> People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems?
Also those 10 billion people in the future will be consuming far more per capita as developing nations continue to industrialise.
This is a good thing as everyone deserves a decent life. But if we are all going to have a decent life without destroying the planet then we need to be mindful of how many of us we can sustainably support.
A dam bursting can cause mass fatalities, it's definitely a lot more severe than a minor inconvenience.
And the alternative to nuclear at the moment isn't really solar or hydropower (most places aren't suitable for it) but rather coal and gas. And those are continually polluting the environment not just with CO2 but also carcinogens and other pollutants.
Of that list of accidents only Chernobyl is still uninhabitable, so it's hardly "literal millennia"
Three Mile Island didn't even kill anyone and many believe neither did Fukushima.
If Le Pen or Zemmour get through to the second round then I imagine Macron will win, as voters unite to avoid them winning, much as happened in the previous elections.
Although I guess Le Pen and Zemmour might split each others vote, preventing them from reaching the second round.
I read some books by Nicolelis' several years ago and it seemed back then that really useful BCI's still required invasive surgery because not only do you need to gather signals from a large number of neurons you also need to be able to distinguish them (and in EEG the signals are merged together and then further obscured by the effect of the skull etc.)
It will be interesting to see how much adoption Neuralink can get with the invasive approach.
Does the salary compensate the amount of effort to get there though?
I had a friend who was a chemist but she left the field to pursue data science instead after her pharmaceutical company started even more layoffs in R+D - it seems pharma companies are more interested in intellectual property law than drug development these days.
It worked quite well at first - I mean they had Sputnik, Gagarin etc. not bad for a country that was some backwards serfdom just half a century before.
But then they lost their ambition - a major point being when they stopped trying to develop their own computing technology and just reverse engineered IBM chips instead.
I did Physics and turned out okay (I work in Data Science now) but a lot of that seemed like good fortune.
I think the future for CS education could definitely be online courses - the Nand2Tetris course has stuck with me more than anything I did at University, for example. And Prof. Roughgarden's Algorithms courses were similarly high quality.
Really I think once online courses work out how to solve the credential problem and actually get taken seriously by employers, the college bubble could burst.
I'd argue it's still worthwhile for degrees like Computer Science if only because HR like candidates to have a degree. (Although this is slowly eroding and may change in the next decade or so)
But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot.
I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer.
Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.
If we go into the 2030's and we are still doing business as usual with our near-exponentially increasing global CO2 emissions then I suspect a large amount of climate damage will already be 'locked in'.
The issue is I don't think that scenario is realistic.
We don't have declining global CO2 emissions and there are no signs we will have that any time soon. In fact, annual CO2 emissions continue to increase at an almost exponential rate.
So first of all we'd have to decrease emissions and invent and deploy some CO2 extraction tech to help lower the current atmospheric CO2 concentration.
To me, it seems far more likely that if SRM was deployed many would just see it as a way to continue with business as usual without having to suffer the effects of global warming.
What concerns me about almost all of the Solar Radiation Management (SRM) proposals is that they don't address the root issue of high Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations.
This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't seem an unfair assumption.)
And should we fail to do so then the protective effect would dissipate leaving us with full solar radiation on a planet with presumably much higher GHG concentrations. This would not only cause temperatures to soar to hitherto unseen heights, but to do so in an incredibly rapid manner.
It's not clear that our ecosystems would be able to withstand such a drastic and sudden change.
We know that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet. I also don't think we will be doing asteroid mining etc. on any scale or timeframe relevant to the current climate crisis.
Therefore we know there is some limit - and we are just arguing about where that limit is.
The Global Footprint Network with their "Overshoot Day" believe we are already beyond that sustainable limit and, to be honest, with increasing populations that (quite rightly) demand Western living standards, I doubt we will ever be sustainable.
I think the CO2 graphs are trade-adjusted but those resource usage graphs come from USGS so I doubt it takes imports into account (especially given imports would include processed goods, manufactured parts etc. where estimating the resource use would be tricky)
Essentially, we are seeing cost-push inflation and it's not clear when it will go away given the supply chain problems.