This gets asked and answered so often than perhaps HN should add an instruction to the "web" link that tells you to open it in a new private/incognito window.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
Either clear cookies, install an extension that clears cookies, or open the "web" link in an incognito browser session and open the Google link from that.
At least one of those options should work, most likely all three will.
London is still really bad, continually missing European Clean Air Quality targets and has been fined several times. The Great Smog was visible due to sulphur from burning coal etc. Whereas today, you cannot see the smog... but it is still very much there.
Yes, London is bad. Paris too. Especially with the reeking fumes near any major road from all the dirty diesel vehicles. Air quality in both cities is totally unacceptable in my opinion.
But it's nothing remotely like the scale of disaster that India has, where there is often constant choking smoke enveloping entire cities and regions. Even China is clean by comparison.
While your point is valid, a little compassion for those who suffer under this pollution, which is caused by a lot harder problems than a few million motorcycles.
Aside from this specific event, do you have the feeling that we will be unable to stop catastrophic changes on earth due to pollution and resource exhaustion (overfishing etc)? Think about runaway greenhouse effects, floods, loss of biodiversity...
I think Elon Musk is right in his urgency regarding the Mars colonisation plans. Sure, you can always say "let's wait a couple of decades, with the new tech we'll have then it will be much easier and cheaper", but you could be mistaken. Technology and human civilization does not always move forward. We've been thrown back many times in the past and eventually there will be the day when we will not recover to previous levels: The beginning of the end. By then, we will no longer be able to tackle a huge challenge such as Mars colonization because we will be fighting for survival.
Actually, I think other than the obviously ethical issues surrounding anthropocene, Humanity can easily survive, as long as there is access to petroleum reserves to keep the logistical chain running - high CO2 levels though will probably make a good portion of S Asia uninhabitable.
Once that dies, the accumulated karma will come back with force (and for good ?). It's fashionable in certain circles to say US fracking can sustain the system, but I'd be very wary of such statements.
I think that we're pretty much fucked wrt climate change. It seems unrealistic to assume that we'll leave any profitable fossil fuel unburnt and I don't think that we'll scale up nuclear or renewables quickly enough. Overfishing is a similar topic where we'll keep fishing as long as people are buying fish, regardless of what it does to the oceans.
I think you are a little over-optimistic with the Mars colonization plans. A Mars colony would be dependent on Earth for material support for a very long time. Setting up the necessary infrastructure to produce all materials needed for the maintenance of the complex technology required by an extraterrestrial colony will need decades if not centuries. If civilization on Earth collapses before that, the Mars colony will die soon after.
Living on Mars would be a very hard life. Given that there's barely any atmosphere, you wouldn't be able to step outside without a spacesuit. And given that there's no equivalent of the Van Allen belt, you wouldn't want to spend much time on the surface anyway to avoid excessive exposure to cosmic and solar radiation.
While we can get to Mars with current technology (and possibly even back again), we don't have any known terraforming technology that would actually make Mars a viable place to live in the long term.
Colonies on Mars would be reduced to living in sealed caves/bunkers. The quality of life would be pretty questionable. So why go to Mars to live in such conditions?
Living on Earth, even after a catastrophic environmental disaster/collapse, is still likely to be easier and better than living as a colonist on Mars.
You don't get to develop the technology to live on a different planet without starting somewhere. I don't want to keep all our eggs in one basket, and Mars seems like the most reasonable place to start.
Mars colonization is not achievable without an enormous amount of energy. Moreover, Mars is a very long way away from being a sustainable human environment. It would be far easier to colonize the Antarctic, and offer exactly the same advantages and disadvantages.
Besides, the Mars colonization plan implicitly works for only a tiny number of people, while abandoning the rest. It's prepperism+science fiction.
What's far more likely to happen is that the West remains mostly OK - perhaps with a bit more visible poverty and security state, but still with the technological capacity. While places which are less well developed or politically stable see events like this, war, flood or famine.
If you look at humanity as a whole, spreading out to other planets is clearly a step on the evolutionary ladder.
Colonizing antarctica would not ensure humanity's survival if there is a global extinction event.
A Mars colony would be very small at first. To be self sustaining you would need a good size. Elon Musk estimates you'll need around 1 million people. Even with a lot of spaceships capable of carrying 100 people each going every 26 months (when the distance between the planets is small) it'll take decades.
Why do you think the West will be ok in the long run? What happens to the rest of the world? Will they just sit there and wait to die?
> Why do you think the West will be ok in the long run? What happens to the rest of the world? Will they just sit there and wait to die?
Neo-colonialism. There's no shortage of ways to push the externalities of environmental damage and industry to other countries.
