Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
You might consider the present novel corona virus outbreak,as a corollary to climate change.
The doctor who identified it was vilified.Just like Revelle or Gore,or Hansen.In the intervening time,before China acted,the cat got out of the bag before it could be contained.Now it's moving towards a global pandemic.The doctor's dead from the virus.
Entropic.Humpty-Dumpty is broken, and we can't put him back together,even with all the wealth on the planet.We killed the ounce of prevention,and we're probably looking far beyond an pound of cure.A few individuals decided the fate of billions.
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I don't follow news, so I'm ignorant of the latest virus people are worried about. What is it, about every 2 years some interesting new virus makes news headlines and then falls off the radar? Sometimes it's existing stuff like Ebola that trends.
Maybe you're right about billions suffering. The flip side is that billions wouldn't have experienced life in the first place without the mighty exploitation of fossil fuels. We could have used those resources more wisely, but that's true for everything all the time in hindsight.
...and besides all that, as I've been saying, the point isn't to have humans consume oxygen for the longest duration possible, but to explore. Exploration is the process of sacrificing current resources to either find new sources, or at least expand knowledge. The interesting thing about exploration is that it might actually lead to humans consuming oxygen for a longer duration. We could all live as drones serving the State, but that is entirely devoid of purpose and meaning.
Finally, the main thing that has changed is our access to news. Before humanity still had to contend with changing environments, disease, and bad weather, but we simply had no way to convey those local problems to a global audience. Our ability to worry about things happening elsewhere was close to zero. The double-edge sword is that we can now respond to issues around the world, but that also gives us anxiety about it, some of it unhealthy with respect to things we have next to no control over.