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Comment by benchmarkist | Hacker News Reader

Technology is not going to get us out of this mess.

I was of the same opinion till last year actually still am as I think the world has passed the point of no return when it comes to global warming.

But the tech is there just not the political will or finances as it hurts economies and people's chances of winning elections.

China is likely to hit it's peak oil because of ev's and peak coal in the next 2-3 years because of renewables and batteries. Although China is mostly going electric for economic and energy security reasons it will be interesting to see what happens when it is no longer using carbon based energy for it's growth.

Money is fake so we can print as much of it as we want. The problem is that innovation can't be bought with money. Newton did not invent calculus because he wanted to get rich, he invented calculus to understand the universe. Money is not the issue.

Probably nothing will get us out of this mess, but technology is really the only thing that can help. Solar power, wind power, electric cars, heat pumps. All technology. All helping.

Seems like we could deflect 1% of sunlight with existing technology. I don't get why we aren't doing this.

We are already terraforming the globe, so we might as well do it intentionally.

The perceived risk of dramatic unexpected effects is too great for people to consider this before things start getting really bad.

We’ll see how people feel in 50 years.

I just don't see how it is any riskier than what we are doing right now, flooding the atmosphere with CO2 and watching the ocean acidify.

What is? Depopulation?

In time

Is there enough left?

I disagree. If anything, a YC-funded company will get us out of this mess.

Step 1: Figure out how to monetize reversing climate change.

Make it a SAAS and put it in the Cloud.

Turn the carbon into diamond.

Not jewels - let’s make some diamond houses. That’d be neat.

Given that diamond has an incredibly high thermal conductivity, I think that might not be feasible. Only issue I could see with using diamonds for housing.

Just write react app and scale it to as many servers as possible. After seeds funding ofc.

Don't forget the step where we use an open-source tool, rebrand it, barely change it and use that as our pitch.

If you truly believe that then the options for what happens are universally bad.

The history of life is a history of extinctions and I don't think humanity is an exception to that rule.

I honestly think that we are. The reduction might be extreme say 90 to 99%. But that still leaves 80 to 800 million humans living some sort of existence. Might not be same as now, but I am almost certain humans won't go extinct.

I guess that's why everyone is in a rush to develop AI, artificial wombs, genetic engineering, and robots but given the scale of the ecological damage I'm not sure what exactly the survivors are going to do with the entire mess.

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