>> "Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides"
(or some other transformations I guess in case of fire.)
That was precisely not what I was talking about (or put another way if you still require abundant explicitness): not the kind of immortality I was describing. Maybe I was not clear enough.
> For example, a star could hypothetically fall into another much larger than it and prolong its life
Well, once again:
>> Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs
For the majority of life existence as we know it (meaning, a proton gradient separated by a membrane), living systems were immortal.
Some external circumstances could change reducing them to a pile of oxides, but the systems themselves were perfectly self-perpetuating -- i.e. time-independent, or put another way 'given enough time' is not sufficient.
Of course, before the heat-death of the universe entropy-reducing systems will break down, but that's not an interesting observation.
> Some physical processes decrease entropy locally, sometimes by incredible amounts.
I think that's the more interesting observation. How to qualify life beyond only 'local entropy reduction systems'.
My uninformed opinion is that it is both 'entropy-reducing' and 'context-dependent' systems that should be considered 'alive' (not sure though that this is sufficient). Dependence on their context means that those systems will have a feedback-loop with their environment, allowing for example non-linear causality and thus complexity to emerge.
A star radiating away their stored negative entropy is an all give and no take, no dependency, full autonomy system. Of course they can still be impacted by external effects, but sustaining their own internal processes does not require such inputs, they are incidental to them emitting away their stored energy. Once started, their schedule (when they will deplete themselves, collapse, etc) is known and predictable, thus not alive.
Sure, it's definitely not the same. I would not think of someone not believing the most extreme predictions to be a skeptic.
What I call climate change skeptics are people playing into the well-known playbook of industries being attacked by research into the harm to inflict on society: tobacco, "forever chemicals", etc, and today also climate change.
The science behind climate change is generally sound, even if we have unknowns and things yet to research, we know two important things: climate is changing, and human activities are causing it.
Some people however are ideologically biased against questioning the status quo. The industry put into question is at the core of our models, it's impacting every facet of modern life in developed countries.
Some political parties are counting on this, so you have had propaganda for 20 years in the US ridiculing environmental efforts, highlighting the most unhinged voices to disparage the effort as a whole, and people generally well educated that should know better, are following suite. The website posted by the OP of this thread is a literal example of such rhetoric.
I see this on Hacker News at least, so many people seemingly too afraid of words like 'degrowth' not to conjure scary strawmans (going back to the dark ages), instead of asking the tough questions of how we are going to get through this.
I just find ridiculous how so many people are too happy to lean into their bias, I find it cowardly and unreasonable.
This website is a pathetic example of cherry-picked and misrepresented data.
No surprise coming from climate change deniers.
Hacker News always had a pretty high number of such people (and an even higher number of climate change sceptics) amongst its users. I think it's due to a prevalent ideological proximity with the American right, which has been (and still is) the main driver for this propaganda.
Life appears in spite of the 2nd law. The context in which it appears means that life orders its context, so 'feeds off' low entropy. But low entropy environment is not sufficient.
You must have pretty specific causal patterns in the 'primordial soup' for the system to self-organize into 'entropy accelerators' such as life.
This article conveniently designs its benchmark to be exactly when open addressing would work.
In almost all of the maps implementations I have used so far, chaining was necessary and intrusive linked lists were used.
An open-addressing scheme was however preferable (cuckoo) for a read-mostly map allowing concurrent reads and locked writes.
I would be more interested in an article exploring the compromises involved there, e.g. related to paying the cost of an additional indirection when accessing the value.
Another critic of this article I would add is the many tables throughout referencing different baselines. A single baseline would be much preferable, to keep a sense of scale for each change.
> The only art in that room was watching that crowd accept that wretched noise as performance, simply because the person making it happened to be on stage.
You cannot fathom that other people might have different responses to it?
I like noise. Not everyday, but I do go to concerts of it. Next you will reveal to me that the sensations and feelings I get to experience are just a construct and I am inflicting this only because it's on stage?
> Will you call all of those people myopic for pursuing a richer life, as well?
Definitely. People living in the US are not the most happy on Earth. Life is not the easiest there. Granted, there is a very successful propaganda at work convincing people that they will have a better chance to succeed. But more and more, this ideal is being questioned.
> Bring in the big earthmoving equipment, run the concrete plans, all powered by fossil fuels, and build dams.
To continue speaking in your language, run the cost analysis. Find how much more costly it will be to entertain grandiose project just to continue living the same way as before.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a believer of an idealistic natural world where humans should not life, far from it. But as the current pinnacle of life, the greatest achievement on Earth, I consider that it is our duty to sustain ourselves for as long as possible -- and that means for now understanding as much as possible of the biological systems on Earth before changing anything. We should reduce ecological collapses as much as possible, until we have learned everything we can from the species we are disappearing every days. We must be aware of our impact, in the fullest of sense and decide with total knowledge how to proceed.
> We'll adapt, or at least I will.
You are describing the exact inverse of 'adapting'. You want to modify the environment as much as necessary, at any cost, for it to fit our current cultural zeitgeist. Our biology trumps any current cultural fact. We should not try to preserve a single society or human colony, we should try to preserve as much life and (DNA) diversity as possible, as this is our best chance to learn and understand more, and find better ways to live, to further reduce our suffering.
