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Nessus posted:This was a pretty hot topic at the time of the 1960s though, there were all these books about how real soon now there's gonna be massive ongoing famine in India and most non-North American countries and hoo boy just you look out. (It was unclear how their populations would continue ballooning in such conditions.) The original story draft had stuff about food rationing, which would've been interesting, but instead we got another Kirk romance of the week.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:14
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Baronjutter posted:Isn't climate change going to do exactly that ? Much like population growth, it depends a lot on what we can do to mitigate/combat the bad effects.
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Jan 26, 2018 01:57
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:They really didn't. Season 3's budget was slashed hard and Shatner and Nimoy got pay bumps. Before Bob Justman quit, he was bitching about how it felt like they were producing a radio show at times. Close. He said "we might have had the money to do a really good radio show."
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Jan 26, 2018 03:16
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Baronjutter posted:Isn't climate change going to do exactly that ? TOS is just old enough that its material does in fact come from a substantially different world view. I mean look at this talk of rationing. We haven't had rationed consumer anything (except, of course, rationing on ability-to-pay) in the West for at least a full generation.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:16
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It's also worth mentioning that overpopulation worries date back to at least the 19th century when people thought it was responsible for the mass European migration to America. Bear in mind that there were only 1 billion people on Earth at the time.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:23
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Nessus posted:It won't do us any favors, but a lot of these scenarios depend on a straight extrapolation of present trends, which are not always actually reliable indicators since other poo poo happens. For instance, the famine guys would've probably been right IF for some reason it was impossible to meaningfully improve agricultural yields over those of the 60s. Yeah, wheat yield per acre now is like around times what it was in 1960 and something like 20 times what it was in 1800.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:31
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Late 18th century at least, Malthus was the first guy to conceptualize history as leading to a situation where we’d turbofuck ourselves by having too many kids.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:32
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I'm in a chemistry of the environment class right now guys. Climate change is bad. It's really bad. The most likely scenario if everyone continues to do little or nothing is 6 degrees by 2100. The Paris agreement's goal of 2 degrees by 2100 is a polite fiction at this point. We're almost certainly going to reach 1 degree warming within 10 years. 4 degrees by 2100 is starting to look like a victory. Maybe we'll get lucky. But at this point we are dumping carbon into the atmosphere faster than the event that caused the Eocene thermal maximum, and that was a +8 degree change. That's palm trees at the south pole. We are currently at about 10% of that Eocene carbon outgassing, and we're putting it into the atmosphere much faster. Maybe we get lucky and feedback mechanisms are weaker than the projections assume, but right now actual data is tracking worst case scenario projections from the early 2000s. Climate change is really bad. You almost can't have a conversation with someone who hasn't been following it without sounding like a lunatic because what is culturally considered possible and what the data says is possible are so divergent. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jan 26, 2018 |
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Jan 26, 2018 03:35
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Nessus posted:Soylent Green's world population figure was lower than the actual present day. Asimov's "Caves of Steel" (1954) has a chronically overpopulated Earth with claustrophobic underground cities needed to accommodate a population of... eight billion.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:19
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm in a chemistry of the environment class right now guys. Climate change is bad. It's really bad. The most likely scenario if everyone continues to do little or nothing is 6 degrees by 2100. The Paris agreement's goal of 2 degrees by 2100 is a polite fiction at this point. We're almost certainly going to reach 1 degree warming within 10 years. 4 degrees by 2100 is starting to look like a victory. Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the south pole a lot colder than -8° C? I don't see how that admittedly drastic number puts Antarctica into a tropical climate. This thread's not really the place for an in-depth climate discussion but I have to ask because that seems, well, lunacy.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:40
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I'm on S1 E20? The one with religion and school. gently caress Kira and Bajorans.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:46
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the south pole a lot colder than -8° C? I don't see how that admittedly drastic number puts Antarctica into a tropical climate. This thread's not really the place for an in-depth climate discussion but I have to ask because that seems, well, lunacy. That 8 C is a global average, not local. Currently the world's warmed I think just shy of 1 C but the arctic has already gone up 10 or 15.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:53
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the south pole a lot colder than -8° C? I don't see how that admittedly drastic number puts Antarctica into a tropical climate. This thread's not really the place for an in-depth climate discussion but I have to ask because that seems, well, lunacy. It’s an average temperature over the whole surface of the earth. Average temperature difference between now and the last ice age was about 5° C. Changes in temp that sound small on the scale of your cup of coffee, constitute a really big change on the scale of a planet. Also the fact that it’s an average obfuscates that local temp changes will be larger at the poles than at the equator.
