Biggest Problem Facing Humanity

[WestAir]

Power production through fission is not a reality yet, at least not outside experimental reactors. Are you confusing splitting atoms with fusing them?

Uh. Going to call you out on this one.

I think you might be confusing "fusion" and "fission" in your attempt to correct Ralathon. Fission is what we currently use. Fusion is the "experimental" thing we want to use. Not the other way around.

[lajoswinkler]

As far as global warming goes, I have yet to figure out why a couple hundred thousand square km of star shades at L1 wouldn't fix a little overheating. We could mass produce a bunch of very thin solar shade material in space, place it directly between Earth and the Sun at the L1 point, and just block enough sunlight to completely null out any global warming.

I read an article that said such a scheme would supposedly cool the tropics more than the poles- but I never found out why they were saying that? Maybe due to parallax? The most extreme parallax, at the poles, from a star shade at Earth-Sun L1 would be a little under 15 arc minutes- when the solar disk is 30 arc minutes in diameter- so it would be borderline. However, if you utilized the radiation pressure on the sunward-facing side of the sail to reduce the effective gravity of the Sun by a bit, it ought to move the effective L1 point away from the Earth, reducing the parallax a bit, maybe enough to ensure full shade coverage even at the poles. Even without that though, we'd be talking about full shade coverage of almost all of the Earth.

Anyway, that article was based on recent research, and as we know, that can be very much subject to change, especially for something as complicated as the climate.

Ignoring the effectively infinite problem of making "couple hundred thousand square kilometres" of shades, you do realize the sunlight powers up almost all of our biosphere? Reducing the amount of sunlight would have a huge impact on the photosynthetic organisms. Oceans and forests would release less oxygen.

I'd never ever mess up with Earth that way.

Sustainable energy sources. Fossil fuels aren't. Thorium fission is, as is Nuclear Fusion.

Don't be fooled by the thorium advocates. It's not easy as they say it is. It's expensive and pretty much experimental, whether the uranium fission is a technology tested for several decades. Uranium alone (thorium alone can't be used, it needs uranium) is a perfectly fine fuel for nuclear fission. The only problem is if you build reactors that can breed weapon material, something that modern civilian power plants can't do.

Reprocessing the waste, from which only a couple of percentages of uranium has been fissioned, could power the current civilization for a long, long time. Hundreds of years, at least. I'd like to see more thorium reactors, but abandoning pure uranium fission is madness.

Plain stupidity and lack of education.

You can solve pretty much all the greatest problems of humanity by having people think about what they're doing, and why.

True. Higher education yields less primitively religious, "old ways" people who think Earth was made for them to consume and squeeze out everything they can before they die. It has significantly lowered the natality in Europe. If only the rest of the world would do that, there'd be much less problems.

Edited October 7, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[Dispatcher]

If you look at things from the perspective of geologic time scales, all conditions facing the Earth are cyclical. Climate, temperature and perhaps even (nonhuman) population vs. resource pressures have existed before in Earth's past. Global warming is nothing new (even though humans currently contribute the most to the current trend). As for populations, problems commonly associated with over population may be best attributed to failures in the production and distribution (and treatment) of water and food, as well as the provision of education. Environmental impacts would be reduced if demand were met with solar, geothermal, tidal and yes, the elusive fusion power. As I indicated, everything is cyclical, and this includes extinction events. So if you are concerned about either over population or the threat of extinction events, all the more reason to establish a human presence on the moon, Mars or anywhere else we may obtain a foothold in space.

Note: its interesting that the cultures which have had the most negative impact on the environment (from a fossil fuel perspective) are the same which have the greatest degree of education and access to science. In contrast, various primitive tribes with their primitive cultures seem to be the most aware of their stewardship of their environments.

Edited October 7, 2013 by Dispatcher
Adding note.

[Mr Shifty]

Overpopulation isn't a solvable problem. There's no humanitarian scheme for reducing populations. Poor people in developing countries have large families for the same reason that agrarian societies have always had large families: infant death rates are fairly high, and it takes lots of hands to produce food from land using manual labor. You want to reduce population growth? Work on poverty alleviation. Note that a declining global population would cause its own set of problems. Our economic system is not set up to handle the inevitable economic contraction very well.

