Nuclear solves all these problems and potentially buys enough time to figure out how to mitigate the worst effects of 2C+ degrees of warming which at this point is basically inevitable. France seems to be the only sane nation in the world right now while everyone else is doubling down on what brought us to this point. [1]
> France has 56 nuclear power reactors in operation, with two units closing in 2020 at Fessenheim (61 370 MW(e)) and one EPR reactor under construction at the Flamanville site. Nuclear power plants accounted for 70.6% of total French electricity generation in 2019, and about 90% of France’s electricity comes from low carbon sources (nuclear and renewable).
The global power consumption is around 25000 terawatt hours, so you would need to operate around 5000 nuclear power stations to cover that.
You would need 5000 locations, but then you would run out of uranium and exotic metals in a few years. They are non-renewable resources.
Nuclear is not going to happen in time. Every dollar put into it is a waste at this point. The focus should be on decommissioning existing reactors so that the harm is limited when society eventually falls apart, to give a chance for future generations.
I suspect that building and operating a nuclear plant is more complex than coal, however this table indicates there are currently 2445 operating coal plants currently, and approx 500 in pre-construction or construction. So is it really that hard to fathom operating 5000 nuclear plants? Especially if our existence might depend on it? I also don't think people are recommending replacing EVERY source of energy with nuclear... just the dirty ones.
Nuclear power stations usually contain multiple reactorsand afaik there's no limit on how any of them you can have. So a lot less than 5000 locations.
> The focus should be on decommissioning existing reactors so that the harm is limited when society eventually falls apart, to give a chance for future generations.
And replace them with what? Energy instability sure as hell won't help current or future generations.
Smaller reactors (which may be, but are not necessarily, "modular") should help with both the build time and cost overrun issue.
The USA has been successfully building small reactors on time, on budget, more or less continuously since the 1950s - they've just been going into warships and submarines and not commercial generating stations.
One problem is that military nuclear reactors use more highly refined uranium in order to reduce reactor size. This makes them more valuable targets for terrorists and thus require greater security. Not hard to accomplish on an aircraft carrier, but this would increase cost for a civilian reactor.
From my experience military equipment is not designed to be efficient in terms of cost. I am pretty sure their designs can’t be used for commercially viable power.
They are also operated in super secure environments like submarines and aircraft carriers. Harder to secure a large number of commercial plants all over the country. Even accidents are much more forgiving out on the ocean vs on land.
So could we not just operate them on water? Many large cities are on water and already have ugly ports. Just build nuclear reactors in ships, park in port and connect to grid. Have coast guard/navy secure them.
That's the general thrust of the modular bit - it's easier to build ten 100 MWe plants (mostly) in a factory and ship them to the site of a power station than build a 1GWe monolith on the same site.
To give an order of magnitude: Germany is producing 11 times more CO2 to produce the same amount of energy than France.
But nothing is sure about what is going to happen in France. While Macron has announced some investments to develop small modular reactors, the path to get to carbon neutrality is still being discussed.
RTE, the electricity transmission system operator released a massive report last week with 6 possible pathways to get to Carbon Neutrality (1). 3 of them explore doubling down on nuclear while 3 others consist in divesting from nuclear and relying even more on renewables.
All scenarios are considered "realistic" despite each having some uncertainties. The projected costs of all scenarios is in the same order of magnitude (~10B euros). While the scenarios with nuclear seem slightly cheaper given median assumptions, it is a rounding error compared to the uncertainties regarding the cost of capital, the evolution of solar and wind prices, and the capability to deliver new nuclear plants).
Maintaining the existing 60GW of nuclear power would certainly make things easier, but the report makes it clear that it is more of a political decision than a technical constraint.
The report is clear about one thing though, renewables are not optional. There is no scenario where France gets to carbon neutrality in 2050 without massively scaling its production of renewable energy starting now.
> To give an order of magnitude: Germany is producing 11 times more CO2 to produce the same amount of energy than France.
That sounds rather unbelievable. As per Statista, France produced 8.7 exajoules of energy in 2020; Germany produced 12.1 exajoules. Meanwhile France emitted 277 Mt of CO2 in 2020; Germany emitted 644 Mt in 2020. Unless I'm calculating something wrong, Germany's 53.2 Mt/EJ is worse than France's 31.8 Mt/EJ, but not by a factor of 11. More like by a factor of 1.7.
