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Comment by rland

I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politically.

What am more worried about is the direct wholesale destruction of the biosphere. There are absolutely bonkers numbers about extinction, ocean acidification, runaway permafrost melt that actually could choke out a majority of people.

Worse still, these effects aren't easily solvable by stopping emissions, or blocking out the sun with mylar sheets, or any of the "low hanging" technological fruit -- the stuff that could be solved with today's space technology or electric car tech.

In order to actually solve these "deeper" problems, we will need an absolutely massive bio-engineering effort that is probably only possible with some kind of entropic breakthrough.

Evolution is basically hyper-organization, a point of locally super low entropy that only happens by hundreds of millions of years of energy expenditure. When a species dies, it's not those individuals, it's every one of those individuals that ever lived that dies. All that concentration of local entropy, destroyed forever. It's like using every GPU on planet earth to train a hyper-smart GPT-4, for many human lifetimes -- and then hitting rm -rf on the weights.

parent rland 5 years ago

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