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Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Caedus posted:

Is the base statement true that this one plant may not have a meaningful impact? Sure, but it's also a demonstration of the technology that can be massively scaled up to the point where it CAN make a difference. Again with these emerging technologies, this isn't some silver bullet for the problem - it's one part of the global first-aid kit we're going to have to develop to unfuck ourselves.

I recently read a book about this - Vaclav Smil's Energy Myths and Realities. He discusses carbon capture, and does the math on the scaling up idea - it doesn't really work. That CO2 has to be liquefied, stored, transported, and sequestered (pumped way underground usually). Those are all steps which require massive infrastructure - which doesn't exist at all today. To make a dent, the new pipelines/storage vessels/pumping underground operations would have to be roughly the same scale as all current oil industry infrastructure, if not larger. That took a whole century to build, and had massive profits driving it the whole way. Imagining large scale capture/sequestration on anything other than a timeline of several decades at minimum is crazy.

He makes similar arguments about wind/solar power - scaling up is happening, and will continue, but probably not fast enough to become more than ~30% of the market by mid-century. Energy transitions take a long time.

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Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Radbot posted:

Current retirement models assume 7% annualized growth until retirement, I find that assumption laughable if middle-of-the-road assumptions about climate change impacts become reality. If that 7% becomes 2-3% (optimistic, IMO), virtually nobody will be able to retire.

If you're right then the society will have to change (it should anyway). If not, you've screwed yourself. Saving/investing for retirement is still a really smart thing to do right now and I don't see that changing in a big way for at least 20 years.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!




You're not off base about the difficulty of the transition. And certainly the political landscape is going to change over our lives. But I think you're sort of over-emphasizing what it means for a civilization to fall. I don't know all that much about history, but wouldn't the two most recent examples be the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the colonial empires (mainly Britain)? Sure, the political structure of the world changed a lot (and maybe some people that wouldn't normally get invaded or have a famine did), but for most people in most places not that much changed. Flags changed, prices went up or down, more or less foreigners would come by your town. For the heads of state and the capital city I'm sure it felt like the world was ending, but what about farmers in the fields a hundred or thousand miles away?

I assume you're American. I am too, and I think we're particularly vulnerable to this kind of worrying, since It Hasn't Happened To Us Yet. We're the dominant culture, world hegemon for basically all of living memory. That will change some day, no question. Maybe in some sort of global war/famine with billions dead, but probably not. I dunno, I just have a hard time imagining a random Italian or Brazilian or Indian dude (let alone somebody from Africa) thinking clearly about climate change and doing quite the same sort of hand-wringing. They're aware their lives or their descendants lives may get harder, or a lot harder, but they also know that, well, that's how it's always been. And people get by.

I'm not trying to minimize the reality of what's coming, but I do think (reasonably well off) Americans in particular tend to overreact, because we've had it so good and so easy for so long. The rest of the world is a little more realistic.

We need to be more optimistic. Not personally, or as a personality trait, but politically. Optimism as a political stance, a policy. Yes, poo poo is hosed up and bullshit, but things will change. That's trivially true. Better or worse is up to us. Better is hard to imagine if people don't even seriously believe it's possible. So you have to be optimistic. Isn't climate change the closest thing to the "alien invasion/world killer asteroid unites the world" fantasy we're going to get? "If only there was some terrible outside threat to everyone, we could drop our differences and work together and save the world." Well, here it is. It's terrible, but we (theoretically) could only get this problem if we also have the technical means to solve it. It's up to us. If enough of us do the right thing, things will improve.

There's a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (recently released as part 1 of Green Earth, a condensed single volume edition of his Science in the Capitol climate change trilogy), where a Buddhist monk is giving an informal talk at NSF headquarters in DC:

quote:

"But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something—reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation."

And then a little later:

quote:

"One of the scientific terms for compassion," Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, ". . . you say, altruism. This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of . . . admonishment. To practice compassion to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion."

