Well, harnessing ALL of the energy produced by the sun (or even half of it) sounds pretty far away in time.
I’ll make a disgression: The risk of X-risks seems to increase with the amount of energy at disposal (only a correlation, yes, but a lot of power (=energy) seems necessary to destroy the conditions of life on this planet, and the more power we have, the easier it becomes). As I pointed out, in the book Power, Richard Heinberg makes the case that we are overpowered: we have so much energy that we risk wiping out ourselves by accident. Worse yet, the goal of our current economic and political structures is to get even more power—forever.
So I’d expect a society with this amount of power to face many other problems bafore getting to “harnessing the sun”. The Fermi paradox seems to point this way.
But even then, this doesn’t really adress the point I made above about animal suffering.
Well, harnessing ALL of the energy produced by the sun (or even half of it) sounds pretty far away in time.
I’ll make a disgression: The risk of X-risks seems to increase with the amount of energy at disposal (only a correlation, yes, but a lot of power (=energy) seems necessary to destroy the conditions of life on this planet, and the more power we have, the easier it becomes). As I pointed out, in the book Power, Richard Heinberg makes the case that we are overpowered: we have so much energy that we risk wiping out ourselves by accident. Worse yet, the goal of our current economic and political structures is to get even more power—forever.
So I’d expect a society with this amount of power to face many other problems bafore getting to “harnessing the sun”. The Fermi paradox seems to point this way.
But even then, this doesn’t really adress the point I made above about animal suffering.
Oh—sorry—I meant to reply to AnonymousAccount instead—it was their text that I was quoting. I’ve now put it there—should I delete this one?
Yeah, I though it was something like that ^^
But no, let’s keep that here.