The biggest problem I see for the near future is energy. Fossil fuels are irreplaceable on any human timescale. There is no other fuel source that is as compact and portable as oil. When the oil is gone (and it will be, probably in our lifetimes), whole industries will die. Things that we take for granted are going to become luxuries. It's possible that the food-to-market chain will be broken and people will start to starve. Global warming will add to the chaos with mass migrations, natural disasters, water shortages. We're probably in for a rough couple of centuries.

[lajoswinkler]

Note: its interesting that the cultures which have had the most negative impact on the environment (from a fossil fuel perspective) are the same which have the greatest degree of education and access to science. In contrast, various primitive tribes with their primitive cultures seem to be the most aware of their stewardship of their environments.

Not exactly correct... You can't talk about cultures in this aspect. You need to use "societies".

The worst impact comes from developing societies such as the West during the 19th and 20th century when all that burned coal and released artificial toxic chemicals were used to lift the society from the gutters of poverty. Now most of the West is heading to the policy of sustainability. It's still a long way ahead, but it started. At this moment the West is still struggling with makeshift solutions such as using false-green stuff (produced in China using a ****load of coal and toxic stuff), but the progress is on the way.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that primitive cultures were benign. Most of the time they really weren't. If you don't count in the small tribes still living in the stone age, there was a lot more viral behaviour before. You've probably heard of nomads. Most of the population on Earth were once nomads. They settle, they breed and consume the resources to the point of depletion, they move to another spot and it all repeats.

One of the most striking examples was the story of the buffalos and Native Americans. No sustainability. Just hunting until there's no more animals, and then moving to a spot where there are new resources.

It's actually the myth of "noble savage" made up in 19th century that Westerners buy because they're taught they're the worst plague ever. Well most of the stuff is their fault, but they aren't the sole ones who display(ed) such behaviour. Absolutely not.

The ideas of sustainable society were practiced when the nature was too tough for the man to do something about it. It was a nuisance, not a wish. Almost always when the man was capable of turning into a nomadic virus, he did.

After nomads, it was the empires. Centralized power with "bots" going around and sucking the resources, bringing them towards the center.

The ideas and concepts of sustainable society were always there, weakly expressed either through philosophy or religion, but it was only in the 20th century that the educated people started actually advocating for it for the grand purpose, and the West gave birth to the environmentalism in the late 20th century, when it coincided with important social changes. The events of the 50s and 60s were crucial. Something similar is happening today, with the impact of the internet.

The most important stuff that ever happened in the history of humanity happened in the last 70 or so years. During the whole past almost everyone didn't even think about the fact that nature can be depleted and that there's something called humanity, responsibility and rights.

Today's Westerners mostly don't realize that. They take the developed world and the public mind around them for granted, thinking it was always like that. The past was horrific, brutal and disgusting compared to today's world. We truly live in the best times.

Edited October 7, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[WestAir]

The biggest problem I see for the near future is energy. Fossil fuels are irreplaceable on any human timescale. There is no other fuel source that is as compact and portable as oil. When the oil is gone (and it will be, probably in our lifetimes), whole industries will die. Things that we take for granted are going to become luxuries. It's possible that the food-to-market chain will be broken and people will start to starve. Global warming will add to the chaos with mass migrations, natural disasters, water shortages. We're probably in for a rough couple of centuries.

Well that was full of happiness and sunshine.

I'm hesitant to consider the looming oil disaster as, well, disastrous. When the oil industry collapses and fossil fuels run dry, which will happen, I can't help but feel like all it will do is turn us to create a new industry in its place. Maybe we'll turn to alternate types of mogas like kerosine or avgas for combustion as petroleum resources fade. Note that the collapse of the oil industry won't happen on the 2nd Tuesday of October and catch everyone by surprise. It'll be a gradual collapse that will see to the gradual rise of gas prices and the reduction of oil infrastructure and manufacturing. As industry jobs are lost and oil prices exceed affordable rates, it will make alternative industries less expensive than oil, and they'll begin to take hold.

While none of us can see the future, it's hard to say definitively that we're in for "centuries of hell". People have been saying that for centuries, and it's never come to fruition. If anything, life has become a lot better over the centuries despite the complexities we continue to throw into our society as a result.

