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Comment by KellyCriterion | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend this graphic to everyone:

https://globaia.org/_astro/GA_1750-2024_DARK2.CKx3duw8_ZQd9m...

It lists 24 socio-ecological KPI across the planet since industrialisation beginning - as you can see:

There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery - and you can expect other graphs of adjacent KPI to show similar development.

In one sentence: There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years. And by overusing our environment, our civilisation wont last 500 years. (sure, some hotspots will survive, but they wont have ASML Twin:Exe machines or cheap flight travel anymore etc.)

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> There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery

ozone, marine fish capture, tropical forest loss, and domesticated land are shown as below peak, aren't they?

True! Maybe its just a slowdown or the first clear signs of incoming collapse of these ressources? Though, domestic land is already accelerating again over the last year, so it will be on par again with its previous high.

And this ensemble is only a collection of some KPI, there are additional ones I guess which will show similar upwards-trend.

The vast majority of countries in the world are aging. "Transistors per microprocessor" and "Phone subscriptions" are weird ones. As if the goal was to have sharp graphs...

> As if the goal was to have sharp graphs

Welcome to capitalism! Task #1: Figure out a couple of numbers. Task #2: Figure out if it's good when these numbers go up or bad. Task #3: Optimize everything against these numbers, never consider anything else but these numbers, they are your life now.

The world population graph is misleading. Looking at it one could be lead to believe that in 2100 there will be 13bln people.

In reality by 2100 the world's population will be around 10.2bln and declining from 10.3bln in 2084 or so.

And that also assumes the UN won't revise its projections once again, as every time they did, they had to lower their estimates.

I think they are about to revise their projections again, the population is continuing to decline much faster than estimated.

That is my feeling as well.

I expect a major revision after India's census concludes next year.

We really don't know how many people there are in the world - some countries (mainly in Africa) hadn't had a census in years.

There is too much uncertainty in predictions like this.

E.g. if we are lucky, and AI works well for biology, we may be able to extend lifespan significantly and end up with 20bln people instead.

If AI works well, we'll reach the singularity and nobody in this world knows what the hell will happen.

We might merge consciousness and live in an ethereal medium, we might insert ourselves in a simulation and keep our physical bodies neatly healthy organized and packed where 20 Bln is not a problem at all, we might collectively (or AI do it for us) decide to reduce human pop to 1 Bln or less on Earth and terraform other planets.

Call me crazy, but if you described our world to someone some hundreds years ago, theyd think the same. Crazyness is a requirement for a correct prediction of the future. There are ALWAYS status quo changes based on revolutionary magic-like technologies that results in significant changes.

If you want to have at least a mild change of doing some sort of future prediction you can check predictions about our current time from people in the past and you'll see the mistakes they make, most people nowadays keep making. Using current technology and ways of thinking, as if they would stay the same just used in different ways, not thinking enough out of the box and allowing themselves to be more imaginative. Fix that, and you'll make wild predictions but also some of them which will be much closer to the truth than any status quo linear evolving incremental improving technology based prediction.

> pre-industry levels within the next 500 years

For instance there are more forests in much of Europe than we did before the industrial revolution, let alone the 1800s. e.g. more of France is covered in trees now than it was as far back as 1300. Of course that's a very narrow and specific "KPI", mostly just shows that humans already had a massive impact on the environment and ecosystems long before the industrial revolution.

I agree on the "we're on the wrong path" though I don't share your conclusion's gravity, but some of these indicators feel very weird to be included imho. Total FDI and transistor per processor makes very little point on the matter.

We are not trying to literally revert the planet to how it was 100 years ago, we are "just" trying to stop these trends as soon as possible so they don't continue for another 100 years. There are going to be consequences regardless, but they can always get worse.

Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.

Most growth is exponential (for a while, as a logistics curve (aka S-curve) does start exponentially), how about showing log(y(x)) instead of y(x).

But not always: if zero is not on the bar chart, e.g. log(y(x)) with [x] = Kelvin, such a plot will of course not work. So keep temperature as temperature increment over pre-industrial times or other baseline.

Also, does coastal nitrogen have three data points, or why the edge in the middle? Scatter charts plus trend are more the real thing than a curve if this is two linear relationships, with a second slope after a certain time, and keep y(x) plotting here, of course.

No, you use logarithms when you expect the data to follow an exponential curve, but there's no reason to believe that e.g. shrimp aquaculture should follow an exponential trend. Using a logarithm there would be rather misleading.

>There is not a single KPI where the curve shows even the slightest sign of recovery

Ozone, I believe.

Ignoring the overly pessimistic and self-defeating overall tone:

> There is no chance that humanity will ever come back to any pre-industry levels within the next 500 years

How could you possibly predict this? We have moments of time in history which are basically "before/after", and no one saw those points coming until they were in effect. Electricity, atoms, nuclear energy, walking on the moon, transistors, internet, LLMs and more are examples of these things, that were short of impossible, and had lots of people claiming "We'll never do that in a hundred years!", up until we already accomplished those things.

What I'd like to know, is what the point is? Why claim "our civilisation wont last 500 years" and similar, what do you wish to achieve with this? What conversation do you wish your comment to spawn, that people tell you you are wrong? Or right?

I see no problem with the graphic. It is going to be like this until we achieve energy abundance which we could have long ago if the idiotic climate activists didn't block nuclear everywhere.

You can keep the blue curves going up while bring down the green curves with sheer power of energy (and new technologies).

The solution to climate problems is not regressing to hunter gatherer age as the climate activists have wet dreams about. The solution is to produce more energy, improve technology, and clean up the pollution.

Humanity will do better. We'll go preindustrial levels within next 100 years. Ironically, china will probably lead the way.

I've heard this argument for the last ~40 years.

"Technology will take care of this" and then crickets.

The solution is to curb our excess, which nobody wants to do. We are all living like kings and queens.

You can adjust the way you calculate every year so you can show improvements. Like we do with inflation

Optimistic to think humanity will survive 500 years on this planet.

Humanity will be around for a few more millennia at least.

How many humans, living what lifestyle, what eco-footprint, Star Trek style tech or back to cavemen after a nuclear winter, those are some of the questions.

As for other species... fewer of them for sure.

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