It's not a question of "waiting to die", it's a question of "scraping a living from whatever you can find". Which is already the case in the poorer parts of the world.
I might be missing something but I think that the situation on Earth would have to be beyond cataclysmic for Mars (a dead planet without atmosphere or a magnetic field) to be a better place.
Realistically, whatever damages we could do to Earth's ecosystem, it will always be much easier to fix (or cope with) things here than to create a livable ecosystem on Mars.
The only advantage Mars has is that it's greenfield (well, red), as in, untouched area. If you want to change anything here, first you need everyone to want the same and do the same, which is a bit challenging.
Earth is not just threatened by human caused problems. There could also be some other catastrophic event such as supervolcanoes, meteorites, killer virus. We may not have enough time to "fix" it.
A second outpost drastically increases our chances of survival.
For example concerning glasshouse gases, we need to come back to 1990's emission levels because that's what the Earth can absorb. The problem is, we're about 1bn more, our levels of consumption are still soaring, and citizen of new nations deserve to emit as much carbon as we do.
Once we transfer the carbon limitations to every individual in developed country, we'll all throw our arms in the air saying "That's oppressive!". Example: When the Greek people learnt they had to pay the same taxes as the rest of Europe, they all started blaming Germany for being over-controlling and penny-pinching, and looked in the way of Putin. Imagine what would happen when our citizens understand that 90% of the people can't have meat, heating, cars or flights.
Hence, carbon limitations will create tensions, country-level protests, and probably wars, which will waste even more carbon than today. Added to the global warming which is already underway, and there's little hope to dodge a catastrophic event. Either we manage carbon properly and most of us survive with greatly reduced materialist life (e.g. no meat), either we have a big event and 5% of lucky humans survive anyway, with a greatly reduced materialist life.
Concerning Mars, launching the Human civilization on other planets doesn't sound like a desirable goal to me. We didn't even succeed to manage ours, why expanding? Notably, none the people you've ever met will be saved by Mars – Only samples of our race will be sent. We'd better send a Noah's Arch than Humans.
I honestly think there are just too many people on Earth. Every single person wants something, every, person is their own environmental catastrophe due to our consumerist driven society and our diets.
Imagine 4 billion plastic coffee lids a day going into landfill, the ocean or needing to be recycled, and in this case, burned. Just that problem alone is incredible, hard to fathom.
I watched people all through Europe, deliberately take their cigarette butts, and drop them into storm water drains, frequently, almost everywhere I looked. I just couldn't believe it. I thought about saying something each time I saw someone do it, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth it. Could you imagine how much damage a single plastic bag or cigarette butt does to a marine eco-system in the course of it's life? I really can't believe people even want to eat seafood for the sake of their own health.
I've traveled through Europe and Asia for the last year and there is just so many people, it was even hard to sleep, like people just living on top of each other. Climate change is having a major effect on Europe, there is no doubt, in Holland, they were hosing raising bridges down so they would close properly, this was happening for days on end, it was 30+ degrees, insane, the bridges just weren't designed for the heat.
Right now, I'm in Bali on my way home from Europe volunteering for a startup who is trying to reduce landfill intake by taking green waste before it hits landfill and turning it into a reusable product (http://www.balicompostcrafters.com/), I visited the tip, it was a catastrophe, all the toxic run off just washes into the harbor each time it rains, the local government solution right now is to just put mud/dirt on top of it all. More amazing is that the tip is next to a sea turtle sanctuary.
My Fiancee and I swim at the beach daily, we can always swim out to the reef, pickup a plastic bag, head back to the beach and easily fill the bag up full of plastic objects, straws, bags, coke bottles etc. People just look at us like we're crazy lunatics, as if that's "Somebody else's job".
Unless most people wake up , tomorrow, roll up their sleeves and start cleaning stuff up, I think it's just a matter of time until a big collapse really affects us.
The thing is, the whole outcome is optional still, if we wanted too I really think we could turn it around.
Too true, unless people take action to improve the environment around them, this planet will continue to degrade in health, and in the treatment of the people on it. We need to stop dumping crap into the ocean, air & environment in general, and treat the humans that are here on Earth better, not as worthless cogs in an earth destroying machine.
None of this is impossible, its just the will to stand up and fight for a better world has been suppressed, you won't see hundreds of thousands of people organizing to fight for a better future like with Silent Spring, Cesar Chavez or MLK today, that is the major issue blocking forward progress. If we can get people out in the streets, marching to fix our world, we can accomplish so many great things. Short of that, business & governments will keep things as close to the status quo as possible, and we'll watch our world continue to degrade.