That last line gets a laugh, and the talk goes on. One of the main characters is deeply affected, though, and as the books go on he becomes less cynical and rigidly rational. KSR is a great writer, and this trilogy about the possible effects of climate change and possible scientific/technological/political/societal reactions is definitely worth reading.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Rime posted:

Like, holy loving poo poo, I know westerners are ignorant when it comes to all things Soviet, but to say that implosion was just a "changing of flags" for the people living there is beyond idiotic. :psyduck:

Fair enough. You're right that I'm not really knowledgeable about the human cost of the Soviet collapse.

And I wasn't really trying to be glib, but the whole "flag change" thing was meant to cover not just these most recent collapses, but all of them throughout history. Many of which, I think, would probably have been gradual to the point of almost not being noticeable to many of the people living through them. At the extreme end there's the case of the Native Americans in North America, where Europeans came in and destroyed basically everything that had been there in a century or two. A continent depopulated. But still, it took several generations. Individuals certainly saw their tribes/alliances decimated, but no one individual saw the complete collapse from pre-contact society to scattered populations on reservations. That's not to minimize the genocide, but I think doomsayers are imagining witnessing destruction on that scale. It's not likely, and when it's happened in the past, it usually hasn't been fast enough to see in one lifetime. I guess the closest thing to that would be the Black Plague, where significant fractions of national populations died in just a few years. But as awful as that was, life went on. Civilization as a whole didn't end.

And he brought up Rome, with the pivotal political/moral collapse around Caesar's time, and the end of the Republic. Big events in quick succession looking back two thousand years later. But for the general population all around the Mediterranean? We can say their civilization went in to decline right then and there, but for the common person was the establishment of the Empire the defining moment of their lives? They all saw it going down hill right then (once they heard it had happened, of course)? Or did mundane concerns like tax policy changes and military reorganization end up being the biggest changes they saw in their towns and villages? I'm not saying there weren't uprisings and famines etc. There were. But not everywhere. Not most places.

The point is that human societies and civilizations have been through a lot of shocks. I'm not trying to trivialize any of them. But "collapse of civilization" is vague to the point of uselessness. If we're going to talk about it, we need to say what it actually means. Otherwise people will project whatever random poo poo they have in their head - whether it's a too-rosy idea of what happened in the former USSR, or an exaggerated collapse of Rome.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Rime posted:

Hell, we don't even need to go back centuries to find a good example. I brought up Syria several pages ago. Two decades of a drought worse than any in the past thousand years caused that country to fall into war and anarchy. By any stretch of the imagination, civilization has "collapsed" in Syria right now. That took less than five years to happen.

Yeah, sure, people live on. That doesn't mean it was pretty or easy for anyone involved.

You can talk about any or all of those examples, insofar as they inform the current discussion, which is (unproductively, imo) about possible future collapse. I don't disagree that all that poo poo is terrible and sad and an embarrassment. And the future won't be easy. Will it be so bad that we need to seriously consider killing ourselves, like Overflight is talking about? I don't think so. I assume you don't either.

The range of possible futures is large. Unprecedented catastrophe is certainly possible. Collapse similar to historical examples is possible, though there are many scenarios, some much worse than others. Maybe the world just sort of limps along as ad-hoc adaptive measures are put in to place scattershot. It's also possible that we get our collective poo poo together and actually make the world better in the face of this crisis. Which scenario is most worth our attention? Our discussion? In a thread called "Climate Change: What is to be Done?"

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



No, it isn't wrong, because I'm not talking about how concerned they are overall. Like I said in that post, the rest of the world actually has a more clear-eyed view of what's coming, and they're rightfully concerned. I'm talking about the rest of the world probably not being quite so prone to this specific kind of thinking:

Overflight posted:

Any thoughts and plans that I have (which again, I emphasize are purely hypothetical) have to do with minimizing my suffering in case everything falls apart. I don't want to spent 12 hours a day digging in the dirt. I don't want to have to learn self defense to protect myself against raiders. I simply don't think that my life is worth all that trouble to preserve IF things come up to that point.

