that, and much more, but strangers? Would you put your hand in your pocket right now to donate even a thousand dollars to save the live of some unknown stranger in, oh, Tanzania or Guatemala?
Look at the predictions that AGW will lead to rising sea levels and massive flooding of low-level areas. An article I read years ago, so maybe the info has been superseded or I just remember it wrong, but it suggested that about 90% of the people of Indonesia would have their homes and fields wiped out by just a rise of a foot or two. Yes, there would still be parts of some (most? all?) of various island still above water, but those would mostly be rocky/hilly land, not much suited for growing crops.
There are roughly 270 million people in Indonesia. What happens with the 243 million who no longer have a place to live or space to grow food? Are other countries going to welcome them? Especially given that just about every country except Switzerland will also be suffering for the loss of fertile lowlands and what to do with/how to feed their own people?
I really suspect that there will be a lot of people who will say, in essence, Sucks to be an Indonesian, but we got our own problems. And if those 243 million people die, well, what did they ever do for me anyway?
This. But it’s about 3 billion across the whole planet who will become homeless, landless, and foodless. In some cases even stateless as their entire country disappears beneath the water. Albeit slowly.
Okay, it seems that my asking about feasibility is the part that’s confusing. I guess I should have asked specifically about technical feasibility, either now or in the reasonable future, to eliminate the political.
I’m not sure if it belongs in this thread, but based on this article it seems that many of the ultra-wealthy may have decided that “sustainable existence” for the masses is no longer feasible so the best option is to secure a sustainable existence for themselves.
But one thing the article did point out is that we may want to start looking at more regional and local sustainability, instead of overreliance on global supply chains that are subject to disruptions. Personally I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. We have global supply chains because they are more efficient and use less resources. But as I said, they are subject to disruptions like war, shortages, or some idiot wedging a boat the size of the Empire State Building sideways in a major canal.
I don’t plan on giving up travel until it’s either banned or exorbitantly expensive. It’s the only thing that keeps me motivated to live.
I haven’t read the whole thread but a lot of people in the beginning were talking like we’re going to have to use significantly less energy, and thus live more like pre-industrial people. And that’s bullshit.
A handful of nuke plants supplemented by renewables could supply all the power we currently use and more, we just have to build them. We don’t need to use less energy, we just need to use less fossil fuels. And we’ve known how to obtain energy from non-fossil fuel sources for generations now.
It’s literally just greedy coal and oil companies which are the reason we’re not living in a carbon neutral environmental utopia right now. At this point, in addition to using less fossil fuels, I think we’ll need a geo-engineering solution to actually reduce atmospheric carbon, which is a big unsolved issue. But it’s nothing we can’t throw money at. We just have to solve the “shutting off the hose” problem first before the “mopping up” phase.
It’s just a matter of political will. I do think it will have to get worse, before the political will grows to the point where we can actually make things better. But these are societal problems that require large scale solutions. A bunch of individuals driving less or buying crap in cardboard instead of plastic containers just isn’t going to have much effect.
In short, I think the average person would notice little change, and indeed we could have been making these changes the whole time in the background, and the average politically unaware person might have never noticed. Now the changes will have to be bigger and more noticeable, but still not terribly intrusive, unless you’re an oil company or coal mine.
I agree, and like I said upthread, the biggest changes to most people’s lives would be taking a high speed train rather than a plane for most travel, and drastically reducing their consumption of beef.
If the public hadn’t gotten cold feet about nukes from Three Mile and Chernobyl, and even better, if Nixon hadn’t cancelled the Thorium reactor program, we’d likely have little issue with carbon free electrical generation (distribution may still see some of the issues we see with it today.)
And you are right about political will, there are some small changes that need to be made voluntarily (even if by govt mandate), before we have to make drastic changes involuntarily (by circumstance, not law). And people exaggerate and balk at those changes, ensuring that we end up on the second path, where we simply no longer have the option of sustaining our lifestyles in any way.
It’s like a smoker complaining that they don’t want to give up smoking, and trying to pretend that that path doesn’t end up with them giving up breathing.
Which is a great analogy when you also consider that going to solar, wind, hydro and nuclear generation would be incredibly healthy for the lungs of the billions of people on the planet.
Heck, the payoff of renewables is great already, but it grows by leaps and bounds when you include the cases of lung disease and the cost of their treatment in the plus side of the ledger.