How to Enjoy the End of the World

What Hacker News said

Strong rec myshpa · 2023-07 · on “How, Mathematically, We’re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet”

> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored

Recommends datashaman · 2019-05 · on “Complex life may only exist because of millions of years of groundwork by fungi”

Check out this sobering talk by Dr Sid Smith where he says the same thing wrt oils and fossil fuels. [this video]

Recommends chacha2 · 2020-06 · on “Does computing make the world better?”

> Computing saves millions of lives on a regular basis. Can't run modern agriculture or medicine or government without it. No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all. Good talk I watched the other day [this video]

Recommends M95D · 2026-01 · on “Why Some People See Collapse Earlier”

> Civilizational doom isn't a foregone conclusion See lecture by B. Sidney Smith: [this video] . It explains the inevitablility of collapse.

Cites jacobwilliamroy · 2020-02 · on “Battery supply problems faced by electric air taxis”

I remember Sid Smith saying that we have enough lithium in known reserves to replace every car on earth one time. [this video]

Cites cableshaft · 2021-09 · on “Ask HN: What are your thoughts on the r/collapse community”

I check and comment on the subreddit on an almost daily basis, and have for about a year now. It takes a while to believe that it can happen, for sure. I didn't start seriously believing it for at least six months of checking the subreddit periodically. But when you see how much damage we're doing to our oceans (National Geographic warns there might be no (human) seafood at all by 2048[1], ocean acidification, coral bleaching, etc), how more and more regions are getting into emergency situations with water (which will lead to people getting more and more desperate to get that water, and possibly wars being waged over it), positive feedback loops from global warming that can shoot us way past

Cites famil · 2021-11 · on “A Biography of E.O. Wilson, the Scientist Who Foresaw Our Troubles”

William Catton is another visonary. I consider his book, Overshoot to be better than limits to growth. This lecture sums up his work well: [this video]

Cites myshpa · 2023-07 · on “Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show”

> And of course, if you know that this scenario is possible, then you probably also start to understand why governments aren't as panicky about the whole situation as you seem to be. So not ecosystems restoration (habitats restoration, reforestation and afforestation, wetlands restoration, streams and rivers restoration, sustainable land management, conservation and protected areas, plant-based diets, ...), but attempts at geoengineering with aerosols like sulfur dioxide, or mirrors in space, or whitening the clouds. The potential problems are enormous. Solar radiation management is also an ungovernable technology. Even if we knew how to reflect the sun's rays, that means deciding on what is