2. Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity. It has been responsible for nearly every other extinction, it would be silly to think ours will be different. It's really just about whether it's sooner or whether it's later.
3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
Depends what timeframe you're talking about. As stars burn they get hotter, and eventually bigger. So yes, climate change will eventually end humanity though this would be the later scale.
>smaller global population surviving
This is just an unfound assumption on your part. Passenger pigeons went from billions of birds to extinct in less than a century. There are hundreds of different scenarios around climate change and disease evolution alone that could wipe us pretty quickly and a rapidly falling population would make it worse quickly as things like new medicines could not be developed quickly enough, or more technology couldn't be created fast enough (unless we have full AGI working on itself, but then you have alignment being its own problem).
Passenger pigeons did not have the capacity to alter their environment.
I simply find it unlikely that any amount of climate change (beyond the eventual death of our sun) will result in the complete elimination of humanity.
Yes, there are many likely bad scenarios that would drastically reduce the population.
The easy scenario to imagine where humans become extinct due to climate change is the scarcity of resources that will lead to the drastically reduced population will cause full on nuclear war to secure those scarce resources. Given our history I actually find it quite plausible. "If I can't have it nobody will."
Extinction is commonplace. I think it's pretty outlandish to assume, after having only been on the scene for a million years or so, that we're going to make it to a billion.
If survival is so easy, why isn't the sky teaming with alien radio chatter?
Forever? I mean we'll probably be long gone by the time this happens but eventually changes to the nature of the sun will strip us of our atmosphere. That too will be climate change.
What sort of non-climate-threat do you suppose will take us out?
2. A big change in the climate will end humanity one day. I am skeptical it will be human caused climate change. Much higher probability it comes from asteroid or another exogenous event. The climate has always been dynamic, and it has been much more dynamic in the distant past.
I think you're over focusing on the decision making. If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices. Even if its just one maniac who decided the bombs were necessary, they did so against a background that would encourage other behavior if we had fewer people.
> If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing right now but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.
I don't know what you mean. Of course we could have, but we didn't. We didn't because building 10,000 electric cars vs 10,000 bombs is a no brainer, but building 500,000,000 cars vs the same 10,000 bombs is a different kind of problem. Intimidation and transportation scale differently. At different scales, different decisions are more likely.
- World population in 1967 was around 3.5 billion people, less than half of our current population
- The U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,000 warheads in the same year 1967
Why did we need more bombs when there were less people? Why was there a greater perceived threat when there were less people in the world to fight over resources? Why would reducing our population level by half cause a change in our behaviour when these factors seem to be independent?
I feel like we agree: The amount of force necessary to be an effective bully is independent of population.
And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.
So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not people will consider waging war over oil is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.
I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.
> Why did we need more bombs when there were less people
Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?
Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?
The number of nuclear weapons needed is more a function of reliability and accuracy than of population density. The older delivery platforms were much less accurate. That doesn't matter for targeting entire cities but it matters a lot when targeting hardened military sites that might survive a near miss. Now accuracy is much better so fewer weapons are needed to achieve the same deterrence effect.
Agreed. You could look at a previous session which got the right answer eventually and make edits until the path to the right answer was more direct.
It's not clear if this would generalize to other related uses, or how disastrous it would be to unrelated uses, but it's worth studying. Feels like a sort of agentic Lamarckism.
Maybe it's not "maximum harm" but there are selective pressures on zoonotic diseases to be harmful to organisms whose behavior is a threat to the ecosystem's stability. They fill a niche that guards against the emergence of monocultures.
Whether to be more afraid of nature's bioweapons, or human built ones, I don't know. But both exist.
The device used to make oligonucleotides is pretty much an inkjet printer, from there it's cleverly applied enzymes to assemble the full strand. If you've got the skills and determination to get the synthetic DNA into a functioning cell, I don't think limiting access to synthetic DNA in the first place is going to stop you.
The device used to make oligonucleotides is pretty much an inkjet printer, from there it's cleverly applied enzymes to assemble the full strand.
Usually the synthesis of oligonuclotides is done with phosphoramidite chemistry [0]. So tell us more about those enzymes to make DNA molecules from scratch.
I’m pretty sure they were talking about how you can combine synthesized oligos into longer fragments when you are starting with smaller oligos. I’m guessing that they were referring to using different restriction enzymes from that point on.
Unless we are talking about really long oligos (which is harder and $$$), you’ll need some post-synthesis enzymatic work to get your full strand.
Yes I also read the comment that way. The inkjet printer remark presumably refers to benchtop DNA synthesis machines which have been commercially available for a while now. (The linked article mentions the possibility of buy-back programs for old machines that don't enforce any restrictions.)
I guess it's not a bad idea to put basic hurdles in place but it would be a serious mistake to see this as any sort of comprehensive preventative. DNA just isn't difficult to manipulate.
The vast majority of commercial synthesizers aren't inkjet. The OG DNA synthesizers are pretty simple - just a handful of pumps and valves and a packed silica column for each run. Anyone with a little mechanical engineering and organic chemistry training could build one (lots of companies in the past did just this.)
Kind of like owning your own darkroom, back in the day of analog photography.
Seeing his adjacent comment I stand corrected. I was not aware that there are now literal DNA printers. Only that you could obtain the sort of synthesizers to which you refer which had approximately the form factor of an inkjet (ie a small box).
The thing is DNA just also isn't dangerous. It's fragile and everything in the environment destroys it - as noted it's literally a everything else which is the hard part.
This reeks of the Longtermists getting their influence into government. They were doing an entire round on YouTube about a year ago.
And yes, phosphoramidites are what you use as ink. You print many many dots on a flat surface, and then you print over the same dots again and again, building up layers one base at a time. Then you dissolve those dots, giving you short strands in solution, which can be assembled into longer strands by being strategic about what else is in that solution and about which sequences you programmed in to the printer.
I've been considering making one in my garage. I don't think it's going to be easy, but I also don't think it's going to be difficult enough to be a good candidate for use as a regulatory chokepoint. We're not talking about a warehouse full of centrifuges here, it's a printer with special ink.
Ansa Bio uses an engineered terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT) enzyme to synthesize the oligos themselves, rather than using phosphoramidite chemistry. Each enzyme is tethered to a single nucleotide, allowing it to extend the DNA strand by exactly one base. The tether is then cleaved and the cycle repeats.
This works in aqueous solution under mild conditions and enables synthesis of much longer oligos (~1,000 bases), which can subsequently be assembled into 50 kbp constructs.
I forgot to label a test tube the other day and found myself surreptitiously trying to smell the contents so I could tell the solvents apart. AR goggles would've been pretty nice about then. They'd remember which of these are dangerous.
Or when you're putting something back together and you end up with two screws left over.
Or if you want to see your friends' annotations in the book you're reading.
We gave control over the web to third parties. We can have nice things again if we just stop doing that.
As memes in the environment. Choices made by parents while raising us, things we hear from our peers, etc.
Also as aspects of nature... Its not just genes for a system that can feel pleasure or pain but also a mapping from that system to a set of textures, temperatures, and frequencies that take that system beyond certain thresholds. Plus a large set of environmental inputs that cause the system to grow in different ways in response to different stimuli.
2. Sooner or later, climate change will end humanity. It has been responsible for nearly every other extinction, it would be silly to think ours will be different. It's really just about whether it's sooner or whether it's later.
3. The Ogallala aquifer will eventually reach a level where it's not economical to tap in to for agricultural purposes. Probably within our lifetime. Meanwhile, snow in the Rockys is increasingly rain in the Rockys, which means the rivers don't flow steady, but just corral floods down to the oceans. What technology is going to replace all of that water?
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