It is really interesting to see strategies from "shutting down all nuclear and building ~ 350 GW of solar and wind and 26 GW of storage" to "still build a lot of renewables but also 27 GW of new nuclear and no storage".
This seems one of the very few times I've seen the storage taken into account.
Sure thing chief, cost is very important when facing a global existential crisis. That's why global CO2 output is now on the rise because people asking for more nuclear power plants (the only reliable low carbon source at this point in time) are stooges for big coal, gas, and oil.
"The fossil fuel industry starting from the 1950s was engaging in campaigns against the nuclear industry which it perceived as a threat to their commercial interests. Organizations such as American Petroleum Institute, the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association and Marcellus"
If you construct reactors in fleet mode, a few will come online every year, first reactor comes online. Like China and India are doing. Bigger problem is nuclear fear in west and unavailability of finance in the rest. India could not avail loans from any banks for their new nuclear plants and had to fork out entire capex from govt budget.
There is very little interest in any large capex projects of any type, in any location, on the part of banks. They're buying US paper instead. To be expected, given the high inflation rate.
In an ideal world, one would expect nuclear tech or financing be addressed in global forums, like say cop26. But, from leaked reports, India was complaining that the cop report is demonizing nuclear and wants nuclear included in the solutions to climate change. Highly doubt India would get any traction on that.
Claims that it takes to long to construct and overruns costs are just FUD from the solar industry which relies heavily on coal and concentration camp labour to produce cheap panels that provide unreliable energy without some sort of storage system which doesn't exist at scale.
Solar Power May Be the Next Victim of China’s Coal Shortage
>Prices of silicon metal, used to make the material that comprises solar panels, have surged about 300% since the start of August after a top-producing province ordered production be slashed amid a power crunch. China dominates global solar production, with its coal generators powering many of the factories that make clean energy equipment.
It's the other way around. Renewables without storage (which we don't have) need fossil fuels around, in the forms of gas peakers and whatnot. Pushing against nuclear is just strategy from big oil and coal and gas to stay relevant.
China is also constructing many new nuclear power plants. However they're also constructing new fossil fuel plants at the same time. It's tough to keep up with the increasing demand for electricity.
Because we are being domesticated. Domesticated animals are all dumber than their wild counterparts. Every wild animal that ends up being domesticated ends up with a smaller brain. I should rephrase and maybe say that this doesn't necessarily mean the animals get dumber but they definitely change in the process of domestication and a smaller brain is one of those adaptations. [1]
> The reduced amount of white matter suggests that domestic rabbits have a compromised information processing possibly explaining why they are more slow reacting and phlegmatic than their wild counterparts.
I think the only thing I really quibble a bit with is the description of "dumber".
Our "domestication" has historically been more that we've gone from a generalist species to a specialist society. With that, things that were previously probably a boon for survival and reproduction become less so (For example, quick reaction times don't matter so much when you have a city wall to keep out predators and a backup hunting party).
My assumption is that what we've lost is more our brain matter used to sleep in trees and wake up/run from predators at all hours of the night. Stuff that's less important when you have night watchman, fires, and shelter.
It's similar to how dolphins have huge brains, but most of that is dedicated to sound processing. If dolphins learned how to make huts, farm fish, and fight off predators I'd imagine the part of their brain dedicated to processing sound would start to shrink as there isn't the evolutionary pressure to keep it around.
Sort of like how humans might be evolving towards color blindness because being able to tell the difference between red and green doesn't necessarily increase our ability to have children. That might lead to weird changes in our eyes and brains that could shrink them but wouldn't necessarily mean those humans are any dumber than their predecessors.
I agree that smaller brain does not mean dumber. This is a very simplistic idea of what brains are for. Whales have huge brains, but I would guess that has more to do with their size.
I don't understand what you mean by "generalist" vs "specialist". I think intelligence is related to why, for example, human beings lack armor, fur, and all sorts of specialized features, functions, and excellences that other species have. Human intelligence can dream up an indefinite if not infinite number of functions which are "offloaded" to technology. We wear clothing and can adjust it depending on the climate which allow us to adapt to environments more than any other species. We have optical instruments which can extend our vision beyond that of any other species depending on need. We have all sorts of communication instruments which allow us a greater range of communication than any other species. We can harvest food in ways that put all other species to shame. We can outrun, fly, and swim any other animal. I could go on. Any capacity other species have we can (at least in principle) exceed with the help of technology, all thanks to human intelligence.
