Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Space Shades: Humanity's Last Hope | Answers With Joe" video.

  1. Here's my optimistic view on this. We'll do nothing or barely enough. If the predictions aren't totally wrong and the planet keeps on average warming, oceans gets too acidified, weather events increasingly extreme, and people starts dying by the truckloads... what we'll mostly do is let people die out. We might accelerate things with wars, or things might accelerate with disease, global catastrophes, and whatnot... but fundamentally we'll just not do enough to matter much. At most we might get some years of not facing the worst effects, if they come progressively and not just turn on a dime, which might happen (like ocean warming completely changing or shutting down currents and whatnot). By the time there is enough consensus to take the most drastic measures, the worldwide population will probably be already halved, resources scarce, no money, economic and political systems shifted, and a bunch of other stuff that will only make moonshot project like those more unlikely to happen. We'll get to a point we'll only be able to do little, and little won't be enough, so we'll have to rely on something outside our reach. So in effect, we will be thrown back some centuries of progress. Perhaps the downfall of civilization will be enough to reduce emissions, together with mass migration towards places were it's still possible to live, perhaps going underground, perhaps a combination of several haphazard responses to every change that happens as a consequence of climate change. A patchwork of attempts and limited successes. I don't believe in stuff like global awareness prompting immediate changes to reverse centuries of accumulated damage nor moonshot projects that would require complete cooperation and coordination between multiple nations because this is just not what humanity is. This requires a level of obedience, likemindedness, and prompt agreement of something like the Borg. Or at least a worldwide dictatorship. So, I'm not really sure if we wanna be a collective that is capable of reversing climate change like that, even. Because it might require giving up stuff we don't wanna give up anymore... you know, like democracy and freedom. Dictatorships and domination might not be good for individual liberties and rights, but it can sometimes work wonders to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks - you need only to look at our past history and several of the wonders of the world. So, the idea is, be careful of what you wish for. I don't even think the idea of space shades is sane enough as a futuristic moonshot project, tbh. Much like worldwide industrialization back to industrial revolution times, I don't think we know enough of potential side effects of something of that scale. The baseline idea is far too simplistic, even if it was viable. There are so many technological leaps and jumps in logic that I'm inclined to think we're more likely to have the worldwide population reduced by a whole lot and then deal with effects locally for those who survive, and then hopefully start to evolve and spread once again after that new paradigm gets settled. When you get to levels of insanity like boundless clean energy to produce insane ammounts of materials to create an impossibly big infrastructure to only perhaps mitigate some of the ill effects of a global problem, my mind goes to stuff like world peace and eliminate hunger. Or to also impossibly far fetched alternates. For instance, I think it could be potentially easier, or at least as feasible, for humanity to upload their minds into machines that could take climate change better in the future rather than thinking about ways to force the world to accomodate our current fragile meat bags. In a way, it's a better more permanent solution that could also lead us to the stars and whatnot. How far from one another is the question though. They are so far outside our realm that I can't see the difference today. And i think much of the feeling of closeness that we get from certain paths of evolution are just too speculative. Yes, we are closer to making a moonbase, at least closer than we were in the near past, but predictions are still hugely speculative. Same for AI, large scale automation, etc etc. We might just be at that point when we think we know a lot, but we actually know jack shit. Kinda like macroscale nuclear fusion energy or flying cars, among with predictions for the future from 60s magazines. I have a tendency to think things will be both much more mundane, and previously unimaginable both for bad and good. Something like climate change will happen anyways, and we'll have a patchwork of ways of dealing with it. Some effects will happen as predicted, some will be kind of a surprise.... and we'll deal with them as we go. Then again, like I said in the beginning of my comment, this is the optimistic view. The realistic one is that we just go the way of the Dodo, having lived for a shorter period of time on this planet in comparison to our predecessors. Humanity is far too young in the history of this planet, and perhaps that's how it's supposed to be after all... enjoy while it lasts.
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