/sci/ - Science & Math

>Will this be the catalyst for solar system colonisation?

once this kicks in we won't live long enough to colonize shit.

>>4140046
Science won't save the day?

>>4140048
science is being smothered by corporate propaganda and a gullible electorate.

the day doesn't seem worth saving.

>>4140050
Ffs. We had so much potential.

>>4140055
it won't be the end of human potential, just the end of this civilization.

there'll be others.

>>4140034
Just wake up.
Read this.
Get depressed.

Is there any hope for mankind?

>>4140061
Yea but it'll put a halt to all the awesome stuff we're doing. There's so much new and exciting research happening at the moment, we can only be a few years away from a huge shift in how we live our lives.

For fucks sake. A few degrees hotter temperature cannot endanger human civilisation. Biodiversity will diminish, poor people in third world will suffer, some coastal cities will get flooded. But no, even if the worst predictions come true, it wont be the end of human civilisation.

>>4140069
This is talking about acidic oceans and all that jive.

anyone who thinks extraplanetary habitation is practical in any way is a sci fi fag and/or a total retard

>>4140074
>at this point in time

>>4140066
temperature isn't the largest concern here. We're actually more concerned about large portions of the ground and atmosphere bursting into flame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

>>4140074

So true. I am all for space colonisation, but any realistic colony will last a short time without support from Earth. Its not viable as an insurance from extinction.

Wait, so... are we all going to die or what? Because If we are I better go get laid FAST.

>>4140114
you've got a few decades.

wouldn't hurt any to go ahead and get laid tho

>>4140118
A few decades? Shit I'm sure we can come up with a fix in that amount of time.
Back to masturbation for me.

>>4140121
We've already had a few decades to come up with something, it's not likely a few more is gonna help.

>first world nations: We can save the future, everyone needs to stop polluting!
>third world nations: NO FUCK YOU WE WANT TO BE RICH TOO
/Durban

>>4140128
Yes but it's always been something that's only going to be a problem for the children of our children. If shit's going to actually affect us then we'll get our shit together.

I wouldn't be surprised if we are wiped out by this before the end of the century.

>>4140139
problem is that it's already affecting us but on timescales to large for most to notice.

by the time it comes up to undeniable speed it'll be far too late to do anything about it.

Be happy. You were probably born at the right moment to witness the peak of human civilization. Just at the top of the rollercoaster ride where things seem to have stopped moving, time is drawn out and the view is wonderful for a few glorious fleeting moments.

>>4140137
>first world nations: We can save the future, everyone needs to stop polluting!
>third world nations: We understand but we want to be able to develop at the same time.
US: FUCK ALL OF YOU ALL! AMERICA NUMBER ONE HURRDDDURRRRRRRGH!! WE BEST IN WORLD ! NOONE CAN TELL US WHAT TO DO

>>4140195
America certainly started the problem.
It's now rolling on its own because others want to be like US, and the planet can't afford more than one.

>>4140189
Except instead of a wonderful view, you and all of your loved ones die a gruesome painful death.

>>4140200
>others want to be like US
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAahaha. ah. HAHAHAHAHA

The US is a fucking awful country these days. Have you been paying attention at all?

>the planet can't afford more than one.
>he thinks that the US is the only 1st world country
You Americans crack me up, man.

>>4140212
>he thinks that the US is the only 1st world country

I think the US is the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

china may have surpassed us, idk.

>>4140034

>schock

No. This was predicted years ago.

Time to become a seabro.

Time to build the Hotel.

>>4140079 but any realistic colony will last a short time without support from Earth. Its not viable as an insurance from extinction.

100 years could see a fully sustainable off world base

>>4140137
>first world citizens: We can save the future, everyone needs to stop polluting!
>first world leaders: NO WE WANT TO BE EVEN RICHER

>>4140034
>>4140034
>>4140034
Deal with it. The humanity is teetering on the brink of its fall. Human extinction is inevitable.


>praise the Lord

We cannot prevent the fall, but we can ride out the ensuing dark ages.

We must find a suitably elevated island that is out of the way. There, we will establish a university and rings of undersea colonies. Maybe a commercial spaceport/sea launch system too.

I will need 100,000 scientists for this task

>increase in doomsayers because 2012 draws near
>/sci/ falls into it also.

I find it rather funny that all of this doomsday calling is so rampant right around this time and yet everyone catches on to it like there's no problem.

I am going to be smiling nice and comfortable when after 2012 there are no more doomsayers like the world up and fixed itself.

Now i am not saying this is an excuse to not do anything about the blatant problems that are going on. But civilization ending? sigh..

>>4140748
If you were serious, I would be so fucking game you don't even know

>>4140775
If only I had the money...

I'd enjoy being a mixture of Douglas Stavenger (from Ben Bova's grand tour) and Hober Mallow.

>>4140772
We all know the world isn't going to end in 2012, but the clathrate-gun hypothesis is an old and chilling one.
If the phenomenon is transitory and localized, there's nothing much to worry about.

BUT. If the phenomenon becomes semi-permanent and the affected area spreads, then there's a good chance it will speed up the climate change in a significant way.