Assuming selection as an explanatory model, I don't see why we should expect to see that basic feature going away. Even with greater specialization in one direction or another, you still need much of that basic underlying generality.
AFAIK human natural niche was persistence hunting. Due to our body shape and ability to sweat, we can outrun prey species in the long run. That's how we're engineered, by natural selection in Ice Age Africa. Persistent trekkers that can throw sticks and stones.
Later, we domesticated dogs and other species, then made more and more advanced technologies. But at it's core? Our niche was that.
I'm pretty sure that humans are apex persistence hunters - we can run any animal to death, not just prey species. It's a brutally effective adaptation. It's the greatest weapon we had until fire.
Even fat modern lazy humans have it in them - kick in survival mode brain chemistry and enough luck to keep chasing a deer's trail for days, the deer will die of exhaustion before the human.
Sounds like we need to take control of this evolutionary process and start engineering it. Just because we are no longer required to use these abilities on a daily basis doesn't mean we don't want them. Evolution can go to hell with its "pressures", humanity is supposed to get better over time, not worse.
You're making a value judgement like "better" and "worse" as if there was a clear global optimum that you can reach. Why do you assume that's the case?
Let's assume there even is a global optimum. Why do we think this global optimum would be invariant on environment? We have clear examples of species that fail to adapt to their changing environment quickly enough dying off. If you took the survivors of a change and then changed things back, those survivors might die again. That means you are fit to the environment you find yourself in. As the environment changes, you're not "better" or "worse" than someone who's more fit to a different environment.
Humanity is not getting strictly better on all stats. It's like a video game. We might tweak improve some stats and have to give up others. We are a bit more unique in that we largely optimize for the environment we create for ourselves, but that doesn't mean humans are constantly "getting better" over time. You could maybe try arguing that the human condition has improved over time due to technology, medicine, etc, but even that's an imperfect analysis because our historical record is so inaccurate.
Surely having sharper and more intelligent humans is an objectively better uncontroversial outcome. If there's even a chance that our environment is somehow downregulating important features such as intelligence, we must find a way to reverse that process.
By what metric are you making the claim that humanity does not reproduce?
To my eye we’ve simply unlocked medical science and have taken control of reproduction to the point where it’s not critical to the species for everyone to reproduce. I’d be more concerned about all the plastics and chemicals that are now circulating in our bodies slowly decreasing our ability to reproduce than us as a species being too dumb to reproduce. That position just doesn’t have an existence proof point (no pandas don’t count because while it’s a funny pop meme, all evidence suggests they just can’t/won’t mate in captivity and it’s environmental for them).
> By what metric are you making the claim that humanity does not reproduce?
I'm not. I was replying to the following question:
> What if there's a level of intelligence above which humans decide not to reproduce?
It seems obvious to me that a species that drives itself to extinction cannot be considered intelligent. Doubly so if it does that due to lack of reproduction.
> it’s not critical to the species for everyone to reproduce
It is. Every couple must have a certain amount of children in order to simply maintain a stable population.
> It is. Every couple must have a certain amount of children in order to simply maintain a stable population.
On average. That doesn't mean that every single couple needs to reproduce. In fact, historically, that's certainly not been the case because some couples are just incapable while others reproduce far more than the average.
Is this perhaps too focused on the individual which might not lead to the optimum for the zoomed-out / group (population-level) case?
This reminds me of a meta-system-transition where simplified versions of individual (previously independent) units can lead to a unified cooperative whole that works better at the meta-system level (similar to what led to eukaryotes or to multicellularity). It's like a sacrifice that the individuals make (of things that might have looked like intelligence in the previous context) in order to be able to work together better, and these kinds of transitions have worked out extremely well for life, so far! (I guess I am biased, being alive and everything!?)
Should humans resist the formation of human meta-systems? Human/robot meta-systems? Certainly seems like a good chance that an extremely successful meta-system could be dangerous to the rest of the regular humans!? But if it's actually better, then that's just normal (meta) evolution.
> Should humans resist the formation of human meta-systems? Human/robot meta-systems?
No. I'm saying humans should not lose abilities or features because of it. We should be able to live comfortable lives and still maintain peak physical and mental performance. Any changes in our nature should not go against that.