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Jan 26, 2018 04:57
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Spot is going to have kittens, Data is going to be a grandad!
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Jan 26, 2018 05:21
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Grand Fromage posted:That 8 C is a global average, not local. Currently the world's warmed I think just shy of 1 C but the arctic has already gone up 10 or 15. These are the numbers they should be leading with! Angry Salami posted:Asimov's "Caves of Steel" (1954) has a chronically overpopulated Earth with claustrophobic underground cities needed to accommodate a population of... eight billion. I think they originally hosed up the surface somehow, but the Spacers helped them fix it. They're all Agoraphobics now, though, so no one ever goes outside if they can help it.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:42
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Beachcomber posted:I think they originally hosed up the surface somehow, but the Spacers helped them fix it. They're all Agoraphobics now, though, so no one ever goes outside if they can help it. I didn't find the vision all that horrifying but I gather it was an extrapolation from New York City, and New York City is hardly a horrifying hellscape in which humanity cannot survive.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:45
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Nessus posted:Yeah when the books start I gather Earth is under the slim, robot-loving fist of Johnny Spacer but in the course of the books that changes. Of course they also do something to make Earth very gradually uninhabitable so people have to leave, and since they already hate and fear robots, they will instead etc. etc. Oh, I don't know. I've been there. How about "one's humanity"?
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Jan 26, 2018 05:55
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Oh, I don't know. I've been there. How about "one's humanity"?
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Jan 26, 2018 06:04
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Forgive my ignorance, but isn't the south pole a lot colder than -8° C? I don't see how that admittedly drastic number puts Antarctica into a tropical climate. This thread's not really the place for an in-depth climate discussion but I have to ask because that seems, well, lunacy. I typed up a whole long thing but, basically, the consequences are very bad, and US discourse has gone backwards in the last 15 years. US conservatives have been subject to a very successful campaign to tie climate change denial with their political identity. But nobody is immune to normalcy bias. When DoD studies project population flows in the hundred of millions or fine-grained flooding studies predict that the Florida Keys are a total write-off and most of San Diego, Savannah and Newark will need sea walls to remain economically useful, it's easier to just kind of not process that because it's so outside of what we consider normal. Normalcy bias is a big impediment to public understanding of climate change. And as for the original question, everybody else beat me to it.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:07
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Beachcomber posted:These are the numbers they should be leading with! Yeah. It's a hard issue to explain because it's so complicated, there's no good way to simplify it. Like right now, Antarctica is getting increased snowfall because of ocean warming. It's real easy to see how someone is like "hurr how warming make more snow???" so you have to explain how warmer ocean -> more evaporation -> more humidity -> more snow. Or how warming can make winter actually colder in some places by loving up atmospheric air currents. I also think a lot of end of the world rhetoric poisoned the well. It's not the end of the world, even in the worst case scenario. Humanity will survive, we're hard to kill. loving up the planet permanently isn't really doable short of slamming Ceres into it or something. But we can gently caress up our ability to live in a comfortable, modern civilization and seem hell bent on doing it. That should've always been the focus.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:09
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Well it's theoretically possible to kill the oceans thoroughly enough that the atmosphere would no longer support human life. Crank up the acidity and UV light high enough and rapidly enough and it might work. It would probably take a few hundred years even after you killed the phytoplankton for the oxygen in the atmosphere to drop to levels that no longer support human life. You'd have to be really loving dumb to do it by accident. Sounds like a Star Trek episode. Graphic scenes as people in first-world countries scrabble over the planet's most vital resources: https://twitter.com/bnonews/status/956748327722221568 Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Jan 26, 2018 |
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Jan 26, 2018 06:29
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The Genesis bomb sounds much faster and more reliable. You know, DID they ever use it as a terraforming tool? It seems like a tactical Genesis device would be a great help in repairing a badly damaged planet or turning a shithole planet into a decent one.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:33
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Completely killing the oceans would do the job. But I'm with you that I don't see how you do it without intentionally trying. We're going to kill off everything worth eating except maybe like squid and shrimp but getting rid of all the cyanobacteria and plankton doesn't seem like it's going to happen.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:36
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Nessus posted:The Genesis bomb sounds much faster and more reliable. Well there's that small problem with the planet becoming violently unstable and blowing up after a few months...