>>4140802
>Hober Mallow
Don't you mean Salvor Hardin?

If I've learnt anything from Futurama (and I haven't) it's that we should all take lots and lots of caffeine so that evolution will work faster and we'll adapt to our new environment.

>>4140831
I would rather be a merchant prince than a politician.

I guess that wouldn't be possible in the early stages of the Foundation though.

The thought of a positive feedback loop triggered by global warming is frightening.

Methane deposit blows in the North Sea were detected none too long ago. None of it made it into the atmosphere, but it DID dissolve into the ocean... which is anything but good.

Even a single degree increase would make large portions of earth very difficult to live in. Massive forest fires, droughts, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

It happened in the past. It will happen again. But I doubt we will see it.

And humanity won't go extinct, that's for sure.

>>4140775
I say we make some kind of lethal virus that goes dormant in the ganglia like herpesviruses. We'll need some specific mechanism to trigger active outbreaks that can be suppressed with an extremely difficult to produce pharmaceutical. Some kind of exotic and fragile large-molecule drug should do the trick.

We infect the leadership of a resource-wealthy shithole like Saudi Arabia and use them as puppets/cash cows to fund/realize all manner of projects.

>>4140888
Sounds like a plan. How do I sign in?

>>4140888
I want to believe you're serious.
This is a good idea: >>4140837

We should do this. I'm not joking at all.

>>4140866
well, we will end up in caves worshiping gods

>>4140137

Couple of problems. Firstly, Australia, USA, Russia, and Canada played obstructing roles in the UNFCC process until very recently. Canada is still, and the US will as long as there's a Republican-dominated Congress.

Secondly, think about it from the developing countries' perspective: 80% of cumulative emissions thus far have come from developed countries. US per capita consumption is still 4 times greater than China's. How do you think this looks like to them? It's like having a bunch of very fat dudes and many more starving dudes stuck on a desert island with a limited stockpile of food, and the fat people insist that the food is shared 50-50 between the two groups.

Thirdly, India DID propose legally-binding limits on their emissions growth back in 2008, but the other countries refused to play ball and the idea was scrapped. China is spending vast sums on constructing prototype green cities, subsidizing the shit out of their solar and wind industries, imposing taxes on primary resource and energy consumption, and will soon implement a cap-and-trade system for carbon. So it's not true that developing countries "don't care" about climate change at all, in fact they do a lot more than Canada or the US.

Of course you've got morons who think that correcting a market externality is actually a "wealth transfer" to the poor engineered by evil liberals and the all-powerful United Nations. They don't think any further than that, or that maybe it's not right to drown island and low-lying states or coastal regions of their own countries.

>>4140069

You're right, extinction is very unlikely unless the highest end of projections come true. But it will mean a permanent and mostly irreversible decline in human population, economy, and well-being.

To put it in perspective, the global temperature difference between today and the ice ages is only 5 degrees Celsius. 5 degrees means the difference between New York today and New York under a mile of ice. Assuming business-as-usual emissions growth, this is the most likely temperature increase by the year 2100.

>>4140077
>>4140831

Some good news:

http://www.biogeosciences.net/4/521/2007/bg-4-521-2007.html

Apparently, clathrates are more stable than we might think. The closest analogue to a clathrate release event is the PETM 55 million years ago, which saw between 5-9 degrees of global warming. However, that took place over thousands of years. Hopefully even if we fuck up so bad civilization is destroyed, we can shape up within a thousand years.

>>4140890
Well, I'm a biochemist but I can't make bioweapons. I guess we need proteonomics specialists, immunologists, virologists, pharmacologists, etc. to make our tool and the antiviral.

We'll also need some mercenaries/soldiers/security experts to keep the population of our chosen shithole from rebelling against its puppet leadership when the benefits/money dry up.

We need engineers and other scientists to help plan out projects once the goal has been accomplished.

We need economists and mathematicians (not bankers) to help us sell off the oil/whatever resource with maximum efficiency.

We'll need the best covert operations types to manipulate global affairs in our favor. High prices for our resource and minimal interference in the affairs of our chosen puppet nation are key.

We'll also need to establish banks (legitimate institutions) to house the money and run investments.

>The ultimate goal is to abandon the puppet nation.

Once it's been sucked dry, we declare the undersea and space colonies to be a Confederacy of Free Republics. Unified military forces, foreign policy, currency, etc.

We base the currency on energy. One unit of currency is pegged to a given amount of kilocalories.

We provide the world with clean energy from reactors and solar powersats we operate. We make them as dependent as possible. We also provide an alternative reserve currency.

We export energy, advanced materials, weapons (2nd rate for us, the best for the rest of the planet), pharmaceuticals, bioproducts, industrial robotics, domestic robotics, engineering/design expertise, etc.

We import talent and naturalize them as citizens. It should be every scientist/engineer's dream to one day become a naturalized citizen.

>>4140935
> I can't make bioweapons
If you can get some eggs and a little bit of soil, you can make crude bioweapons.

If you also have time, you can make better bioweapons.