We specialize though. Some people might be able to maintain peak mental performance. Others peak physical. Some might be better at social things to make sure we have a cohesive well-functioning society. There's probably thousands of character traits and some are going to invariably be tradeoffs in our genome/social conditioning. There's a reason there aren't Einstein-level intelligences running around every day doing body building, modelling, race car driving all at once. You have to choose what you spend your time on and most people choose to intersect that with natural abilities and interests.
Also, assuming the conclusions of the article in any way prove a shift in intelligence (it doesn't), you'd still be looking at averages which tells you nothing about the effect it has on total number at population. Maybe there's an upper bound of "smart" people or "strong" people modern society demands. Certainly as a skill becomes more commoditized it becomes less valuable economically. Maybe we've got too many smart people now because a lot of people saw the explosion in value of such careers?
Also "better" and "worse" only mean something relative to an end. I do not deny ends (I take human nature to be teleological, for example), but many "evolutionists" (i.e., those who accept a basically materialistic worldview) do deny the reality of ends (and are wholly incapable of accounting for them even if reduced to mental phenomena by virtue of having painted themselves into a metaphysical corner).
Eugenics involved horrific deprivations of human dignity for arbitrary decisions of what seemed at the time to be “self evidently good” traits that are much less self evidently good now… if the traits were even retained.
Is that really why eugenics is demonized? That the human race (not any living individuals) is giving up its freedom to some sort of fallible authority?
I guess, like censorship, people only object to an arbitrary subset of it. People love censorship of "really bad" ideas just as they love eugenics of "really bad" genes.
Most people seem happy with asserting our authority of gene selection over animals though :P Conservationism is that. Not to mention actual selective breeding and killing of course. Perhaps we rightly believe humans truly are capable of being benevolent arbiters of who gets to reproduce and who doesn't in animals.
Animal breeding is somewhat different from human breeding.
With animal breeding, there's almost always a set goal. Getting a fatter, tastier, more hardy, or in the extreme, aesthetically pleasing animal.
I doubt we'd really use eugenics for any of them. However, a pure eugenicist might say "Well, why not? Why not select for people less prone to cancer, more physically fit, with better immune systems?"
So then it comes into the question of what eugenics has historically been used for. The worst example would probably be the sterilization of gay people. We used it against mental illness in an age where lobotomy was considered a good treatment for mental illnesses such as hyperactivity.
And all of this, of course, sort of belays the fact that for humans there seems to be no reason why we couldn't use gene therapy in place of breeding programs. Why do we need eugenics when we can directly target the aspects we want in the future generation (and quite a few people would opt in for those changes).
We already seem some of this just in genetic testing of embryos and fetuses. When people know a fetus has downs syndrome, they get abortions and try again. I could see the same with a whole host of chronic illnesses.
People select their own mates. On the assumption that you aren’t just advocating for stuff that’s always happening, you presumably want to set up some authority for who people mate with other than the couples involved. Why can’t they decide for themselves?
It really is pretty similar to the kinds of things that are used to advocate against E2E encryption. An attempt to have the state encroach on territory that used to be private.
> Sort of like how humans might be evolving towards color blindness because being able to tell the difference between red and green doesn't necessarily increase our ability to have children.
Doesn't this hold true for "dumbness" as well? Being dumb is no longer an obstacle in having a reproductive success.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a peak in the reproduction rate bell curve around IQ 80-90.
Whoa... whoa... let's unpack all the intense presuppositions you're packing in here:
"Domestication" is just a word for a natural evolutionary processes in a symbiotic system. The concept that "domestication" is like, actually a thing apart from evolution is a vastly more difficult idea to parse than it appears on it's face.
>Domesticated animals are all dumber than their wild counterparts.
I mean... again... there are so many things to unpack here. What do we mean by "dumb" and which parts of the brain are being used, and how their size relates to their usefulness. I think it would be extremely difficult to argue any of these claims on their face beyond: small brain -> less brain function, which is extremely spurious.
Homo neanderthalensis had notably larger brains than us, yet they did not survive. Hardly an argument for the idea of greater intelligence -> greater brain size. AFAIK, specific areas in the prefrontal cortex is the primary point of interest when it comes to intelligence, and it's a relatively small section of the brain compared, say, to the visual cortex.
