I don’t know whether this guy’s ideas for carbon capture make economic sense or not, but this I see a lot of this sort of nonsense:
You quote the Jesuit philosopher Thomas Berry, who writes about our being inseparable from the Earth. That’s not trending in Silicon Valley the way, say, terraforming Mars is.
What the hell do we do when we’ve trashed the hell out of Earth? We escape to another planet! That appears to be the attitude from the tech-os. Well, I find that hugely irresponsible. Why waste billions on going to Mars when we should be putting that into nourishing Earth? It’s your classic mechanical mind gone to the extreme, and I find it abhorrent from people that are meant to be intelligent. We are an integral part of Earth and until we start nurturing her, we are going to go down the gurgler. Maybe a few of those tech-os will end up on a spaceship, but the rest of us won’t.
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.
The left love the smell of their own farts so much they can’t imagine how anyone would want to get away from them and their flatulents.
And if they want people to put more money into the environment, a good way to start would be sensible clothing choices, not opulent over-priced Gucci crap like Patagonia.
The only people who would trash the earth are the “sustainable” vegetable-only crowd.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/01/whats-really-behind-the-plant-based-diet-agenda/
As far as “trashing the earth” goes, the difference between my surroundings today and what they looked like 158 years ago tells the story. Photographs of Manassas, Virginia from that era show wide-open fields as far as the eye could see. Today, despite heavy residential and commercial development, it is densely forested, and teeming with wildlife. I’d say we are doing the opposite of trashing the planet.
But now they are saying that re-forestation sucks co2 out of the atmosphere causing mini ice ages.
Well, as Father Guido Sarducci once observed (about global warming and nuclear winter), I hope they happen at the same time to cancel each other out.
‘Nuclear Winter’ was the original ‘Global Warming’; leftists pushing a political agenda with worthless computer models.
The ‘Nuclear Winter-ers’ made the mistake of actually making predictions that could be tested;
their models predicted millions of deaths after Saddam Hussein set light to the oil wells of Kuwait. But, oddly enough, that didn’t happen.
The Global Warmers learned from that, and any prediction they make is decades or centuries in the future, safe from any kind of comparison to reality.
He lost me at ” a list of the 100 best methods to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere because that’s the main cause of global warming.”. Clueless.
As for the rest, yet another bleeding heart Australian whack job.
There is good evidence that the current bunch of aborigines are the third lot to arrive. The second lot exterminated the first and the third exterminated the second. Nobody wants to talk about that.
“System” of agriculture? The aborigines exterminated much of the megafauna (salt water crocs excepted – best weapon for those would be a 50 cal) and burned most of the place to the ground. The “firestick farming” was likely ” eh, you hungry” “yep” “how about we burn that area of bush and when the kangaroos run away we spear a few?” “good plan, let’s do it”
The left are terrified that the right will be able to escape from their clutches. Hence they will do anything they can to prevent us from expanding into space, where they’ll never be able to control us again.
“The left are terrified that the right will be able to escape from their clutches. Hence they will do anything they can to prevent us from expanding into space, where they’ll never be able to control us again.”
And by extension they (the left) would lose their tenuous grip on the direction of humanities’ future; no lefty/tree hugging utopia. Instead a future of space colonization where at some point earth is thought of as a backwater populated by backward kook-bats (the lefties).
Nah Rand he means why waste resources going to or transforming another Earth when we have a perfectly good one already. Invest in Earth put thrusters on it to dodge asteroids and comets, and move it to safe orbit when the sun expands. Invest in technology to mitigate any geological disasters. Eventually encase it in a Dyson Sphere that harvests Zero point energy (insert other energy of the future) to provide all the energy needs for the Earth and move it to interstellar space and protect it from exoplanetary radiation. IE create “Spaceship Earth”.
The only reason to go colonize some place else is for the radicals to get away from everyone else and make their own rules.
Could of swore Musk has put environmental disaster as a reason to be multi planet civilization.
Dam HTML tags for those who have limited sarcasm detection , I had a put tongue firmly in cheek before I started and ended before the Musk comment.
Musk postulated some kind of disaster, not necessarily an environmental one.
The Earth is one planet with one planet’s worth of resources. Even with the most efficient -or most ruthless – environmental policies we will eventually clean out the refrigerator. Confining the human race to Earth alone will eventually condemn it to a primitive, miserable existence, and finally extinction. Leave the cradle or die. End of discussion.
Why did humans migrate out of Africa before solving all of Africa’s problems?
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.
The concern is usually expressed in future tense – if we fail to move off earth then the “trashing” of the planet will be inevitable.
Concern for the terrestrial environment has been an important motivator for the O’Neillian space colony enthusiasts and Jeff Bezos has touched on this theme numerous times. I think you’re being uncharitable to the author of the piece by calling his argument a strawman. He grasped the fundamentals if not the details.
No, he didn’t. The point is to avoid the trashing of the earth, not to trash it and “escape” it.