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Comment by Snowe | Hacker News Reader

It will require a massive change of mindset. The hard question is how to achieve it in a fair way. There has always been a tension between the freedom of the individual and what's best for society and more broadly all humankind. I don't think people have to give everything up, but there will probably come a time when priorities will have to be re-evaluated and many people will have to live with less in the way of disposable gadgets, mindless entertainment, inefficient transport, over-sized houses etc.. Maybe education is the key, more mindful entertainment, less mindless...

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Sadly I think the only solution to global warming is something like a nuclear holocaust that kills the majority of the planet's inhabitants, and sends the remainder back to the stone ages, walking around rather than flying and driving in fossil fuel vehicles.

Other than that... Things are bad, getting worse, yet there are plenty of deniers, and it doesn't appear we're going to stop screwing up any time soon. We're too stupid and greedy as a species to avoid catastrophe I fear.

No need for a nuclear holocaust, the increasing ineffectiveness of antibiotics will do the job eventually. Nature has a way of getting even.

What's wrong with mindless entertainment, as opposed to mindful entertainment, from an environmental point of view?

it dumbs you down into non-caring whateva state. there is place for both, after very hard brain-day at work for example, but many folks only have the mindless ones.

> It will require a massive change of mindset.

...or a dictator?

Kill 90% of humans and our CO2 emissions won't be a concern anymore.

You could do with much less than 90% by targeting the worst offenders.

Or: we move all our shit-producing industries to Moon and Mars, places where there is no ecology to fuck up. Expensive but could be done, especially if we find out that those places have good minerals we can mine and work on right there.

I'm trying to imagine the pollution controls that would make that economical. And the space network that would enable it. I think that even with astronomical fines for pollution on Earth, it would be a difficult value proposition. Consider a planet made of solid gold, and then consider how far away it would need to be to make it uneconomical to retrieve. Moon rocks have been valued at $50,800 per gram based on the cost to retrieve them, which should probably be taken as an upper bound rather than a typical figure, but the current spot price for gold looks like it's around $37 per gram. So if the Moon were made of gold, we would need to reduce our retrieval costs by three orders of magnitude to make it worthwhile. I don't have a remotely rigorous way to estimate from that where our current breakeven point might be, but I think it would be pretty close in.

Your idea is pretty crazy, but not completely crazy. There aren't any other particularly good ideas for making space travel profitable. On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine the advances in technology and the environmental concerns that would make it possible. Barring some absolute prohibition, it seems unlikely that spending millions or billions of dollars to manufacture things on Mars would be easier than improving manufacturing processes here on Earth.

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