Finally... the most absurd of all the ideas packed in here is that natural selection for smaller brain size would even be a thing. Human mating is openly available for study, I see little-to-no argument for this being plausible beyond some sort of idiocracy world (is this the domestication thesis you hold? I see in the article they are treated separately), which is genuinely problematic. Possibly that certain types of brain sizes are predisposed to certain behavioral patterns. However, the idea that there is even a single evolutionary pattern for billions of humans is pretty ridiculous. We don't have evolutionary islands like other animals do.
> "Domestication" is just a word for a natural evolutionary processes in a symbiotic system. The concept that "domestication" is like, actually a thing apart from evolution is a vastly more difficult idea to parse than it appears on it's face.
In mammals, there is a well-established "domestication syndrome" with a specific proposed underlying mechanism and associated symptoms, including many observed in humans in comparison with other hominids (smaller jaws/muzzles, smaller teeth, smaller brain, greater docility). See https://www.genetics.org/content/197/3/795#skip-link for more information.
The concept that some animals are able to be domesticated, generally, while other's are not, lends itself to the idea that drift toward docile qualities is probably working in the domesticator's favor, and is not an inherent quality of domestication as a concept.
The idea that we have an idea of a thing we can readily point at, does not mean that thing is the driving force behind it. It's just a post hoc argument. We can't domesticate zebras, we can domesticate horses. The idea that 'domestication' is a force, rather than a result of evolutionary pressure of a symbiotic relationship shows that the domestication can't be the driving force. It's just evolution.
I'm not arguing the concept that domestication syndrome doesn't exist. I obviously defer to these experts, I'm just arguing that the concept that free, independent humans 'domesticate themselves' is effectively nonsensical on it's face, as domestication, as such, requires symbiosis and controlled breeding, and is simply not possible for many species.
Domestic animals have safe, boring and predictable environment. It's expected that they'd simplify their brain - the organ that consumes so much energy. If domesticated animals started playing chess, that would be a different story, but they spend their life mindlessly walking between a food dispenser and a litter box, taking naps in between.
This is not how evolution works! They are not in control of their breeding. Evolution is not some intelligent agent with goals. It is like a river, responding to to the path of least resistance in reproduction.
Intelligence and/or brain size not a dominant evolutionary factor unless they are specifically bread for intelligence and/or brain size. Domesticated animal's dominant evolutionary qualities have nothing to do with the animal preferences for mating, thus brain size in fairly arbitrary, and we should suspect it to be some sort of drift, rather than rationally getting smaller.
This is a good point but it does seem like people consistently select for less intelligence because less intelligent animals are more tame and easier to control.
You don't have evidence for that. You presume that less intelligent animals are easier to control, but that's not at all necessarily true. The smaller brain -> less intelligence isn't even something we know.
That doesn't mean that humans are dumber now, though, nor does it mean that dogs were bred to be dumb, nor does it mean that dumb animals are easier to control. Humans with intellectual disability can in fact be extremely hard to control in my understanding!
That wasn't the claim. The claim was about the effects of domestication on cognition and at least for dogs it is very obvious they are less intelligent than their non-domesticated counterparts. Same is true for rabbits. So, at the very least, in at least 2 cases it is clear that domestication has lead to a decline in cognitive abilities. It doesn't take much to infer the same is true for people, domestication has reduced selective pressures on cognitive abilities.
If you know of cases and studies where the opposite is true then I'd like to see the research.
I think you're conflating biological evolution with evolution as a whole. Technology and culture also evolve. Just differently. Evolution is a much wider aspect of existence than mammalian genetic evolution, or even sexual evolution. I absolutely can simplify my brain consciously, by choosing to remember useful, compact things and by choosing to forget useless, complex ones. And then pass that knowledge through our cultural transfer mechanisms.
Why is there evolutionary pressure for the brain to shrink? We seem to have enough calories to feed our brains, and we're not beholden to some master species that needs to economize.
Because we no longer need to run away from predators and process information at the same rate we'd need to in a more wild enviornment. The survival pressures of our ancestral environment are no longer relevant. We've essentially destroyed and driven to extinction every other predator on the planet and now the only selective pressure is adaptation to the human created environment which is much nicer and simpler than the wilderness we came from. Simpler and safer environments make simpler brains and that's my best guess at why our brains are shrinking but I'm just an armchair scientist so it's better to ask the experts. The only remaining selective pressure is basically human predators, a.k.a. sociopaths.
