Hey Tab, hope you're doing well.
Tab wrote:I'm a bit on the "ouch we're allll gonna die" side of the fence too tbh.
And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie! We're all gonna die - Country Joe
Tab wrote:3 things, in order of probability, give me some small hope.
1) proliferation of small nuclear reactors.Maybe something like SNAP units - Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_for_Nuclear_Auxiliary_Power#SNAP-27Back in the 60s there was thought to putting them into homes. But was decided against because it would be an easy grab for uranium.
They did put them into outer space, for power units up there. The downside to that is that when they come down -- what goes up must come down -- they break up and spew uranium into the atmosphere, and breathing in one particle smaller than the naked eye can see means certain death from cancer.
2) successful fusion.From what little I know about Fusion is that so far it's a pipe dream.
3) alien intervention.They'd likely just wipe us out, for being such primitive barbaric animals.
Tab wrote:Our problems are really always energy problems. With enough cheap energy, everything is doable. The new design small nuclear reactors are safer, cheaper to build, and use pellets of not very disasterously dirty fuel. And clean. Fusion is the same, but a lot better on all counts. Plus yay, bonus helium. Or whatever.
Solves the water shortage problem with cheap desalination, and hell, worst comes to the worst, refidgerate the poles or some other whacky idea.
If neither of those things get off the ground... then damn, seemingly we do have aliens flitting around in the shadows, hopefully they'll take pity on us and fix the planet.
Needless to say, we won't fix things by cooperating - on a global scale - to cut emissions, humans just aren't wired that way - hyperbolic discounting etc.
Well we can't go back. We can't even go back to the mid 1800s, when population was only one billion. And most certainly can't go back to "the garden," back when we were hunter gathers.
We can only go forward from here, and so are dependent upon science to save us. Maybe evolution is doing science now. Let's hope ; hope that science doesn't destroy us before it has a chance to save us.
Otherwise, Whoopie! We're all gonna die ... and we become into the history bin of evolution ... a very big heap so far.