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from the nothing-lasts-more-than-8-years dept.
Mankind has a history of long term projects. The Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Great Wall, getting Mickey Mouse into the Public Domain...
Some of these projects took multiple centuries of effort. Not a single person present at the start of those saw them completed. This is made worse when you consider lifespans that were half or less what they are currently.
But what was the LAST project that spanned lifetimes? Do you know of any going on today?
The Great Wall was started in 300 B.C. and completed some 1900 years later.
As humanity considers things like colonizing other planets and space megastructures we are talking about activities that will take centuries of effort. This turns into millennia as we look at things like terraforming and actually spreading humanity beyond our own star.
Does humanity in the current instant gratification social media quarterly results era have the appetite for projects that our grandchildren won't see completed?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @03:49PM (4 children)
The 1kw per square meter of sunlight falling everywhere on Earth, four to five more orders of magnitude more energy than humanity uses for all its purposes including agriculture indicates otherwise.
No AC or refrigeration, no instant global communication, no huge multipliers of our labor from electricity-based tools, no cheap lighting, and a huge drop in our ability to manufacture the stuff we want and need. I can point to numerous, important uses for each of these. The refrigeration of spoilable food and medicines, the ability to widen one's mind by communicating with people around the global; the work- and time-saving devices to make our lives better; lighting to improve the quality of our living habitats; and the amazing variety of goods and services, powered by electricity, that we use to shape our world and better our lives. Sure, you can live with stone clubs and whatnot, but if you want to do something more than merely live, that requires some of the furnishings of the modern world.
Because living less well and using resources even more inefficiently than we do now, will be so much better for people and nature than now. As I noted earlier, you're ignoring both that the power sources for electricity are remarkably plentiful, even going past solar power, while the needs and wants are significant. Calling it "useless and downright evil goals" is merely an abuse of the semantics of morality. It's not, thus you are wasting our time with spurious and wrong accusations.
Then you would be saying different things. Your words here demonstrate your true outlook.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 25 2018, @07:55PM (1 child)
AKA industry will continue unhindered by environmental concerns!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 25 2018, @08:02PM
Because that is the only other option, amirite? Either we halt all human progress to save our extremely precious electricity which is the most important thing in the world, or we allow industry to run riot over the lands and turn the place into a parking lot. There is no other possible course of action - what we're doing now must somehow fall into one of those two pigeon holes. But it doesn't seem to fit. Maybe if we whacked on the logic harder?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28 2018, @09:21AM (1 child)
I thought we were discussion electricity, not energy or sunlight... After you've covered the entire surface of the planet with 100% efficient solar panels and promised to maintain those in perpetuity we will resume discussion...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 31 2018, @05:17PM
Electricity can be obtained as reasonable efficiency from sunlight and of course, from energy. When you have a bunch of orders of magnitude more than you need, a little inefficiency is not that important.
Why in the world would we bother to do that when we only need two to three orders of magnitude less (counting the inefficiency of the solar panels)? Agriculture in comparison uses up about a third of the Earth's land area, which is crudely an order of magnitude less than the Earth's total surface area. Thus, agriculture already uses up one to two orders of magnitude more land area than we would need with 10% efficient solar panels (counting clouds, night, angle of the Sun, etc).
What is insane here is that you're speaking of electricity as if it is a resource so scarce that we need to conserve to an extreme its consumption, even though there's plenty of evidence that's nonsense. In an economic sense, sure, electricity like all finite resources is scarce. But at the same time it is plentiful and there's plenty more we could be doing than merely optimizing its usage.
We don't generate electricity because we hate Mother Earth. We do it because we use that electricity for all sorts of useful things. And the incredible cheapness of electricity, particularly when compared to the cost of the things we do with it (rarely is electricity or energy usage a significant cost of a human activity!), indicates that your concern is greatly misplaced.