[m4v]

I'm hesitant to consider the looming oil disaster as, well, disastrous. When the oil industry collapses and fossil fuels run dry, which will happen, I can't help but feel like all it will do is turn us to create a new industry in its place.

Right, except that for create that new industry you need energy, so we have to create it while we can use fossil fuels, not after the wells are dry and the economies are collapsing.

[WestAir]

Right, except that for create that new industry you need energy, so we have to create it while we can use fossil fuels, not after the wells are dry and the economies are collapsing.

But we do have other industries around today. Biofuels [biomass, Algae based fuels, Biodeisel], Alcohol fuels [Ethanol, Methanol, Butanol], Ammonia, Carbon Neutrals [synthetic fuels], Hydrogen fuels, etc al. Are any of them remotely as successful, cheap, and capable as petroleum? Absolutely not, but that's not what is being argued. The argument is if something else can take over when oil is gone, and the answer is without a doubt yes; I'm extremely hesitant to believe that humanity as a whole will sit on its hands and ask "what now?" when oil runs out. It must be obvious that we won't do nothing, and the only something we can do is turn to an alternate, so the only obvious answer here is that we'll expand an alternate industry to become mainstream.

[Depth]

But when we have clean, renewable energy, where does the massive manpower that is currently in the oil sector go?

It would also be a huge economic crisis as the income from the oil dissipates.

[J.Random]

The biggest two problems facing Humanity are Stupidity and Zealotry. Everything else is solvable, but only if those two are defeated, which won't happen any time soon.

[WestAir]

But when we have clean, renewable energy, where does the massive manpower that is currently in the oil sector go?

It would also be a huge economic crisis as the income from the oil dissipates.

True. It'll be as bad as the housing bubble, dotcom, whathave you. Entire industries collapsing are never a good thing, and it can bring the entire world to a halt for almost a decade - but it certainly isn't the biggest problem humanity faces, or the start of several "centuries of darkness."

[-Velocity-]

Ignoring the effectively infinite problem of making "couple hundred thousand square kilometres" of shades, you do realize the sunlight powers up almost all of our biosphere? Reducing the amount of sunlight would have a huge impact on the photosynthetic organisms. Oceans and forests would release less oxygen.

I'd never ever mess up with Earth that way.

In my "couple hundred thousand square km" example, I am talking about a reduction in sunlight by 0.25%. A couple hundred thousand square km may be a very realizable goal, especially in a future where we have large space-based asteroid mining and manufacturing operations. After all, right now, the world is producing something on the order of around 40,000 or 50,000 square km of aluminum foil each year. Solar shade material would be MUCH thinner than aluminum foil. Maybe, the bigger and tougher material manufacturing challenge lies in the rigging and support for all those solar sails/shades.

Anyway, even if your concerns are legitimate, if global warming does become bad enough, it might very well be the lesser of two evils. HOWEVER, plant life, at least as far as I have seen, and on land at least, is far more limited by the lack of water or nutrients than by any lack of sunlight. Many of the greenest places in the world have the cloudiest and rainiest days. That's why they call them "rain forests" .

I would suspect that nutrients and perhaps water conditions are likely to be the limiting factors for phytoplankton growth too.

Finally, I note that during the Carboniferous period, the time when perhaps the Earth was the most plant-covered in all its history, the sun was several whole percentage points FAINTER than it is today.

So while I'm no botanist, I'll need quite a bit more information before I would believe that a reduction in sunlight would actually result in a reduction in plant life. Obviously, plants need sunlight, but a reduction in sunlight only leads to a reduction in plant life if sunlight is a limiting factor inhibiting plant growth, and it does not appear to be, not at all.

Edited October 7, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Nibb31]

But when we have clean, renewable energy, where does the massive manpower that is currently in the oil sector go?

It would also be a huge economic crisis as the income from the oil dissipates.

Where did the coal miners go in the 70s? And the US automobile industry workers? Industrial reconversions happen all the time, it's part of the game. Sure, there were social issues and individual dramas in those cases, but nothing that isn't insurmountable for a modern society.

[PakledHostage]

It would also be a huge economic crisis as the income from the oil dissipates.

I'm not sure it would have that big an impact. As others have said already, oil isn't going to be depleted overnight. The current incarnation of the oil industry will gradually shrink and evolve as our remaining oil becomes too precious to burn (oil is used to make a whole bunch of very important products including pharmaceuticals, plastics, etc).

