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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

I suspect you are seeing the result of a few generations of humans doing exactly what you are proposing and subsequently maybe (with effort) fixing the number one demand. All the other "future huge problems" have become the now huge problems and it doesn't really make sense to rank all the definitely going to destroy our way of life issues because they will all result in the same thing with a similar time frame (way too soon).

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I have the same intuition. It’s not all that different from an old codebase that runs on even older (and disintegrating) hardware. You may keep fixing things, adapt to mildly new requirements, change a tape deck here, a consensator there, but eventually the whole system is going to come down and has to be replaced - there’s nothing we know that lasts forever in a self-repairing way, and that’s what’s going to happen to our civilization. Telling by the worms and the beetles my guess is it’s a matter of decades, not centuries, hopefully not years. The only hope is that we’ve wisened up sufficiently till then to renew without completely getting annihilated or being back at cave-and-sticks level.

Climate change has been talked about for decades now, and very little actually seem to be done. What is something you would consider a number 1 that was fixed? (I guess the ozone layer hole was a relative success).

On the drawdown website, refrigeration seems to be #1. Afforestation is up there. Family planning too. But supposedly we have to be doing all of these things on massive scale.

I was considering saying "nothing ever gets fixed" and toned it down to what I wrote specifically because I remembered CFCs.

maybe although I got to think that a lot of these environmental issues destroying our way of life way too soon are interconnected, and it perhaps isn't as difficult to rank them as it might seem when viewed as singular unconnected problems.

on edit: typo, changed out to our.

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