Which is what a lot of Americans/rich Westerners seem to be falling in to. Some of the people in that survey probably live a life somewhat close to Overflight's nightmare, insta-suicide scenario. I think they'd probably take offense at Westerners looking at their lives and saying "if it ever got to that point for me I'd just kill myself!" They know full well it could be much worse.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Overflight posted:

Again, how am I supposed to live my life with this knowledge? I refuse to raise a family, any and all career goals seem useless to me since society as we know it might not even survive the next 20 years, let alone 100, and most people and family treat me like an annoyance at best. Is the mere act of existing and not being dead supposed to give me some intrinsic joy? Because I don't get it and getting medicated for it doesn't seem like a good prospect because I am afraid of becoming too optimistic and then making choices like raising a family that then will be stuck in this hell and die painfully cursing my name.

You could also remember that your parents' generation could have had the exact same attitude, using nuclear war as an excuse to not do anything ever. They'd even be able to pat themselves on the back in the same way - "at least I'm saving my unborn children (you) from the nuclear apocalypse!"

Of course climate change as a slowly worsening crisis is essentially guaranteed (in hindsight, nuclear war obviously was not (... yet)). So it's not quite the same. But plenty of people were sure the bombs were going to fall by 19XX - most of them just learned to live with the threat, some were so worried they did something about it - advocacy, lobbying, think tank work, diplomatic work, painting protest signs, whatever. All of that together probably helped!

You're not really worried about climate change and civilizational collapse on the merits of the case. If climate change wasn't happening I suspect you'd feel the same way about nuclear war, or a global pandemic, or a big CME knocking out the world's power, or a comet strike, or the Yellowstone caldera, or zombies. It's not the facts of these potential disasters, or their likelihood, that gets to you. It's their fundamental uncertainty and temporal displacement - it lets you project every personal hangup and insecurity on some "objective" future event.

Yes, lets you, not makes you. The deal you (unconsciously) made with yourself is that you'll take on the world's anxiety, worrying about this hard enough for all of us, in exchange for having an excuse for not trying to improve your life. The excuse even comes with a great out - if it [insert world ending disaster here] never happens in your lifetime, it drat sure could have and I wasn't wrong to have been so worried. Humanity got lucky, bless those happy fools in their ignorance, they don't know how bad it could have been. You get to remain superior no matter what.

Everybody does this kind of ego-protecting self sabotage (including me), just usually on a smaller scale.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



"Go to space" makes close to zero sense as a species-wide solution. It's definitely possible to put people on Mars or in bigger stations than the ISS, but millions (let alone billions) of people living off planet is not realistic. At least not in the next few hundred years or so.

First, the logistics make no sense. Think about how many people you'd have to move off planet every year to just keep Earth's population constant. Currently the figure is something like 75 million. Per year. Rockets will never get you there. Maybe if we built 100 space elevators, and each sent three cars that are the equivalent of a fully packed, single-class 747 (660 people), up every cable, every day, for a whole year, you could almost do it (you'd still be short a few million, but let's keep it simple).

Congrats. Population is now steady. You have made (birth rate) - (death rate + people leaving Earth) = 0. To actually significantly draw down Earth population over a meaningfully short timeframe you need to pump this exodus up by a factor of 2 or more.

I think we'll be lucky if there's one space elevator by 2100. And I don't think it'll be moving ~2,000 people per day permanently off planet. Even if it was, you'd need another 199 just like it to start to make a noticeable dent. It's just not going to happen.

But let's say it does. We discover carbon nanotubes 3.0 and build 1,000 space elevators! Now we can physically move a big fraction of humans off the surface of Earth. Cool.

But where will they go? It's not like a train station, where the transportation infrastructure connects one livable area to another. We're dropping people off by the (hundreds of?) millions each year in to wilderness that's worse than the summit of Mt. Everest. Think about the numbers of people and the infrastructure they need. Tens of millions of apartments, at the very least. Every year. That doesn't include space for industry or work or agriculture or recreation. You'd have to build (roughly) a Bangladesh worth of everything humans need to live, oh and make sure it's all air tight and doesn't need support from Earth, because then what's the point? Every year. And that's the sad case where most live in crushing poverty and are packed dense.