Maybe someone else has access to a better reference, but I just had a quick look at the Wikipedia article on the United States Economy and oil doesn't even get its own line item in either the "Employment by sector" table or the "GDP by industry". Presumably its production is too small a percentage of the US GDP and employment to be notable. This despite the fact that the US is supposedly the world's third largest producer of oil and the second largest producer of natural gas.

[lajoswinkler]

But when we have clean, renewable energy, where does the massive manpower that is currently in the oil sector go?

It would also be a huge economic crisis as the income from the oil dissipates.

We'll never have clean energy. Everything we do to extract energy from the environment causes damage. Coal does the most damage per kWh.

Environmental problems will always be present. We just have to decrease their size.

As for the manpower... There will be lots of lives ruined. The society will live on. That's how it goes.

In my "couple hundred thousand square km" example, I am talking about a reduction in sunlight by 0.25%. A couple hundred thousand square km may be a very realizable goal, especially in a future where we have large space-based asteroid mining and manufacturing operations. After all, right now, the world is producing something on the order of around 40,000 or 50,000 square km of aluminum foil each year. Solar shade material would be MUCH thinner than aluminum foil. Maybe, the bigger and tougher material manufacturing challenge lies in the rigging and support for all those solar sails/shades.

Anyway, even if your concerns are legitimate, if global warming does become bad enough, it might very well be the lesser of two evils. HOWEVER, plant life, at least as far as I have seen, and on land at least, is far more limited by the lack of water or nutrients than by any lack of sunlight. Many of the greenest places in the world have the cloudiest and rainiest days. That's why they call them "rain forests" .

I would suspect that nutrients and perhaps water conditions are likely to be the limiting factors for phytoplankton growth too.

Finally, I note that during the Carboniferous period, the time when perhaps the Earth was the most plant-covered in all its history, the sun was several whole percentage points FAINTER than it is today.

So while I'm no botanist, I'll need quite a bit more information before I would believe that a reduction in sunlight would actually result in a reduction in plant life. Obviously, plants need sunlight, but a reduction in sunlight only leads to a reduction in plant life if sunlight is a limiting factor inhibiting plant growth, and it does not appear to be, not at all.

0.25% is a lot. Just look at what the tiny increase of CO2 in almost 200 years is doing. Oh, I wouldn't play like that with a planet.

Oceans with their phytoplankton are huge sources of O2 and are very susceptible to the changes of parameters. 0.25% reduction of sunlight might do all kinds of things with pH, salinity, temperature, density. That can mess up the global conveyor belt.

We don't know what exactly was going on during Carboniferous period. The plant life evolved over huge time spans to deal with such insolation. If we launch the shades and lower the insolation during the period of 50 years, it will be a huge shock for the biosphere, an equivalent of a smaller asteroid impact. I don't know what the consequences would be. It's messing with powerful stuff we don't know a lot about and it's irresponsible.

Edited October 7, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[-Velocity-]

0.25% is a lot. Just look at what the tiny increase of CO2 in almost 200 years is doing. Oh, I wouldn't play like that with a planet.

Oceans with their phytoplankton are huge sources of O2 and are very susceptible to the changes of parameters. 0.25% reduction of sunlight might do all kinds of things with pH, salinity, temperature, density. That can mess up the global conveyor belt.

We don't know what exactly was going on during Carboniferous period. The plant life evolved over huge time spans to deal with such insolation. If we launch the shades and lower the insolation during the period of 50 years, it will be a huge shock for the biosphere, an equivalent of a smaller asteroid impact. I don't know what the consequences would be. It's messing with powerful stuff we don't know a lot about and it's irresponsible.

I certainly would agree that, at least right now, we don't know for sure, and starting such a project NOW would certainly be ill-advised and premature. However, we very well might have a much better handle and understanding of how a reduction in sunlight would affect the planet and plant life in 100 or 200 years. I think it very likely that we will have a very good understanding of how climate works in just a few more decades, as ever more powerful supercomputers come online that run ever more detailed climate simulations.

And, I cite again the evidence that it doesn't look like sunlight is a limiting factor in plant growth. BUT, considering the consequences of being wrong on an issue like this, I would whole-heartedly agree that extreme caution is definitely advised, and the negative effects of global warming would have to be pretty substantial to justify a project like this.

