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Comment by Goety | Hacker News Reader

>Energy is a fundamental need for society to flourish.

Energy is needed for basic modern services.

Humans have survived a long time without electricity. It could be simpler to 'go without' or 'find a workaround' for a lot of conveniences if we were serious at combating climate change.

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Not for eight billion people. Just look at what happens when we stop loading trucks for a little while. Now imagine if you expanded all that "going without" to everything that uses energy. You'd have days at most before mass chaos.

Can we engineer a human backbone behind these services to be resistant to corruption and complacency for security sake?

We did an ok job with nuclear weapons but only just.

Before electricity we would burn wood to not die in winter. We don’t have any forests left to do that.

Luckily nowadays we have clean sources of energy, so there is no need to go back to burning wood.

In what condition? Without the energy of the fossil fuel, lots of the energy came from human labor. Without it, we wouldn't have gotten rid of slavery. Most people were doing a manual labor, which is also more discriminatory to the weaker ones (e.g. woman)

So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.

>In what condition?

Well that's the question right? Without nuclear there may not be a middle ground as an option for a lot of people.

>So your just suggesting we go back to the middle ages? No, thank you.

I'm not suggesting anything, simply declaring it an option.

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