And even if Von-Neumann bots can hollow out asteroids fast enough to provide all this space and make it survivable, where will the food come from? Shipping it up from Earth defeats the purpose. If we're growing the food in space then we've figured out how to make fertile soil from scratch, or nearly so. (Or you're taking it from Earth, which again defeats the purpose). Reliable fertile soil creation methods alone would probably solve just about everything on Earth, right?

To save Earth by going to space you need dozens of major revolutions/innovations in dozens of fields. A smaller subset of those revolutions/innovations (fusion power, or self replicating autonomous construction bots, or artificial soil creation, or big/cheap/efficient solar panels) would solve the problems on Earth: Build the arcologies in Nevada instead of on the Moon, it's just easier. Let cheap fusion power desalinate ocean water instead of building fusion rockets to go fetch comets, it's easier. Build just the bigass solar panels by themselves and beam the power back down. Build the self contained farms with genetically engineered crops and aeroponics and artificial light next to your already-existing NYC. Instead of building it in space, and then having to also build space-NYC, and also the infrastructure needed to populate it, and then also moving all those people.

What set of circumstances would make us do all the space stuff but not the vastly easier/cheaper/doesn't require mass migration/isn't missing one final tech revolution here-on-Earth stuff?

That said, I'm a huge proponent of spaceflight, manned and unmanned. I think we should absolutely send people back to the Moon and put a science station on Mars and launch 100 robotic probes a year and all that other sci-fi stuff. We'd learn a lot and it's a beautiful project. But there's just no way it can save us, in the sense of large fractions of the population moving out there to lessen the burden here. Someday I'm optimistic that people will live all over the solar system. But Earth will have the vast majority of the total population for a very long time, even if there are thriving colonies on Mars etc.

Our work is here. Certainly this generation, and probably the next five or ten generations too.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



NewForumSoftware posted:

You simply cannot ignore the body of work w/r/t climate science and conclude we are anything but hosed when it comes to collective global action.

For the sake of clearer communication, could you elaborate on this? It does seem obvious that a lot of people are going to die in the coming century, but is 100 million a lot? 1 billion? 5 billion? 10? The average quality of life will drop, but by how much? What will the standard of living look like? Will there be WWII style rationing of food and such or will major western countries totally collapse from famine? Obviously this all exists on a spectrum. And even the realistic "best case" is objectively bad. But when you say "we're hosed," what average situation are you picturing? What spread of outcomes seems most likely to you? Say by the year 2100.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



NewForumSoftware posted:

When I say we're hosed I mean that the collapse of industrial civilization is inevitable

Hmm, interesting. Maybe you could back this up? Surely, if you're so confident, it must be the consensus. Or at least a majority or plurality position? I'd like to see the climate literature survey or meta-analysis that concludes "industrial civilization will definitely collapse." Or, really, the many of them that such a confident statement would imply.

Or maybe you could post that TV show clip again, where Toby from the Office (in character as the deadpan depressed man) delivers a bunch of cringe-worthy Sorkin-isms. Including a bit about "storms that permanently blacken the sky." That will convince people. Or a random dude's blog.

Or you could claim that there's a conspiracy - the scientists and policy analysits you are so sure agree with you "would literally never be allowed" to do so in pubilc!

You are grossly over reacting. Your "inevitable" future is a possibility, but it's on the "very bad and fairly unlikely" end of the spectrum. It does not comprise the entirety of possible outcomes, as you claim.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



NewForumSoftware posted:

It's the only outcome if nothing changes 20 years ago, and it didn't. So, here we are. Unless you've got some evidence that suggest otherwise I'm going to go ahead and assume that the Co2 we've already put into the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet which will put us over 2C for a sustained period of time, causing the myriad of feedback loops we have scientific evidence for that are the basis for the 2C target in the first place.

Again, it's the only outcome which is realistic given the scenario we are in. Nobody can even come up with a plausible way to stop it at this point, how bad does it have to get before we accept it's not coming and begin the actual hard work of addressing reality.