You have this backwards. We are dealing with orders of magnitude more information than we did in ancient times, and we are required to remember a good chunk of it and to be able to recall and use it at a moments notice.
Computers are a big factor in generating all of that information, even if they help process some of it the net effect is a huge surplus.
> We are dealing with orders of magnitude more information than we did in ancient times, and we are required to remember a good chunk of it and to be able to recall and use it at a moments notice.
Surely you mean required, meaning you could end up embarassing yourself in front of your coworkers if you aren't able to recall that particular bit of information.
It's very different from REQUIRED, meaning that if you take a left turn instead of a right turn while running away from a predator you end up in a canyon... or the predator eats you because you have no way to escape...or both.
I don't think I have it backwards. I don't remember anything or know much about the world in general terms. I just know and remember enough key phrases for google to give me the answers when I need them which requires very little cognitive effort on my part. [1]
That wasn't the argument. You seem to be saying that the increasing volume of digital information will require new cognitive adaptations and I'm saying that's not the case because I don't need to be as smart to appear smart on a digital medium, I can just rely on external cognitive aids like google.
Yes but let's say, pre-writing people needed to remember 100% of all information they needed to use - which writing people can offload to tablets and parchments.
Pre-agriculture people had it worse, they needed to remember 100% of all pertinent informations by the hunting band, which had a max amount of 50-100 people. All the predictive abilities for preys in their lands, natural disasters, medicines, rituals, etc.
It's logical that adoption of technology and farming led to lesser pressure for memory recall, at least for the median human.
The brain itself is the evolutionary pressure. It is often repeated that the brain takes ~20% of our body's energy despite being ~2% of our body's mass. If there is no need to have a brain so large (due to a lack of predators) it is beneficial to shrink it.
It's beneficial to lower the brain's calorie intake it if it results in higher reproductive fitness. But like GP said, we have plenty of calories, more than we've had compared to the entire history of humanity. So it doesn't naturally follow that lower calorie brains are higher fitness in 2021.
There are no guarantees civilization won't collapse. The traits that were essential for our survival in the stone age aren't things we want to abandon. I'm a big fan of redundancy.
Beneficial how? Reduction in calories? We tend to have diseases of excess calories in the developed world now. If anything, the greater brain metabolism may actually help by burning some of those excess calories off…
“Use it or lose it” applies in evolution, because of energy usage, but also because of complexity. More features means more things to go wrong, more options for cancers, etc.
Alternately, big brains are recessive/selected against in all circumstances except those from 6mya to 70kya. We've generally removed most selective pressure at this point, if having big brains is due to a combination of recessive traits we'd expect brain size to start shrinking.
I was going to say: maybe it's because we're so successful? We dominate our environment so well that we've made the world a much less threatening place, and so it's not as difficult to survive in the world anymore. Less selective pressure means we end up with a less selected population.
I don't want to turn this into a political commentary, but the modern age is an extreme example of this. You could be the kind of person who doesn't finish high school and can't keep a job, a deadbeat, but still manage to have multiple kids. Even if you don't take care of them, someone else will ensure that your kids survive. Long ago, not being able to are and provide for your kids probably meant that they died.
IMO, as we keep making the world increasingly more safe and comfortable, we might have to resort to genetic engineering. Otherwise, it might be inevitable that more and more genetic disorders will arise, just because we're able to keep people alive with all kinds of illnesses that would have been fatal before. People can argue about the ethics all they want, but it seems inevitable.
Wouldn’t being able to retain maximal genetic diversity actually be a good thing species wide though? Because it also means we have ever bigger achievers in ever more niche but valuable roles.
Screening and abortion are already used to prevent serious disorders. For instance, a huge fraction of downies are aborted. But subtler things are more challenging.
It's possible for an animal to domesticate itself. This is one of the theories for how wolves were domesticated. It's not that humans did anything special to domesticate them but that wolves started hanging around humans and eating the scraps that were left over at campfires and other human habitation sites. Eventually the less fearful and tame wolves became human companions. Once people realized they could hang out with wolves they started actively breeding more tamer variants.
