Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was.Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.Think there's too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we're widely expected to have this century.So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.