That we'll most likely overshoot 2C isn't really controversial at this point, and neither is the existence of positive feedback loops. So you're right that far. But saying "past 2C we trigger enough positive feedbacks that are so certain, fast acting, and strong that within decades industrial civilization can definitely no longer exist" is a fringe position.

NewForumSoftware posted:

I totally agree with what he's saying here, and you're right, I'm more pessimistic than he is, but if the worst criticism you can make of me is that I'm too pessimistic so be it. I'll be waiting for someone to provide a realistic alternative scenario.

The "realistic alternative scenario" is that your self admitted pessimism doesn't affect how the climate system (or industrial civilization) actually functions - as in, it probably doesn't work the way your pessimism lets you believe. It probably will not be as bad as you think. It could be, but that's a low probability scenario.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Maybe this is a good time to introduce an idea I've been kicking around for a while. This discussion sort of sucks right now because different people are taking different outcomes (in say 2100) as their "baseline," and then reasoning from there: "we're hosed" vs "it'll be bad but it could be worse, don't give up" vs whatever other spread of optimistic or pessimistic views. Without exposing the baseline assumptions it's a lot of talking past one another. What we need is a good analysis on the spread of outcomes - how likely different classes of future are, and what those futures look like. Of course it's all very fuzzy and subject to change, but it's possible to imagine a discussion anchored in this way.

There are IPCC projections of raw temperature averages, rainfall averages, etc. What I wish existed was a set of coherent "future snapshots" - a lightly fleshed out projection of what 2100 looks like with exactly 4.3C warming, such and such rainfall patterns, such and such sea level rise, and so on. A specific future, with a specific imagined future situation for humanity (or a given region). Of course there's nearly no scientific value in such an exercise, but it would give people something to grab on to mentally - "if it goes like this, then maybe this is what life would be like in that world." It's basically just lightly informed sci fi.

Like this, (four illustrations of what the future of the oceans might look like: one very grim, one somewhat grim, one positive, one fantastic, with short stories to accompany them). But focused more on life on land.

What I'd propose is a large number of these projections (at least 100), biased in their specific details by the actual (assigned or calculated or modeled) probability of that scenario occurring. So there'd be lots of case studies done with the predicted median warming. And maybe only one or two scenarios at the extreme low or high ends.

Imagine two illustrations, side by side. "Green and white Ecotopia, with architecture and solar panels by Apple Inc" (the positive future where we do everything right) vs "Mordor landscape with scorched trees and shells of buildings" (the worst case scenario if we do nothing). And now imagine the 200 illustrations in between, in a Gaussian distribution of good or badness. Middle of the road scenarios that differ in their specific details would be the majority, tapering and shading towards just one or two outlandish utopias or dystopias at either end, several standard deviations from the mean.

The value of any one projection is basically nil - just a thought experiment, a single model run. But in the ensemble, you'd have a somewhat properly weighted idea of the range of outcomes. A gestalt of the future. Not just a black and white best case vs worst case. I'd imagine it existing as a big book, with one big landscape illustration on each spread, and a little blurb of story about the specific future depicted. You could have plenty of variety in the settings (urban, coutnryside, coast, inland, etc) and you could choose the settings to showcase something particular to that future - "ah, here's a +2 sigma Florida coast in 2100 - notice the big upgraded launch pads from the old Mars missions, and see how far under water they are!" or "Here's the very unlikely -4 sigma Reno Nevada - see how rich and prosperous it is - note the arcology." And a few hundred others. Maybe all around the world, maybe just around the USA. Or it could be a website that randomly selects an image to show you - as you click through, even if you only saw a few, statistically you'd get roughly the right picture.

What do ya'll think? If this existed, would it be useful? Interesting?

Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Oct 18, 2016

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Right. What I'm suggesting is taking the output of those model runs and putting a human face on them. Tie each one to specific location and flesh it out. Individually, any one illlustration/story is as useless as the individual model run that inspired it. But together, the model runs mean something. Together, the illustrated future scenarios based on those individual model runs might mean something. To a (vastly?) wider audience than the one that can be satisfied by a chart of watts per square meter delta and average temperature increase in degrees C. I know the IPCC and others do public facing stuff, but is there anything as... crude? Literal? Low brow? as what I'm suggesting?

