Ask HN: How do we save the planet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418592

by whiteboardr • 4 years ago

8 5 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Asking for my daughter.

How would you explain the current situation, the outlook and what to effectively do to a little human?

verdverm• 4 years ago

The best thing might be to teach her about doom content and effective strategies for managing anxiety and such. This would help her deal with more than the dire situation this iteration of life is facing. It would be interesting to see the reaction to gaining the perspective that the planet will survive and that we are really talking about our own survival when we talk about saving the planet.

soueuls• 4 years ago

Except by going into light dictatorship to force people to change their habits I don't think it will be possible, unless we reach some kind of technological miracle.

I live in a West European country where we abandoned

- Religion - Strong family values/structures - Nationalism/Patriotism

I think you can probably give up on 2 out of 3. And some people might not care about any of the 3.

But for most people, once your society reaches a point where these values are not really protected.

Then asking them to make sacrifices for outcomes that will comes after their death is not viable (yes I know some consequences will come during our lifetime, but I think it will be somewhat negligible for many.

- Religion (the Earth was created by God, thus we need to protect the Earth to keep it as it was)

- Family (I recognized that my ancestors worked hard for hundred of years to write books, build infrastructure, produce science, I need to at least keep the status quo for the next generation)

- Nationalism/Patriotism (I need to protect my land, and make it better than X or Y)

These three values, no matter if we agree or not (I am personally not a believer) helped humans transcend their own existence throughout history.

But now, our modern values are too weak.

And the fact that the messengers are ill chosen does not help (who want to be lectured on ecology by an influencer who uses the plane 50 times a year)? It does not matter if the message is correct or not, it's full of hypocrisy and if you want to have billions of people onboard, you can't allow yourself such hypocrisy.

If you tasked me right now to come up with enough reasons to

- Give up on meat - Stop traveling - Walk or use public transportation everywhere - Take less showers - etc

I don't think I would find enough of them to truly care and radically change the way I want to live.

And I don't think that the survival of Belugas or the fact that Yemen and Somalia are going to be unbearable is enough for me to change my life for the next 40-50 years.

So yeah, at some point we need to ask ourselves the hard questions

- Should we go back to having stronger values? - Should we go into light dictatorship to force these changes?

I think we already reached a point where the number of people thinking climate change is a hoax is negligible. You won't convinced more people with logical arguments.

We know.

nest4893210• 4 years ago

Every generation meets a generational challenge that threatens their existence: slavery, smallpox, civil war, overpopulation, pollution, etc.

To date, every generation produces inventions, vaccines, organizations to remedy and lessen the suffering caused by these challenges. Immense suffering has been caused when we didn’t have the courage and dedication to find solutions to each challenge.

Give your daughter hope that she can solve the problems she finds most compelling, and help her educate herself to the point that she has the competence to solve them.

Young people own the future of the human race, it’s only fair that we give them the strength to face it.

Blackstrat• 4 years ago

Start with rejecting the very premise. Look at who stands to gain from the various crises and realize most are manufactured. Now closer to 70 than I care to admit, I’ve seen decades of world ending predictions, all of which were fallacious but profitable for certain people, either in terms of money or power. That’s reality. It’s typically condemned, particularly by today’s gullible younger generations but it is reality all the same.

pizza• 4 years ago

You may be interested in the azimuth project: https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage

The Azimuth Project is a group effort to study the mathematical sciences for “saving the planet.” Our goal is to make clearly presented topic literature, and to help people work together in study and research efforts.

Ask HN: How do we save the planet?

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