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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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The reason nothing will be done is because the only realistic option we have to save our planets ability to sustain life is economic degrowth.
We don't have enough of the minerals we need to go fully nuclear or renewable and even getting close would use up vast amounts of the very same energy were looking to save in the first place.
As the record levels of equality directly after ww2 showed, economic degrowth due to nearly all the men being at war, only results in the loss of the super rich which is why they'll never allow economic degrowth.
We all work too much, produce too much and pollute too much. Worse, we're all forced to produce the very wealth thats used to force us into wage-slavery and kill our planet.
The answer is and will always be the strategic refusal of labour, above what we need to survive and have a good quality of life. This, by default, will result in economic degrowth.
Want to sit around and do nothing to save the planet? Well, now you can.
Uranium is extremely common on Earth. What minerals are we lacking to go nuclear? If you were arguing that we need to switch the type of reactors we use, I could see that. A lack of fissile material isn't an issue.
I wouldn't be so uncritical about this. Depending on rate of consumption (and data source) the world's Uranium supplies will last for about 50 to 200 years. (The latter a low demand scenario based on current consumption rates.)
Technological advancements may push these limits. Possibly even into 10.000 to 60.000 years, when filtering active substances from seawater, which is currently quite a timeframe to consider it long-term sustainable even for a limited resource. However, we're not there yet.
We also use thorium which is much more abundant than uranium.
If I remember correctly, we don't have enough of it to go fully nuclear with our current energy demands. More so, we've mined nearly all of the soil thats anything above 0.02% uranium. As such, not only do we not have enough on the planet, getting it and refining it would almost defeat the whole point of doing so in the first place.
It is a problem in that there might be plenty of it but that doesn't mean there's enough.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying we have to go back to the stone ages. Its just that we can't afford the super rich anymore.
Pretty sure there's enough weapons grade plutonium to run the US for 100 years in decommissioned nuclear weapons alone.
I think 100 years is enough time to build pumped hydro storage and renewables like solar/wind.
The problem is that there a major, major shortage of one of the isotopes needed to re-enrich weapons grade uranium (pu 238). Thats before you get to the vast energy inefficiency of doing it which isn't a problem, if you're just decommissioning them anyway and you don't care about energy consumption. However, in this instance, you would need to worry about energy consumption as well as the isotope there won't be enough of to convert even a fraction of it.
Again, even if you had 100 years, there aren't enough of the specialist minerals needed for hydro storage and renewables.
Essentially theres" a hole in our bucket."
The only answer is degrowth.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
What specialist materials are we talking about? Wind, solar, and pumped hydro use primarily copper, silicon, carbon, and concrete.
nothing will be done peacefully. plenty could be done.
see, the ultra rich die either way. either they kill everyone, including themselves, and end all life, or someone kills them. those are the only two outcomes here.
I mean, i guess they could just fuck off and stop being super rich. fuckerberg could be a creepy robot man who lives above his kinda cringe MMA dojo or something, but they're not going to do that. I don't think they're psychologically capable of it.
Remember the Titanic sub? How those rich guys thought they knew more than scientists and engineers? When they died, I realized that was exactly what they were doing with our planet. They will kill us all for their ego and hubris. Quite clearly. That's why they are building their bunkers and super cities and not allowing governments to actually address this issue - they think they'll come out on top. And there's evidence they've thought this since at least the 70s, so this implies a couple generations of them plotting to kill us.
One point I have to disagree on is the point you made about nuclear energy. Its untrue. If we switched to primarily using nuclear energy we would be able to successfully power the majority of the species using that technology. Its fear that stops us. Everyone is worried about another Chernobyl or Fukushima. When the logical course of action would be to find tectonically stable sites for any nuclear facilities. That'd be number one to solving a lot of meltdown concerns. The other would be to use well researched and planned designs. Chernobyl was a faulty design for a reactor that should never have been allowed to be produced.
Lookup Thorium reactors. Those are the true future of nuclear technology. Thorium is also abundant when compared to Uranium or Plutonium. It does not have the same weaponization issues. It does not produce the same high levels of radiation. It is also safer to handle and store once depleted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Thorium-fueled_reactors "Using breeder reactors, known thorium and uranium resources can both generate world-scale energy for thousands of years. "
Literally with nuclear power we can power the whole world for the next 2,000 to 3,000 years. Possibly longer. It's fear that holds us back on this.
Yes and majority of time and expense that goes into building nuclear reactors is due to regulations, espeically NIMBY/fear based regulations. They have to hire teams of special lawyers for these and cases last years. That's why when you see people describing the cost and time of building these, they always start at the planning stage which can include years of legal battles.
And these lawyers are usually nuclear engineers who went to law school afterwards, so they are pretty expensive to staff.
It's at the point where I don't accept the label of being human. Humans lack the logic and morality I identify with.
What are you then? A primate? A posthuman?
Is this the start of a furry fic
Autistic people identify as non-, or other-than- human in other ways than furry, e.g. Machinekin or Alienkin.
Me? I just don't want the label of human, because I don't respect human society.
You don't have to be autistic for any of this. Also, never said the only other option besides human was furry. I merely ASKED if this was the start of a furry fic due to the romantic tension and pacing of the comments
I'm a living being who does not want to associate with humans.