Unfortunately, solar shades will do nothing to stem the tide of ocean acidification caused by high CO2 levels.

[Camacha]

I think you might be confusing "fusion" and "fission" in your attempt to correct Ralathon. Fission is what we currently use. Fusion is the "experimental" thing we want to use. Not the other way around.

You are right. The word for fission is something altogether different in my language, so I got them mixed up. You learn every day

[vetrox]

Alot of good points have been made in this thread (along with some less good points, notice i didnt say bad)

But i guess that "Global Warming" is a problem. Is it the greatest? Only time can tell

However i agree with NGTOne

I'd say lack of proper access to education. Quality education has been demonstrated to drastically reduce war, poverty, etc. within a few generations. But in the US, the educational system is flagging badly, and large swaths of the world lack access to even basic education services.

Im not sure weather its lack of proper education or lack of access to any old education. The unfortunate and maybe ironic thing is that most Childeren and young adults dont really want to learn...and they probably dont want to learn some of the generic crap that is thrown there way through various generic curriculums.

EDIT: Gonna put in a correction right here. Those in the more developed world dont really have learning at the top of the agenda and those in less developed parts just want to learn but dont know what to learn about because...well...they havent been taught anything yet! aarrrgghhh its a vicious circle. Why cant we just go back to the middle ages where everything was magic and the will of god! Those were simpler times.

I spent a whole half a term on photosynthesis and the water cycle. Sure i understand the basic concept now but its something that a)im not interested in and i did not need to spend half a year learning (half arsed learning) about a subject i couldnt give a crap about so i would have learned it badly.

Adults on the other hand want to learn about specific subjects. I expect everyone here has a great interest in space and ,to a lesser degree, physics. I would love to go back to school and learn nothing but astronomy and physics (and math because physics) but back when i was at school all i wanted to learn about was how to catch sithilis.

So in essence i guess we are our own problem.

If only communism was global and not fraught with poor leadership (but thats a discussion for a totally different forum)

Edited October 7, 2013 by vetrox

[Mr Shifty]

Maybe someone else has access to a better reference, but I just had a quick look at the Wikipedia article on the United States Economy and oil doesn't even get its own line item in either the "Employment by sector" table or the "GDP by industry". Presumably its production is too small a percentage of the US GDP and employment to be notable. This despite the fact that the US is supposedly the world's third largest producer of oil and the second largest producer of natural gas.

Oil extraction may not be a huge sector but it undergirds a lot of other ones. Probably the biggest effect will be on transportation. You can change power plants over to nuclear or renewable, but those are not really portable energy sources. Air travel will disappear. Trucking will disappear and since most stuff in the US is shipped by truck, that'll have pretty large consequences. Overseas shipping, diesel-electric trains, etc. Population migration will be less fluid because it will be more difficult (=expensive and time consuming) to travel long distances. Things will change.

[lajoswinkler]

Transportation (burning it) is the lesser problem.

What about petrochemical products? Drugs? Polymers? It all relies on carbon compounds we extract from the ground. Oil is a precious thing.

Granted, we could supply some of it using CO2 and plant material, but it would be extremely expensive compared to oil.

[SargeRho]

The way I know humans, it's unlikely that air travel or trucking will disappear. We'll just find a new fuel to run that stuff. Like Methane, or bio-fuels.

[trvtannenberg]

Not the biggest, but important is crystallization of proteins.

[rkman]

it's hard to say definitively that we're in for "centuries of hell". People have been saying that for centuries, and it's never come to fruition.

Except during the middle ages.

[Camacha]

Im not sure weather its lack of proper education or lack of access to any old education. The unfortunate and maybe ironic thing is that most Childeren and young adults dont really want to learn...and they probably dont want to learn some of the generic crap that is thrown there way through various generic curriculums.

To be honest, this problem is rapidly disappearing. There are many online courses you can follow for free, in your own tempo and on the subjects you like. As soon as poorer countries have internet access, they can benefit from this. The knowledge gap is becoming a lot smaller than it once was.

[Camacha]

Except during the middle ages.

I do not agree. The notion of the dark ages became popular during the enlightenment, but nowadays scholars and scientists are realising that it was not the retarded age we think it was. There was a lot going on back then.