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from the Do-you-know-where-you-are-going-to? dept.
A technology genius always has two basic options. For example, he can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives—or he can develop an app that will let people amuse themselves. In most cases, the technology genius will be pushed to focus on the product that has the potential to create millions of dollars in profits. Profit is the North Star of conventional economics. Lacking a collective destination, the only highway sign we follow is the North Star of profit. Nobody is putting up any highway signs that will lead the world toward a collectively desired destination.
It raises the question, does the world have a destination? If not, should it?
As I've explained, the UN's sustainable development goals (SDGs) are an attempt to define an immediate destination over a very short period. They represent a good beginning. The SDGs give us a destination over a 15-year stretch— just a moment in time out of the human journey of hundreds or thousands of years. Many people and institutions have made commitments to travel in the direction that the SDGs reveal—but, unfortunately, most for-profit companies are not redirecting themselves in meaningful ways to reach those goals because the market definition of success does not include them.
Toward what SDGs should tech people direct their work?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:40AM (7 children)
Our world's long term destination is to be burnt by our star as it ages.
The human species destination on the other hand may be different if we become a space faring species. The odds are low that we could achieve that in a meaningful way (e.g. travel to other star systems or at least far enough to survive our star's aging process). But if we don't try we won't.
That said we do not actually need that many technological geniuses to develop the necessary technologies to achieve such goals.
The real issue is somehow we are willing to allocate lots of resources towards "trips to Mars" but none towards developing technologies for space stations with better radiation shielding and artificial gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
Don't blame the people who are developing phone apps for money. Blame those who are using wasteful missions to Mars for money or other goals ( https://futurism.com/us-government-issues-nasa-demand-get-humans-to-mars-by-2033/ [futurism.com] ).
They're working in that field and they're wasting resources or creating wasteful distractions.
From a scientific and technological perspective our next step should NOT be sending humans to Mars but to build stuff in orbit near Earth so that we can test humans and our other favorite animals at various gravity levels. Once we have real scientific data we can better decide how much of our finite resources should be spent on the Moon or Mars.
For example if the data turns out that humans are OK with Mars gravity but not Moon gravity then:
1) Mars becomes a possible place to stay for humans (it's still a big gravity well with hardly any atmosphere though, so it's actually worse than a space station or even an asteroid)
2) Standard artificial gravity levels for some space stations could be reduced to reduce the costs.
But if it turns out humans still don't do well at Mars gravity and say need more than half G then spending so much on Mars would be a big waste of our resources and time.
As for SDGs for our planet. We should be figuring out ways of improving cities so their environment impact is lower and we can accommodate more humans in better conditions (zoning, rent restrictions etc). Because the fact is if we are going to still have billions of humans on this planet it's best to have most of us and our crap concentrated in cities where it can be better controlled and cleaned up. Ignore the delusional hippies who think humans should live in forests with nature - there are only 4 billion hectares of forest in the world. If there are 8 billion of us that's half a hectare (about 1 football field) of forest for each of us - then what undisturbed forest would be left for those tigers, orangutans, tapirs etc so beloved by those treehuggers? Many of those animals really don't like being disturbed by humans.
Thus if we really cared about "Nature" most humans should be living in dense cities and not disturbing nature[1]. And we need geniuses to think of ways to improve them - e.g. require most buildings and houses to collect rain-water (reduce urban run-off and flooding, use the rainwater to help keep cities cool etc). The water collection stuff needs to not breed mosquitoes etc...
We also need to phase out commercial fishing ASAP and move to farming in oceans and figuring out better ways of doing it[2] . The fishing industry is terribly broken - it's the equivalent of getting pork by roaming about destroying entire forests just for the pigs (and discarding the other dead animals caught in the pig-traps, including cows!) then you have another bunch getting beef by destroying forests for the cows (and discarding other animals in their cow traps, including pigs!). Yeah farms are evil but they are the lesser evil.
But are people willing to endure the pain and suffering involved for the transition?
Personally I don't care that much, from time to time I'll do my duty to to tell you bunch but that's it. I don't have much skin in the game. I don't plan on having any children, so my environmental footprint ends when I end, I could drive an SUV for the rest of my life and still cause less damage than someone who has kids who have kids who have kids etc even if they all drive electric cars.
If someone rich/well-funded thinks my bullshit is worth paying me for then maybe I'll show more interest. But till then I'm not going to quit my day job. I'll follow the North Star of profit, because who else is going to feed me? There's never going to be decent Basic Income in my country within my lifetime.