Colonising Mars will not save the Earth or its current inhabitants; it's not viable to move people there, for example. It'd be limited to scientists and the elite to go there, and (if science fiction is anything to go by), would merely create an entirely different country or even species, assuming people can even survive there. Communication and travel with Earth will be crap, so isolation will happen. It might help perpetuate the species, but it's not going to save humanity or the planet as we know it.
I think both undertaking (saving planet Earth and colonizing Mars) are independent of each other. Currently we have enough resources to work towards both goals simultaneously.
As last time, here's the problem to solve : what is a cheap, recyclable way to plant seeds without burning (last harvest's) hay ? The current solution of using a "seeder" costs 1900$ that is unaffordable by farmers. This was posted in November 2015 - http://scroll.in/article/770176/why-we-should-be-alarmed-at-...
Fueled by this mess in our capital me and a couple of friends spoke to a regional administrative officer for an anti pollution drive that will bring some sense in people. We were told to come back when the pollution is high enough. We're fucked in this country.
People blame crop burning as the reason. Probably the farmers are polluting this place for 15 days, but the same farmers are absorbing our emissions with their farm plants for the remaining 350 days in the year. Nobody seems to mention it ever. The farmers also give us food to eat.
The farmers only need about 2000 dollars for a machine called "happy seeder" to stop burning. It is not a lot of money but the political class will only "subsidize" it, as long as the illiterate farmer fills out a big application form, takes a crowded train to the far-away capital city and submits to the right official along with some bribe.
Given those conditions, I really cannot blame the farmer, I only feel sorry for them.
By the way, I live in Delhi. I am suffering because of this pollution but I will not blame the farmers like media and other people of Delhi. Farmers are nice and simple people, they give us food to eat. Their farms absorb the emissions from my petrol car till I can afford to go electric.
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadHowever right-clicking the main link and opening in private browsing seems to work.
Source: http://www.nytco.com/the-new-york-times-to-offer-open-access...
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
At least one of those options should work, most likely all three will.
So maybe there's hope Delhi will clean itself up in the near future.
But it's nothing remotely like the scale of disaster that India has, where there is often constant choking smoke enveloping entire cities and regions. Even China is clean by comparison.
Air Quality targets have become massively more demanding.
But yes, must be hard when "your actions are so small they don't count".
I think Elon Musk is right in his urgency regarding the Mars colonisation plans. Sure, you can always say "let's wait a couple of decades, with the new tech we'll have then it will be much easier and cheaper", but you could be mistaken. Technology and human civilization does not always move forward. We've been thrown back many times in the past and eventually there will be the day when we will not recover to previous levels: The beginning of the end. By then, we will no longer be able to tackle a huge challenge such as Mars colonization because we will be fighting for survival.
Once that dies, the accumulated karma will come back with force (and for good ?). It's fashionable in certain circles to say US fracking can sustain the system, but I'd be very wary of such statements.
I think you are a little over-optimistic with the Mars colonization plans. A Mars colony would be dependent on Earth for material support for a very long time. Setting up the necessary infrastructure to produce all materials needed for the maintenance of the complex technology required by an extraterrestrial colony will need decades if not centuries. If civilization on Earth collapses before that, the Mars colony will die soon after.
While we can get to Mars with current technology (and possibly even back again), we don't have any known terraforming technology that would actually make Mars a viable place to live in the long term.
Colonies on Mars would be reduced to living in sealed caves/bunkers. The quality of life would be pretty questionable. So why go to Mars to live in such conditions?
Living on Earth, even after a catastrophic environmental disaster/collapse, is still likely to be easier and better than living as a colonist on Mars.
Besides, the Mars colonization plan implicitly works for only a tiny number of people, while abandoning the rest. It's prepperism+science fiction.
What's far more likely to happen is that the West remains mostly OK - perhaps with a bit more visible poverty and security state, but still with the technological capacity. While places which are less well developed or politically stable see events like this, war, flood or famine.
Colonizing antarctica would not ensure humanity's survival if there is a global extinction event.
A Mars colony would be very small at first. To be self sustaining you would need a good size. Elon Musk estimates you'll need around 1 million people. Even with a lot of spaceships capable of carrying 100 people each going every 26 months (when the distance between the planets is small) it'll take decades.
Why do you think the West will be ok in the long run? What happens to the rest of the world? Will they just sit there and wait to die?
Neo-colonialism. There's no shortage of ways to push the externalities of environmental damage and industry to other countries.
It's not a question of "waiting to die", it's a question of "scraping a living from whatever you can find". Which is already the case in the poorer parts of the world.
