We are going to build a wall around earth and make the aliens pay for it
“uhhh your country didn’t vote the way i wanted. fuck your crops!” starts scorching summer
Yes, why not let an emotionally fragile, egotistical maniac control the weather? What a good idea.
Hey hey hey. Elon. 1-2-3-eyes on me. Ok? Listen little man. You have to put away all the toys you already got out before you start getting any more toys out. You made a big mess out there in low Earth orbit already, you need to help clean it up before you start any more games. Got-it got-it?
Yes, I know you don’t want to, but sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to. Yes, even if you took all of the play money for yourself.
Yes, I know your daddy owned an emerald mine. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to help keep this whole place usable.
Also, while you’re doing your cleanup, there’s still a hole you dug in Las Vegas that you forgot about, and you also need to apologize to the rest of the class for breaking the government services they all enjoyed, and help everyone put them back together.
I know it’s not going to be easy to fix them. That’s why we don’t break things, right? That’s right. Especially when…? When we don’t know what they’re for, right. But you can do hard things, especially if you have help.
I know you fed it into a wood chipper, Elon. We all watched you do it. No, I don’t think it’s funny or epic.
Ok. Well if you aren’t going to help clean up, I think we might need to have a consequence, ok? …no, the consequence can not be going to Mars.
He will have a lot of time on earth to clean thanks to the kessler syndrome he would create.
This is all pure bullshit, inspired by his fear that his failure to get anywhere near his Artemis mission goals would result in him getting his NASA public money tit turned off.
“I’ll just come up with some bullshit off the top of my head saying I am going to do something with satellites - it doesn’t matter that it isn’t possible - and the American public will lap it up like the mugs they are. They will insist on giving me billions via NASA.”
Trump appointed Musk’s crony as head of NASA so the grift will continue. Musk and China applaud. It will result in China winning the new space race, and is another nail in the coffin of the dollar as global reserve currency. Billionaire grifters will get rich over this period, while the average American will get poor.
We’re in Picard S2, on the Confederation timeline.
Fml.
Elon must have read KSR’s Mars Trilogy and never once thought this might end badly.
He also said he’d have people on mars by 2024…
He said Starship would go to orbit by 2019.
I don’t even remember what year he first promised Full Self driving for.
You’ve already won Elon. You’re a trillionaire. You don’t need to find new ways to rape the planet and its inhabitants. Please just fuck off and leave the rest of us to die in peace.
Didn’t they just make this illegal in Florida
Do you guys remember how clean the sky looked when we were all in lock down? 'Cause I do.
Then everyone started driving again.
That was the best, even though you could still look up on a clear night and count 40 satellites shooting across the sky in an hour but not seeing the aircraft was sweet
Dude couldn’t even build a tunnel
I wish I had a really cool tunnel.
Maybe leading to some kind of grotto.
Where’s Marjorie?? THERE HE HIS MARGE THE WEATHER CONTROLLER
He needs to hurry up and od on ketamine before he figures out to upload his consciousness into neuralink and we end up in Altered Carbon.
cocaine is most likely to OD you than KETAMINE.
It takes a lot of k to od. Cant we get him addicted to fent or something quicker?
cocaine is probably easier to acquire for him.
Long term/chronic use can also lead to serious life threatening complications.
Just keep him in the hot tub. Let nature take its course.
The truth is, the tub was rigged from the start
If he uploads his consciousness I’m going to download a copy of it, mod it into the Sims, and torture it on loop.
Related story of the horrors of uploading yourself 🤭
TL;DR: viable last-ditch option would resemble Highlander 2 in terms of putting one corporation in charge of “protecting” the planet.
Okay, so I was keeping the idea of using deliberate “global dimming” in my back-pocket just so it wouldn’t worm it’s way through the zeitgeist. It’s a viable last-ditch option, but it comes with steep drawbacks. But since we’re here now, fuck it.
We already know that, thanks to requiring shipping vessels to use low-sulfur fuel, cloud seeding can actually reduce solar gain. The problem is that it also blocks out a lot of the light needed for photosynthesis. So this approach punches down on the environment in a completely different way. As for people, while global warming will absolutely impact agriculture, so would less sunlight.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
So we could just use airplanes and cloud-seeding. Or we could increase particulates in the atmosphere. Or, as Elon suggests, fly satellites to do the job. The tradeoffs here are awful: disrupt where rain happens, raise lung cancer risks globally, or catapult one man into multi-trilliionaire status while they charge every government on earth for the privilege. Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.
We should seriously considering doing anything else first.
Edit: I know I didn’t invent this idea. Rather, I just didn’t want to add to any consensus around it.
Plus, each of those options are more or less forever if we never get around to carbon sequestration that actually works.
Obligatory reminder that the easiest by far way of sequestering carbon is to simply not extract it from the ground in the first place.
This is it. Active sequestration is at best a small part of the solution, at worst a dangerous tangent that will grab investments and energy that should go to reduction, restoration and preservation efforts.
That’s such an unhelpful statement. Idk what made you think it’s obligatory. Everyone is talking about ACTIVE SEQUESTRATION. Further extraction of more carbon from current natural sequestration is undoing what already has been done. We need to create ways to artificially sequester the carbon while ALSO limiting emissions.
I think there’s more than 40% of the people on earth, at least in most major western country, that need to hear that statement. How about you calm down when talking to people trying to help.
Trees sequester carbon. Trees work.
I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.
A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce
Humanity is currently generating around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. SauceSo now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2 sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.
Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.
Of that, here’s a quick breakdown:
So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.
yeah, sure, but have any of the other carbon sequestration technologies proven more efficient while being equally scalable?
Technologies? No. But the oceans are 42x better at sequestering carbon than the surface, and there are some pretty interesting ideas around promoting phytoplankton blooms and kicking the ocean currents up, that sort of thing.
But trees are rad. We should absolutely have more of them. Besides, they’re proven, as you noted.
But really, humans have to stop emitting as much CO2eq. That’s it. There is no magic sciencey solution.
For a starts, we need to shut down all coal mines and power factories, stop oil, reduce animal exploitation as much as possible, stop fast fashion and reduce AI to scientific uses.
Nothing here is new or controversial, it’s just a bit boring, difficult, and goes against massive entrenched interests. That’s the hard part.
But any approach that is banking on technological breakthroughs maybe helping us capture all the CO2 (and methane, and nitrous oxide, and…) is inane.
I think there’s argument about whether or not even that’s enough.
