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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore.

> we’re not capable of

I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom.

I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.

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Not saying you’re wrong, but espousing the idea that “humanity is too short sighted” is just as daft as saying “we are definitely going to colonise the universe”. It’s not particularly helpful, you’re reasoning more on emotion than fact (we’ve gotten this far) and most of all you’re talking as if this is something you or I cannot change. I think that’s why you get downvoted. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable opinion you hold, but it’s not a very constructive outlook. And HN is full of people who want to make things better, not sit on the sidelines pronouncing doom. If you see a problem, work to fix it. People can and do change the direction of humanity.

If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system.

Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.

> I do not see why

One word serves to explain why what you imagine won’t happen in time: profit. More specifically: oil profits.

    If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough

If you're thinking of big Tesla Powerwall-style batteries, that just kicks the problem ahead by a few years or decades.

The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years.

Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.

You're right that the current state of battery tech is woefully inefficient for any kind of grid-level storage.

But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.

The materials in those batteries can be recycled into new batteries indefinitely.

And when we need to create additional batteries...?

What element in a battery is destroyed during its lifetime that cannot be recycled?

What percentage of batteries are actually recycled? How much energy does recycling them take? What toxic byproducts are produced as part of the recycling process? What will future demand for batteries be, and how long will our supplies of lithium etc. last? Who controls the lithium supplies?

This is not an argument against recycling batteries, by the way. Chemical batteries are a big part of the future, and we should recycle them. But let's not be glib about any of these choices.

Is it possible the raw materials to make these batteries are so abundant right now that it’s much cheaper to just make new ones than recycle old ones?

> They will become "the new oil" in N years.

The existential problem with oil is climate change, not finite resources.

> Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need?

Clearly this line of logic is not working, seen in Ukraine. At some point there is a person with enough power who wants to fight just because they can. Essentially humanity is at mercy of random power-hungry sociopaths to not bomb the nuclear power plants.

Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop?

Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.

How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.

Even if all nukes would go off (spread evenly) they would not kill everybody.

The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.

In what realistic scenario would all nukes go off "spread evenly"?

There isn't one. Maximal theoretical damage (not practical) would not end civilisation.

it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food

The nuclear winter calculations by Sagan et al noticed that some fuels create more problematic smoke than other fuels. A lot of trees and wood structures would be ignited in a nuclear war, but the smoke from those fires falls out of the atmosphere relatively quickly compared to smoke from burning oil tanks, which Sagan et al said would contribute most of the cooling effect.

Then Saddam lit thousands of oil wells on fire as a big fuck-you to the miltary coalition arrayed against him, more oil than would be set on fire by any nuclear war. The cooling effect was detectable, but hardly serious.

We have quite some understanding that a mayor nuclear war will cause nuclear winter, by generating huge amounts of smoke at high altitudes which will block the sunlight.

We also know that it causes an extinction event, since it was one of the effects of the K-t extinction event 60 million years ago. It is the one that killed the dinosaurs, and many more: A huge number of species, including almost any large land animals, dies. It is unlikely that homo sapiens would survive this time.

> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat,

Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?

No, the positive impacts will most likely outweigh the negative impacts.

Potentially, yes.

There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc.

Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending.

We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly.

Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?

Note that a reactor meltdown isn't "civilization-ending" either. The world carried on fine after two of those.

Yes, of course, if we take a look to the history and cities marooned after a several years dry spell lead to war and migration.

Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable

Yeah. Across the universe, what percentage of advanced species managed to harness nuclear power and not end themselves by nuclear energy, directly or indirectly?

It can't be a very large percentage.

I would like to be wrong.

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