For example concerning glasshouse gases, we need to come back to 1990's emission levels because that's what the Earth can absorb. The problem is, we're about 1bn more, our levels of consumption are still soaring, and citizen of new nations deserve to emit as much carbon as we do.
Once we transfer the carbon limitations to every individual in developed country, we'll all throw our arms in the air saying "That's oppressive!". Example: When the Greek people learnt they had to pay the same taxes as the rest of Europe, they all started blaming Germany for being over-controlling and penny-pinching, and looked in the way of Putin. Imagine what would happen when our citizens understand that 90% of the people can't have meat, heating, cars or flights.
Hence, carbon limitations will create tensions, country-level protests, and probably wars, which will waste even more carbon than today. Added to the global warming which is already underway, and there's little hope to dodge a catastrophic event. Either we manage carbon properly and most of us survive with greatly reduced materialist life (e.g. no meat), either we have a big event and 5% of lucky humans survive anyway, with a greatly reduced materialist life.
Concerning Mars, launching the Human civilization on other planets doesn't sound like a desirable goal to me. We didn't even succeed to manage ours, why expanding? Notably, none the people you've ever met will be saved by Mars – Only samples of our race will be sent. We'd better send a Noah's Arch than Humans.
Any specific examples of when this has happened?
Imagine 4 billion plastic coffee lids a day going into landfill, the ocean or needing to be recycled, and in this case, burned. Just that problem alone is incredible, hard to fathom.
I watched people all through Europe, deliberately take their cigarette butts, and drop them into storm water drains, frequently, almost everywhere I looked. I just couldn't believe it. I thought about saying something each time I saw someone do it, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth it. Could you imagine how much damage a single plastic bag or cigarette butt does to a marine eco-system in the course of it's life? I really can't believe people even want to eat seafood for the sake of their own health.
I've traveled through Europe and Asia for the last year and there is just so many people, it was even hard to sleep, like people just living on top of each other. Climate change is having a major effect on Europe, there is no doubt, in Holland, they were hosing raising bridges down so they would close properly, this was happening for days on end, it was 30+ degrees, insane, the bridges just weren't designed for the heat.
Right now, I'm in Bali on my way home from Europe volunteering for a startup who is trying to reduce landfill intake by taking green waste before it hits landfill and turning it into a reusable product (http://www.balicompostcrafters.com/), I visited the tip, it was a catastrophe, all the toxic run off just washes into the harbor each time it rains, the local government solution right now is to just put mud/dirt on top of it all. More amazing is that the tip is next to a sea turtle sanctuary.
My Fiancee and I swim at the beach daily, we can always swim out to the reef, pickup a plastic bag, head back to the beach and easily fill the bag up full of plastic objects, straws, bags, coke bottles etc. People just look at us like we're crazy lunatics, as if that's "Somebody else's job".
Unless most people wake up , tomorrow, roll up their sleeves and start cleaning stuff up, I think it's just a matter of time until a big collapse really affects us.
The thing is, the whole outcome is optional still, if we wanted too I really think we could turn it around.
None of this is impossible, its just the will to stand up and fight for a better world has been suppressed, you won't see hundreds of thousands of people organizing to fight for a better future like with Silent Spring, Cesar Chavez or MLK today, that is the major issue blocking forward progress. If we can get people out in the streets, marching to fix our world, we can accomplish so many great things. Short of that, business & governments will keep things as close to the status quo as possible, and we'll watch our world continue to degrade.
and relevant info on the cause of the smog. Its not industrial pollution, but agricultural burning that's happening in neighboring states - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/world/asia/farmers-unch...
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/amp/articles/2016-11-04/who...
As last time, here's the problem to solve : what is a cheap, recyclable way to plant seeds without burning (last harvest's) hay ? The current solution of using a "seeder" costs 1900$ that is unaffordable by farmers. This was posted in November 2015 - http://scroll.in/article/770176/why-we-should-be-alarmed-at-...
But thanks for your concern we have contacted a couple of rich heads to use the situation to their advantage.
Government is subsidising all things solar.
Also I meant electric vehicles, sorry mixed up both the things.
The farmers only need about 2000 dollars for a machine called "happy seeder" to stop burning. It is not a lot of money but the political class will only "subsidize" it, as long as the illiterate farmer fills out a big application form, takes a crowded train to the far-away capital city and submits to the right official along with some bribe.
Given those conditions, I really cannot blame the farmer, I only feel sorry for them.
By the way, I live in Delhi. I am suffering because of this pollution but I will not blame the farmers like media and other people of Delhi. Farmers are nice and simple people, they give us food to eat. Their farms absorb the emissions from my petrol car till I can afford to go electric.