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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."

Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).

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You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this."

This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.

Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.

The solution to the first two is reuse. With enough energy, some form of recycling of becomes feasible for pretty much anything. No oil? Just make plastic from atmospheric CO2!

Is it a solution if the masses refuse to trade cheap convenience for more expensive and burdensome products/processes? Theoretically yes, but realistically no.

How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.

have we tried adding "make no mistakes" to the humans' prompt?

Scale matters. When you have the scale that we do, you will have accidents because of the sheer number and the lack of oversight due to cost pressures. These accidents aren't going anywhere. They have been around since industrial times and will continue to be so. Please tell me how you would ensure 0 accidents - the world would be interested to know since it hasn't been discovered yet. Now please explain who's position is baseless.

> lack of oversight due to cost pressures

Perhaps the costs of an accident should be increased to the point that it makes sense to have the oversight.

It's true, you can't ever ensure 0 accidents. But you can do things to reduce the rate of accidents and try to limit the peripheral impact of the ones that remain.

"Perhaps the costs of an accident should be increased to the point that it makes sense to have the oversight."

Not the cost of an accident, but the cost of preventing them. The cost to consumers is something people wouldn't tolerate.

Not with humans.

Wow, lots of people disagreeing with the comment without stating why. Pretty meta when you consider the cognitive dissonance aspect haha.

Uncomfortable truths and all that.

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