this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Mankind has been cheating for decades now, building a super consuming inefficient society without the means to actually do so sustainably.

We failed the Candy challenge, we chose to eat our candy now instead of receiving more candy in the future. We wanted to have new toys constantly, make stuff cheap and throw-away, because we want new stuff anyways. We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. We wanted to have our own large homes with large gardens and heat/cool them to be perfect for living in all the time. We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so. We used the ultimate cheat code called fossil fuels.

Using fossil fuel is like going to a bar and putting everything on the tab. You can drink and eat all you want, but at one point in the future you are going to have to pay up. Previous generations didn't really care, they would just pass along the tab to the next generation, they will figure it out. And with technological progress as it was, it would have seemed likely a solution would be found. Especially in the atomic era the solution to a lot of problems was within our grasp. Unfortunately because a lot of reasons that never panned out.

No solution is within sight and the bill is coming due. But in order to at least pay some of that bill, it would mean we are going to have to give up a lot of riches we've come accustomed to. With a lot of people it isn't they don't want a better future for the Earth and the next generations, it's that they don't want to be the one who gives up those riches. They don't want to give up their car, not even for a day. They don't want to stop eating meat, even if it's only half of the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So the bar analogy works, and I hate to agree with an idiot, but when the tab comes due, some people just go to a different bar.

Let’s get off planet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Let's fix the planet. It's possible, especially if we greatly expand hemp production. Once that's done, we ship the tiny minority of greedy assholes to Ceres. They can figure out asteroid mining, we can even give them MOABs to help out, but no nukes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd love to do this, but we literally don't have the energy budget for that. At least, not for everyone. Rockets require crazy stupid amounts of energy for relatively small amounts of mass, just to leave Earth's gravity well. Nevermind that space is an incredibly hostile environment requiring technology we don't even have yet, or that our next best bets for settlement (Mars and Titan) aren't much better. We'd be far better off terraforming the Sahara.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Absolutely agree. I just think the earth environment thing is already a wash, so we could try our damnedest to get off the rock.

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