I feel like I’m a really good judge of character; I can tell if I’m not going to get along with someone or how they will treat me in the future. When it comes to high profile celebrity figures, i can get a sense of their character through very minimal data. This is why I predict Andrew Tate (toxic manosphere influencer) will pivot into becoming an alien conspiracy influence. But I have no evidence for it, thus the prediction is baseless.
Anyone have any similar beliefs/predictions?
Geoengineering to combat climate change by mass carbon capture will be the solution that saves humanity but will arrive too late to prevent some harrowing effects.
Self-driving vehicles will become good enough to technically be safer for passengers than human drivers soon, but the stigma around them will continue for a long time after they are road legal and their uptake will be very slow.
countries dont seem interested in combatting climate change at all. plus there is one country that solely funds anti-climate change as thier economy depends on it, combined with the rest of the oil-gas industry. trying to get funding for research about climate change is a little dicey too.
Any idea if mass carbon capture could undo runaway venus-like greenhouse effects? I have no hope that humanity will put up with even minor inconveniences until lead starts melting at room temperature at the equator. It would give me hope if there was a way to undo runaway greenhouse processes.
It’d really be cool to see Venus colonized following some greenhouse gas cleanup like that.
It seems kind of unlikely. It could be part of an array of solutions. Right now it captures something like 0.1%. That means it would take 1000 times the current infrastructure to support it, including carbon-neutral energy to cover the additional energy costs. All that is assuming 100% carbon capture is even viable. Even then, that doesn’t solve the problem of the carbon that’s already in the environment, which will continue to warm the earth for centuries.
There’s an interesting emergency option: Stratospheric aerosol injection.
If we got to the point where the runaway effect was unavoidable, it might be possible to use this before civilization starts to collapse. It would probably have a lot of nasty side effects, but it might be able to buy enough time for CO2 levels to come back down. At least civilization could survive in some form.
One harrowing thing i expect is for there to be mass migration attributed to climate change - after all, we already see mass migration for smaller reasons, so even if they don’t strictly speaking need to move north (or south), i think new media and scientists will just attribute any migration that occurs as being climate-
influenceddriven.Arguably a good thing, if it raises peoples’ concerns for climate change. I think this is why a lot of RWers dismiss climate change as a hoax though, because of its connection to mass exodus from the “globsl south”. Two things can be true.
I expect we will lose some entire settlements, coastal ones. I think Egypt will get messed uo because of their weird relationship with water, and major cities with major sea defence projects are ones to look out for - they’re ramping up sea defences in New York right now, making me think something is coming (next 20 years or so)
Couldn’t disagree more with either of those takes. Self driving cars won’t be safer even theoretically given unsolvable problems and will almost certainly lead to even worse pedestrian rights and make our cities so much worse. That solution to climate change isn’t realistic of feasible at all we need if we are going to solve it massive systematic change and an end to capitalism.
What are the unsolvable problems with autonomous cars? Also I agree it is a bad thing for pedestrian rights and cities in general.
the decision making problem is the obvious one. there are an infinite number of possible edge cases to deal with when it comes to driving a car on roads with humans. current strategies require a bespoke solution to pretty much all of them, meaning tons of common edge cases arent covered and the vehicles will take potentially wildly inappropriate actions in unhandled cases, without even considering false positive or false negative detection of handled edge cases. this problem will never go away, and if you could make a computer that could do it as reliably as a human it would basically be agi. its a sisyphian problem that isnt going to be solved before we remember how great trains and streets without cars are.