If you also have a good microscope, petri dishes, agar and an incubator, you're pretty much in business.

I'm not going to toll you what the last step of weaponization requires or how it's done, since that would be, if not illegal, would at least warrant closer scrutiny.

>>4140957
Wow, I meant with the degree of precision needed.

>>4140960
>precision needed
If you mean for something like what was mentioned, it mainly just takes time. And human experiments.

Or if by
>precision
you meant something truly controllable, targetable, then chemical weapons are a safer bet. I don't think there's one example in the history if biological warfare that the weapon hasn't caused at least some(sometimes MORE) casualties in the party researching/using it.

>>4140980
You need some method to keep a small-ish group of people controlled.

You need to make them dependent on you for their continued survival.

Figure that out.

>>4140984
In that case what you want is some physically addictive new drug.
Preferably tasteless and odorless, so the addiction can be induced without the victims knowing.

A poison or a heavy metal wouldn't work, as they usually either kill too fast or are too easy to counteract with chelation or some antivenom.

Guise instead of focusing on implausible scenarios like creating a technocracy inspired by science fiction and talk about practical ways to address climate change and the resource crunch

>>4141000
Put something in the water to make people behave rationally?

>>4141002
I think the unrealistic part of that is that most people are inherently unable to behave rationally and that no drug is going to give them a working brain. Another problem is that it can be very rational to be a power-hungry nihilist bitch that wastes money and lives and energy without giving a fuck just to feed personal needs until it all ends (and that's a problem mostly because powerful people are the ones who decide things, not the people).

If I had a billion dollars, I alone could stop the most severe effects of global warming.

How would I do it you ask?

Did you know that the entire Southern Ocean has a huge deficit in iron? Algea require iron to reproduce and live. Years that have seen spikes in iron concentration in the Southern Ocean have had the entire global CO2 levels decrease dramatically, that is the scale we are talking about.

All thats necessary is to seed the Southern Ocean (basically the ocean around Antartica) with bio-available iron and we can delay this by another 100 years, hopefully enough time for Orion rockets, Thorium power and other things to take off.

>>4141013
Well, global disasters have a good capacity to focus people's minds. If it could be engineered so that one only affected the most lazy people, and the people who take advantage of that laziness, then we'd be golden.

It's methane, can't we just harvest it or set it on fire?

>>4141025

Pretty big fucking "ifs" there

Also this sounds suspiciously similar to the plot of State of Fear

>>4141027
Carbon emissions, potential to fuck up and release tons of it is pretty high.

Seriously, let's start a Foundation.

>>4141027

>set it on fire?

Combustion of methane produced carbon dioxide and water vapour. Not exactly helpful.

>>4141033
>Carbon emissions

But methane is worse than carbon as far as the greenhouse effect goes.

>>4141037
My answer was in re: a question about burning it.

>>4141022

I haven't seen any numbers on this, only that it could be done. It probably would cost more than a billion dollars but less than a mitigation policy from the production side of things. How do we know that this will absorb enough carbon emissions? What are the knock-on effects of iron fertilization and algae booms? These must be considered before we attempt it.

>>4141031
Never read it.
>google: "Crichton? Uh..."
>read synopsis: "Artificial tsunami?" okay.jpg
I was thinking more about a saturation EMP attack combined with... something else.

>>4141022
Let's just dump all our iron-based trash in the Southern Ocean, then.

>>4141037

Molecule-for-molecule, methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2, but it also has a relatively short atmospheric residency time before it is re-absorbed into the methane cycle. CO2 on the other hand, has a variable atmospheric lifespan which could mean that excess CO2 remains for hundreds of thousands of years after it is first emitted.

>>4141053

State of Fear was a fucking awful book

>I'm not saying scientists are Nazis and Stalinists, but scientists are kinda like Nazis and Stalinists

>Herp derp scientists politicize the science

>Shake hands with George W. Bush in televised event, testify in Congress against climate scientists

>Chicago cooled between 1998 and 2002, therefore the world is not warming

If only America would stop bombing brown people in the desert and arguing over fucking paper with numbers on it we might not have this problem

>>4141069

You wouldn't believe how many interests are IN FAVOR of mitigating climate change

Reinsurance - these are the insurance companies that other insurance companies go to when they can't pay out claims. In their analysis, something has caused natural disasters to be more costly and eating into their profits. It's not geologic hazards (tsunamis, earthquakes) and adjusting for more people and property near coastlines, there's still something causing an unprecedented spike in billion+ dollar damages events.

Venture capitalists and investment bankers - even without a comprehensive climate policy, green energy is surging forward and multiple percentage points of growth per year, while prices are falling simultaneously. Fossil fuels = old and busted; renewables = new hotness

Municipal governments = being closer to the citizenry, they are more in sync with what the people demand. Chicago for example is beginning to implement a city-wide adaptation strategy and cutting GHG emissions.

Tourism - this should be obvious

Small island nations, coastal regions - obvious

Military and intelligence community - significant infrastructure located at sea level or next to rivers, major risk of increased geopolitical instability, possibility of resource wars, and so on. New problems are created, old ones are made worse.