TK-741

TK-741 t1_jc8xiwx wrote

Parking lots for damn sure. The others come with some complications.

Most houses are still not required to be built solar-ready. Solar installations add thousands of pounds a typical roof isn’t engineered to carry on top of the snow load. Deserts seem like a good place aside from the weathering they’d probably see from all the bloody sand.

Main take away is that we aren’t doing enough.

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TK-741 t1_j5yr50y wrote

“Have the tech” is a bit of a misnomer.

It costs billions of dollars to make marginal improvements in P removal. Financially it makes more sense to pay farmers to employ more sustainable fertilizer application practices.

Even then, excess P in groundwaters is going to lead to persistent problems for decades to come even if we stopped all new discharge of P from point and non-point sources.

A wicked problem if ever there were one.

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TK-741 t1_j5cch0p wrote

The reality that “efficiency” isn’t as important as reducing the distance food travels from farm to table.

So really, we shouldn’t even be predominantly relying on centralized agriculture, but food grown in our own backyard/community.

That isn’t to say the farmland should therefore be developed into highways and cities, but that we can do more from within our cities than we are currently allowing ourselves to do.

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TK-741 t1_j22y2ja wrote

Imagine. 60 years of travel to Alpha Centauri. That seems so close — almost on the cusp of being feasible for us to get unmanned probes out there, even. If only we had invested in this type of tech, we could even be halfway there by now. I could have theoretically seen another star and it’s planets from satellite photos from within its solar system, in my lifetime.

It pains me to see what humanity has instead dedicated itself to. We are wasted potential, squandering all the greatness and opportunity for exploration. We could build something incredible and yet we can’t even agree on whether we should.

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TK-741 t1_ixx61s3 wrote

You’re not completely wrong but there’s no way to achieve it… so ultimately it isn’t really what we need. Our society would come crashing down around us.

What we need now is a million different initiatives that we can apply in a piece-wise manner to collectively mitigate the effects of what is coming, while also minimizing our ongoing environmental impact as much as possible as we transition to more sustainable technologies and practices. No single solution will work across different places and communities, and not everyone will work together for the sake of the group, so we need to work around those complexities with adaptable solutions.

It’s an impossible problem to solve that we’re running out of time on, and while your perspective isn’t technically wrong, it’s far from constructive.

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TK-741 t1_ixx5emu wrote

No evidence because it’s only really become a widespread thing in the last few years. 20 years from now we’ll be able to look at what’s going on and say “yeah this micro-plastics stuff causes cancer”

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TK-741 t1_ixx55g1 wrote

Hard to say, but yes, it’s very likely that it’s just a widespread collapse of civilization and severe reduction in quality of like equivalent to that of the Dark Ages for many, many generations.

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TK-741 t1_ixi0qov wrote

Nukes will fall on population centres. People will gravitate toward population centres as that’s where our food/shelter and services are.

Animals are everywhere in the wild and many already burrow underground. Many animals will die, but more would survive because they live in forests or other environments which often thousands of miles away from cities.

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