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Comment by jakobnissen | Hacker News Reader

I don't really think so. Areosol pollution is short-lived and kills a ton of people. So you get enormous downsides in the short run (WHO estimates 2 million people die of air pollution in China alone), and in the medium term, you don't gain anything in terms of warming. The underlying CO2 accumulation happens anyway, and as soon as the short-lived areosols and suphur dioxide rains down to Earth, the accumulated warming kicks in.

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But the killing a ton of people is very long term /(dark) s

I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The options to reduce total energy consumption were always humans voluntarily accepting lower quality of life (not just among the top 1 million or 100 million, but top 2 billion at least, so this was obviously not going to happen), or reduce total number of humans.

It would make a difference even if we humans could just accept the same quality of life we already have, instead of building more and more, larger and larger data centers, for whatever the future of AI is. Computers have become so much more efficient than they used to be, and despite any joke we can make about Electron apps and such, those are still reductions in energy consumption, and some people are building such extravagant compute facilities that far outweigh the progress people have made on reducing energy costs.

It is great to see progress on those mini nuclear reactors for data centers though?

https://www.popsci.com/environment/google-mini-nuclear-react...

Really hoping the work here ends up producing solutions that can be taken advantage of by cities and towns since the smaller size factor requires a lot less onerous demands for deployment.

I assume energy use by electronic devices is a distant runner up of energy use compared to moving lots of mass (individuals + their large personal cars) lots of distance (to and from their large lots in far flung suburbs). And leisure travel of course, especially via airplane.

Oh, I bet you're right. I was only giving the first example that came to mind. I think transportation is a better example, a field where many cities (at least in the USA) could have better quality of life for less energy. When everyone drives their own car every day because public transportation is inadequate and inconvenient, we waste time every day stuck in slow traffic. With more convenient public transportation, the roads are more clear for cars, the air is cleaner, and people don't have to spend as much money on gasoline and car maintenance.

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