[1] We'd have cities, farms and "less disturbed nature".
[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/10/188431577/how-to-clean-up-fish-farms-and-raise-more-seafood-at-the-same-time [npr.org]
http://e360.yale.edu/features/new_breed_of_ocean_farmer_aims_to_revive_global_seas [yale.edu]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @11:25AM (3 children)
To me it seems all of that is an outgrowth of the 19th century, slash-and-burn economic mentality. Changing that to a zero-waste, closed loop mentality would cascade across all spheres of human endeavor. Every output becomes an input to another process until the loop is closed, eg., food waste is composted to soil and returned to agriculture to grow more food.
Everybody wins. Lots of new industries and jobs will be created that way.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday October 18 2017, @07:07AM (2 children)
It's the same mentality of most animals. Most never have to worry about such stuff. They eat, poop and the poop is someone else's problem. Same for discarded fruit peels etc. Only a few animals have stuff like birth/reproductive control that doesn't involve infanticide.
It took quite a while before fungi etc could eat wood (breakdown lignin). Some think that's why those coal deposits formed- wood didn't decay as fast back then: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/ [scientificamerican.com]
http://feedthedatamonster.com/home/2014/7/11/how-fungi-saved-the-world [feedthedatamonster.com]
But others disagree: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442.abstract [pnas.org]
I wonder what would happen if fungi, bacteria, termite/zooplankton gut microbes etc developed the ability to breakdown and eat plastics fairly efficiently (developed naturally[1] or someone gave them a helping hand ;) ). Probably wouldn't be a major disaster, after all even untreated wood doesn't rot that easily or rapidly when it's kept dry.
The real difference is there are 7+ billion of us and billions more of our livestock. So if we don't speed up the waste processing maybe in the future instead of coal deposits/seams there'd be plastic deposits and similar... ;)
Reducing waste is important but it may also help if we developed better methods to mine landfills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining [wikipedia.org]
Imagine billions of phones failing within a decade every decade how do we get back some of the materials like gold?
[1] There are already some with that ability:
http://www.nature.com/news/2001/010627/full/news010628-11.html [nature.com]
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles.html [phys.org]
http://english.cas.cn/newsroom/research_news/201703/t20170330_175543.shtml [english.cas.cn]
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/wax-worms-eat-plastic-polyethylene-trash-pollution-cleanup/ [nationalgeographic.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 18 2017, @12:52PM (1 child)
That's interesting about coal. Thanks for mentioning it. I hadn't heard that before.
There was another Soylentil a while back (was it you?) who predicted that landfill mining will become a thing. I think that's likely. And if we figure out good, profitable ways to recycle all the waste plastic out there, then even the Pacific trash gyre will be cleaned up.
That in turn got me to thinking about how our descendants might wind up mining the atmosphere for all that carbon we dumped into it and spinning it into graphene and carbon nanotubes. So much of our material culture can be built from those feedstocks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday October 18 2017, @06:48PM
You're welcome but do see the other link which claims that's not true. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between... :)
Landfill mining is already happening. It may get more widespread.
The gyre might stay at a certain size if plankton and similar start being able to digest plastic. Plastic has only been around for a few decades. Given there already exist quite different types of microbes that digest plastic I wouldn't be so confident of claims that plastic will last a long time in the oceans. Doesn't mean we should keep letting our trash enter the oceans - especially since many other creatures don't cope well with it. Doubt we have the tech to modify sea turtles to be able to eat and digest plastic bags yet, and not even sure if we should...
There probably wouldn't be that much point recycling plastic in the middle of oceans (which is what the gyre is mostly - water with higher concentration of tiny plastic particles[1]). There would be far richer sources elsewhere for us to use. Similar for carbon. It may make sense to use "tech" based CO2 conversion for incinerator or power station exhausts where the CO2 concentrations are much higher. But from the general atmosphere it's probably better to use living plants or algae which grow themselves and convert CO2 from the atmosphere to more convenient chemicals. It'll be some time before our tech gets much more efficient and we'd probably still want plants like trees around anyway.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/05/great-pacific-garbage-patch-is-a-myth-warn-experts-as-survey-sho/ [telegraph.co.uk]
https://searchengineland.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch-on-google-earth-21333 [searchengineland.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:40PM
(Score: 2) by slap on Tuesday October 17 2017, @04:16PM (1 child)
The amount of money spent on sports teams worldwide makes the amount of money spent on space exploration and missions look like a drop in the bucket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @05:41PM