Autistic people are more likely to be Therian (identify as partly non-human and non-humanoid animal): Therianthropy: Wellbeing, Schizotypy, and Autism in Individuals Who Self-Identify as Non-Human, Clegg et al., Society & Animals 2019.
Looking at some brief descriptions of the terms (I'm only mildly aware of them) there is also the related group of Otherkin, who identify as not fully human, but do identify full with human-like sapience. The personal experiences of a 'Machinekin' (identifying as part sapient robot) are presented in _ Exploring Other-Than-Human Identity: Religious Experiences in the Life-Story of a Machinekin _, Shea, S.C, 2020, published in Religions. Neve discusses the relationship between autism and feeling othered in terms of gender and non-human Machinekin identity first hand.
Searching for autistic and otherkin, I find regular discussions in autistic spaces about how people believe their otherkin and autistic identities and experiences overlap. Much of this is in Autism / Neurodivergence discords, which can't be searched. However, these discords provide a managed group of fellow travellers with information that doesn't leak out to search engines. Nevertheless, some discussion about this is searchable. Here's one comment:
Another discussion is titled "Does being autistic feel like being a robot who is trying to learn how to be human?" Top responses agree to this, giving various explanations of why it occurs, or how it feels, including:
and
and
There are questions about this on sites like Quora, with responses like "I've known since I was a kid that I had autism, so this might not relate to me. However, as a kid, I called myself an alien in this world. It's probably common when it comes to robots, but I was an alien to this world."
Unless you are legitimately an alien or a cat or something that somehow got on Lemmy (and I apologize if this is the case), then you are a human. You can't identify your way out of being a member of this species.
The fact my fellow autistic people are disidentifying from humanity is extremely concerning. Even worse I can understand why given the behaviour of so many humans being what it is. Plus constantly being marginalized in human societies doesn't help.
The solution though isn't to stop identifying as being human and pretend to be something else. The solution is to re-evaluate what being human is. Too much emphasis in popular culture is placed on humanity or being human as some positive thing where someone who is truly human couldn't be the villain or the mass murderer. The reality is the human race is broad and doing a genocide is just as human as inventing the vaccine for TB. Those things we can do because we are human, with human capabilities. Another animal wouldn't think to make a vaccine, or to do a genocide, they do what they because of instincts, learned behavior, and survival.
I kind of hate this kind of narrative here.
Yeah, capitalism is shit etc... but let's get to the real root cause: we're all still animals, and want our pack to be the best. The root issue isn't money, it's power. Many societies wouldn't mind degrowth if it didn't mean all the others would bury them & dance on their grave.
If one single country would actually degrow, all the others would dominate it financially, loot it for all its worth, and unless it can completely 100% sustain itself without outside trade (pretty much impossible in our globalized society), it would mostly collapse. And even if it could sustain itself, the power imbalance would be so huge we'd run in all other kinds of issues soon (hey, why not just conquer that country that is pretty much powerless now?)
Imo we're all just animals knowing we're headed for extinction, but at the same time it's a big game of chicken on the road, the first to stray from this path will get fucked in so many ways by all the others who see their chance to improve their situation... And imo capitalism isn't the cause of that, but one of the results of this. It's just another way for us to compete and try to fuck eachother over like the animals we still are.
So either we get to some near global agreement on how to get out of this situation, or we just keep doing far too little since... what's the point of trying to improve things if it just means you get annihilated by those that don't, and things will remain the same despite your best efforts...
I feel like the way out is global and cultural in nature, and I think it's in progress now, in fact we're doing it now, talking about this on Lemmy. This wasn't practical, wasn't being done outside of "elite circles" before a decade or so ago. This global conversation is going to take some time and have bumps, but it's happening, this is novel on this planet.
What I hope comes of this, and seems to be happening, perhaps slower than I'd like, is a paradigm shift in the way we think about ourselves, others, our communities, our situation, and our goals. We need a new "mythology" that allows us to live on this planet sustainably, and it only needs to be true enough and could even be done transparently and with purpose.
I feel like our species is in a existential battle and almost nobody (at least on the left-ish) is talking strategy. As if any valid strategy (e.g. "capitalism", "communism", "competition", "religion", "growth" "zero sum" etc) has been identified by the 1960s and we're all just battling amongst 20th century ideas for domination.
I'm thinkiing stuff like this (sorry for the poor organization of my thoughts, to lazy to cleanup)
Define some axioms/statements that are mostly true and fairly agreeable, not based in faith, not limited by materialism.
--> The goal of these axioms is not to get everyone to agree to them, it's to blaze a new path that can evolve into the way, to plant a seed that can inspire moving in new directions.
A set of explicit stated axioms allows taking the next steps and figure out how to evolve into a sustainable culture. Clear eyed strategy and goals are why the Heritage Foundation is making progress and the left is not.
Strategy like this could allow a better understanding of who and what the actual threats are and identify appropriate responses to them.
--> The "global agreement" will not be a formal inter-governmental thing, it will be loosely coupled set of cultural evolutions spurred by global conversations happening now.
I agree that it starts with a sense of a global community. Instead of people considering themselves a citizen of their homecountry, they need to switch to the mindset of being a citizen of Earth.
We now have the technology to get past the language barrier, so it is more possible to get people together, talking about our future as a species more than anytime in our history.
One thing that could help is some sort of globally available social media, or forum that automatically translate to the language of the reader. Imagine if a Chinese person could post something in Chinese, but English speakers could read and respond in English, and vice versa.