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Jan 26, 2018 06:37
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McSpanky posted:Well there's that small problem with the planet becoming violently unstable and blowing up after a few months... There would have been dark comedy if that was what the Romulan/Cardassian fleet tried to do to the Founders.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:42
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McSpanky posted:Well there's that small problem with the planet becoming violently unstable and blowing up after a few months... To be fair, they set the drat thing off inside a nebula. Which somehow caused a planet to form, which seems a little outside Genesis' job description. Starting with an actual planet could yield better results.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:45
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I think it had to make a little star too.
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Jan 26, 2018 06:48
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How did it know to do that?
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Jan 26, 2018 07:15
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No, it was flawed through and through. It was the protomatter stuff, David and Saavik have a scene about it. In the novelization of ST:III, they go back to the Regula I caves on the way to the Genesis planet and it's all hosed in there too as foreshadowning. It's all overgrown and the plants are reaching the end of their evolutionary lines and dying off.
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Jan 26, 2018 07:39
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Rewatching Future Imperfect and I love the speed that Riker goes from "well I'm really really trying but this all seems like a stretch" to "gently caress all of this, eat poo poo everyone" when the Minuet reveal happens. It's one of those excellent peak Riker moments.
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Jan 26, 2018 09:43
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J33uk posted:Rewatching Future Imperfect and I love the speed that Riker goes from "well I'm really really trying but this all seems like a stretch" to "gently caress all of this, eat poo poo everyone" when the Minuet reveal happens. It's one of those excellent peak Riker moments. Between that, "Frame of Mind", and "Allegiance", one wonders how often Riker's mistakenly jumped to the "gently caress you, you're not the real Picard!" conclusion on the bridge.
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Jan 26, 2018 10:19
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skasion posted:Late 18th century at least, Malthus was the first guy to conceptualize history as leading to a situation where we’d turbofuck ourselves by having too many kids. And it’s in sci-fi literature of the 40s and 50s I remember the term “Malthusian” as a phrase for contraception. Like Stranger in a Strange Land.
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Jan 26, 2018 14:11
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Nessus posted:The Genesis bomb sounds much faster and more reliable. There's still that small issue, beyond the instability problem, of it wiping out whatever's left in favor of something entirely new. That's why they had such trouble finding a suitable test planet, they needed something totally barren without already-existing life forms, even a microbe would be a show stopper.
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Jan 26, 2018 14:15
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IMHO, we're inadvertently participating in a form of global terraforming. The solution rises from that point quite easily.
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Jan 26, 2018 15:09
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Angry Salami posted:Between that, "Frame of Mind", and "Allegiance", one wonders how often Riker's mistakenly jumped to the "gently caress you, you're not the real Picard!" conclusion on the bridge. "I said shut up! As in sit down and stop talking!" "Oh lord, he thinks he's on a fake Enterprise again. Deanna, would you mind?"
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Jan 26, 2018 15:45
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bull3964 posted:No, it was flawed through and through. It was the protomatter stuff, David and Saavik have a scene about it. Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock posted:SAAVIK: It's time for total truth between us. This planet is not what you intended, or hoped for, is it?
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Jan 26, 2018 16:00
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Do bajorans ever get better?
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Jan 26, 2018 16:40
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RC Cola posted:Do bajorans ever get better? A contentious question Not really, though. They change the least over the series, probably.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:48
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The Bloop posted:A contentious question You see the best of bajorans in the first two seasons, and then after that they become more one-note as the story transitions away from bajor's problems.
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Jan 26, 2018 16:55
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I mean space pope mcnasty is a pretty interesting and sometimes compelling character but that's about it. (some of the last part with dukat might compel you to retch)
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Jan 26, 2018 17:09
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