The problem with single future case studies (here's a vision of the destroyed rainforest, or a dried up lake, 2095) is that people (rightly) suspect these scenarios have been cherrypicked for maximum emotional effect, and disregard them. "Oh, that's just a Worst Case." What if you could hit them with Every Case and make them see how most are actually bad (but not hopeless)? That's what the models do, but the public doesn't understand them. Even if they believe you, people can't imagine what "+4C" means.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



That video is fine, but it sort of highlights what I'm talking about. It's all very abstract. "An Ice Age Unit in the other direction?" I get it, conceptually. But then he's talking about really long timescales and hundreds of meters of sea level rise. Only one guy actually said "children and grandchildren" and gave the specific(ish) example of farmland turning to desert. That's what people need to hear, some tangible thing that could affect the people they care about. Another guy said "several meters instead of 12 centimeters." After the first guy said "hundreds." Again, I know what they're trying to get across, that they're talking about a bunch of different times (a long time ago, right now, 2100ish, far future) but if you're a layman watching that video, it's confusing, contradictory, and abstract.

NewForumSoftware posted:

I don't know what your definitions of "actually bad" vs "hopeless" but I'd love to hear it.

Living in India, right now. Living in Shithole, Mississippi, right now. Bad. But not hopeless. The future won't be some unimaginable thing, it'll have very close analogues to somewhere that already exists currently. If you tell (and show) people in Middle America that they'll look like Average Mexico in 100 years, they might pay attention. Give them something specific and realistic to want to avoid.

BattleMoose posted:

I think there is some value in what you are suggesting but it would be difficult to produce. You would primarily be looking for skills that belong in media/advertising space. And it could be career limiting for scientists to be professionally attached to such a "low brow/crude project". But who would organise and fund such a venture?

Oh, it's something I've thought about doing myself. I'm not a skilled enough painter to do it justice yet, but maybe in a year or two I could reasonably start. Working digitally, producing 100 or 200 images good enough to publish would only take a few years. Similar to a novel, or any other "big" art project. I'm sure once it got started/serious there would be people willing to help on the technical side (I can muddle along for a good bit, my BS is in physics).

Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Oct 18, 2016

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Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Mozi posted:

It's now or never for meaningful large-scale change

I get what you're saying, but this is extremely wrong.

In a narrow sense it's true that maybe if everything went exactly right and everyone agreed we could "comfortably" transition our economy/society to zero carbon. It didn't happen in the past (obviously), and the current political situation makes it essentially impossible, as you note. But you seem to be saying that "meaningful large-scale change" would be futile in say, 2025? Or 2035? Or 2055? Of course sooner is better than later, and now would be best of all, but putting a hard limit (seemingly 2020, from your post) on when things are "too late to matter" is ridiculous.

The longer the transition takes, the more painful it will be, and the less familiar the societies making it will be to us, but whether it really gets going in the 2020s or the 2060s or the 2120s doesn't really matter - those are still people, they deserve just as much of a chance as we have now. From our point of view they'll live in a blasted nightmare, with human possibility needlessly atrophied. From their point of view that will just be the reality of the world. In the same way that environmentalists in the 1950s would weep to see the current state of our world, but we just take it in stride. We know it could be vastly better, but we don't really waste time crying our eyes out that it was better in the past. We either do the work or don't. That's the situation of every human, past present and future. We can help ourselves (and those future people), so we should.

Deciding in 2016 that ~*the line has been crossed*~ and (all possible!) future societies are doomed is an abdication of responsibility. It's a cynical and self serving thought. It's detached from reality. It is also, as Forever_Peace points out, obedience to the current system, which doesn't really care what you think (whether we're turbo-hosed or that magic technology will save us) so long as you do nothing.

Massive action > small action > no action > advocating no action. You have a moral obligation, to yourself and to future humans, to move up this chain. In your own way, at your own pace. But in the right direction.

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