The same is true for humans. The process is obviously slightly more complicated because unlike wolves people have more influence on their environment but it's undeniable that humans are now domestic animals. No modern human can survive in the wilderness and this process is accelerating. We are now, for all intents and purposes, dependent on mechanical tools and technology for our continued existence. Feeding 8B people is impossible without industrial farming and agricultural techniques, e.g. Haber-Bosch. [1]
I did some research into this a couple years ago. There is an interesting theory that we didn't domesticate wolves, but that wolves domesticated us. For one, wolves naturally are very intelligent and pack hunters, so they could have used humans as a hunting partner. For another point, we domesticated wolves way before anything else (atleast 20000 years ago) and that makes no sense since every other animal we domesticated (goat, horse, chicken, etc) will eat pretty much anything and is only of very limited threat to us, whereas wolves are carnivores (very expensive to maintain) and extremely dangerous.
However, if wolves domesticated us as hunting partners, then this starts to make a lot more sense. We didn't need to first learn domestication on easier species, the danger was limited and our hunting would be so much more effective that it was worth the premium.
It also explains why we have the concept of werewolf and why some people have been charged with turning into wolves to be successful in hunting, but never any other animal (there are no cases of ware eagles/falcons). There is something primeval deep inside us that associates wolves with successful hunters.
I find the theory neat, I am not convinced it is true.
Ya, I also don't know if it's true or not. I was just making the point that an animal can domesticate itself by changing its environment and then adapting to the new environment in a way that ends up being essentially a self imposed domestication process.
By society. More intelligence means more likelihood of "waking up". It takes a little bit of ignorance and blind trust to be a cooperative member of society. Once you get too smart, you no longer become useful and then you have to start hunting on your own. Not everyone can do that in today's age, so most people choose to delegate their decisions because the reward is that you get to live without having to think as much.
The Flynn effect is now going in the opposite direction and I don't think it was a good indicator of intelligence anyway because intelligence is more than just IQ. [1]
Yes, people give away their private data for small conveniences, much like how pets give away their natural lives in wilderness for a guaranteed meal and a warm house.
70,000 years ago people were running around in groups of 50-200 people killing mammoths. Private data has nothing to do with this, that’s only happened in the past 20 years and there isn’t a generation that has lived their whole lives with smartphones that are adults yet. We have no idea what effect they’ll have on evolution
Facebook/Meta is a consumer company. All the worthwhile applications of remote presence are going to be in industrial spaces that combine robotics with VR. I see no way that Facebook/Meta will do anything worthwhile or useful in that space.
I vote for 3. I've been thinking about doing something similar because it has become obvious to me that most software these days is a net negative and actively hinders progress (both personal and societal).
Right? That's what I keep coming back to—the net negative thing.
I know there are great projects out there, but they're few and far between, and regardless of how I feel about my own work and abilities, I seem to struggle to impress the right hirers (where I have an easier time getting in at companies I dislike :/).
Thanks for reading my longggg post, and thanks for the vote!
Why would one of the wealthiest and most powerful humans ever to live want to run from reality? He is literally above the law. He has no consequences for anything. He seemingly has no conscience.
I can't imagine a more pleasant world for him to dream of than the one he is currently gripping by its throat.
I don't think he's an evil villain. I really do think he's constantly running away from reality. It's why he created Facebook in the first place. It was meant to replace real world social interactions.
The current trajectory has locked us into 2C+ of warming. Even if some magical technology appears out of nowhere and allows us to start capturing and sequestering carbon at the gigaton volumes required to make a dent we're still locked into 2C+ of warming. [1][2] At this point it is no longer a matter of doing enough, it's a matter of actively adapting to the reality of a warmer planet because no matter what we do 2C+ warming is an immutable fact.
My point is that people still think there is a way to salvage things when there isn't and because they think there is a technological solution they are refusing to change their consumption habits. That's what I mean by adaptation. By the way, at 4C there is no longer any human civilization as we now know it. Even at 3C we're basically screwed.
That's not enough time. My current assumption is that all the worst predicted effects of global warming are going to happen: mass migration, food and water shortages, general political unrest, increasing economic inequality and instability, dwindling energy resources, escalation of national and tribal conflicts, etc. All the signs are there and the question is now whether governments will manage to adapt fast enough to mitigate the worst effects.
> France has 56 nuclear power reactors in operation, with two units closing in 2020 at Fessenheim (61 370 MW(e)) and one EPR reactor under construction at the Flamanville site. Nuclear power plants accounted for 70.6% of total French electricity generation in 2019, and about 90% of France’s electricity comes from low carbon sources (nuclear and renewable).
1: https://cnpp.iaea.org/countryprofiles/France/France.htm