alt Hacker News> The “ideology of technological salvation”
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
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We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.
If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.
That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
The only thing "wrong" with it is that both parties are being intentionally vauge and operating at a "higher level" than the actual problem they are dealing with.
You can immediately rule out "carbon-sucking machines or whatever" because it will take at least as much energy to capture and sequester the carbon as you got from burning it and spent extracting it. Which directly brings us to the actual solution of getting energy from a renewable resource that is cheaper.
Over time all tech will cause issues but if it's well designed the issues won't be exorbitantly expensive to fix compared to the benefits. innovation will always be a cure-all, cause otherwise the problem is already solved, showing or educating people about which solutions are already optimal energy-wise will do more than enough to set their expectations straight, or at least convince them that they don't want to carry around tnt in their pocket.
Making Mars habitable will be a thousand year project which implies that the earth is not uninhabitable. Nobody except a conman will tell you that we have to "escape" earth to go live on mars.