> Eh. This gets repeated over and over with little evidence.
This is already happening, these last years have already shown a prelude of what is to come.
Rains will be rarer and more intense, leading to periods of drought and floods, as well as reduced retention in our current biomes. I don't know what you watched these last two years but it has already been happening in several regions, I don't know what more evidence you want of what is to come.
It will only become more and more difficult to grow food and keep livestock as the water system become more violent and unstable. Trying to stabilize an increasingly unstable system will prove extremely costly, you will be battling forces that are currently outside our capabilities. You might be optimistic and consider that we will always find solutions to it, but this is unreasonable. No one has shown so far that we will be capable of containing those issues.
Water might be the most problematic issue in the medium term, but wildfires, ocean acidification, tropical storms, ecological collapses have also started to happen, more frequently and more intensely. It will lead to a harder life for everyone. We will be lucky in the US and EU and will live better life for a time, but we will also experience greatly increased migrations, that will completely destroy our current social support systems. Given the latest rise in populism (on the left and right), it is clear to me that in that situation people will vote for any tyrant that will promise to do anything to protect their way of life. That will mean building critical infrastructure to attempt to contain the effects in the best case, but more likely just more self-serving, corrupt assholes and brutal power enforcement, genocide of the millions of people moving. It's only human nature.
Frankly what you describe will only accelerate our downfall. Our best chance of surviving is through knowledge, and your way will make so much of the complexity of life around us disappear, just to fit some myopic conception of how we should live.
They may have a point, that won't change the reality of the situation: letting them do exactly what the developed countries did, will kill them. That's not fair, that's life.
> So yes, idealism likely will not solve anything. But it can help make the transition to a sustainable economy.
No, idealism by definition will produce idealistic solutions that won't amount to anything. You are advocating for controlling a system by considering that with enough ingenuity, trust or whatever, we can do it. No, controlling a complex system is done by understanding its baseline or attractors and tweaking its inputs carefully to bring it and maintaining it there.
It means indeed that injecting aerosols in the atmosphere to control the climate is a foolish errand, and the practical approach is energy sobriety. But don't go advocating this position by talking of ideals and fairness, you won't convince anyone.
> As a commenter put it so eloquently elsewhere, how do we ensure that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis can live like Texans? Because relieving human suffering is my goal.
Are you prepared to hear that it is simply not possible? We have finite resources. If everyone was living like in developed countries, we would consume the entirety of the resources we are currently capable of extracting from the Earth in a year, in only a few months. And even if we expanded our extraction capabilities, there is only one Earth, of which only finite amount of material will be useful and put to good use for our comfort.
Given that, there is only two possibilities: reduce resource consumption, or expand the amount of available resources.
* Reduce: you can either reduce each individual usage, or reduce the number of individuals. Now you see why everyone is advocating for reduced individual usage, because culling the population is seen as 'not relieving human suffering'.
* Increase: it requires going away from Earth and expanding into at least adjacent bodies with the capability of transforming them into useful stuff. To plan for that, you need to prove first that such solution would be possible before we are all extinct from the ecological collapse of our life support systems.
So now you are back to square one: if 'increasing' the available resources is not available right now, and might not even be available in the future, and reducing the population is frowned upon, then you are forced to find a way to reduce resource consumption.
Which might well mean that for everyone to live like Texans, that means Texans will have to change their lives and live like everyone else.
Once our ecosystem has collapsed, a possibility we see approaching close and closer, then *no one* will live, nevermind with the latest F150 or whathaveyou that Texans might enjoy. If your goal is truly to reduce human suffering, you must also entertain the possibility that we must limit ourselves. Someone living hedonistically, trying to enjoy earthly pleasures as much as possible and dying at age 35 to cardiac and respiratory failure, has not succeeded in enjoying their lives the most.
Another question might be: does everyone want to live like Texans in the first place? Are you planning to burn our Earth on faulty ideological or cultural assumptions? Because believe me, when I see how Americans live, I definitely do not wish to join them. You might be culturally conditioned to believe your way is the best, but don't take extreme opinions such as 'climate change is preferable to modifying the status quo' based on such myopic views.
> Second, no conspiracy would be needed, just hypocrisy of individuals.
To quote your first sentence:
> It's interesting to me how much people are trained to reflex against this possibility.
Which is definitely conspiratorial. It's not just that they might have incomplete or lacking science training, or are defaulting to incorrect common-sense intuitions, no, they have been trained.
Second, the hypocrisy of people benefiting from the status quo, defending a stupid idea to squeeze a few years of carbon emission, and accusing the other side of being ideologically driven is quite striking.
You insult the other side by summoning the idea that they are simple peoples believing in gods and wood spirits, dismiss their opinion by projecting your own ideologically-driven hypocrisy, engage in conspiratorial-adjacent thinking by considering that their opinion is the result of propaganda.
Note how close this is all to the usual climate skeptics rhetorical toolbox. After having to finally conceded that there is an issue, they are trying to justify their insane beliefs by saying that "people were not nice enough when explaining the problem and agreeing with my politics".
Don't claim to advocate for science-based approach by using such rhetorical devices.
The hero saves the day by hacking old routines lying in the depth of the ship systems.