Iron_Baron

Iron_Baron t1_j70khpw wrote

Thanks for starting off with an insult, when it's your reading comprehension and subject knowledge that's at issue. I'll elaborate for you:

The future will undoubtedly continue toward increasing scarcity of resources among the majority of the world's population. The uber rich will hoard wealth and power, as automation drives down wage growth and job opportunities for large swathes of humanity, even in the developed world.

Zero nations have a game plan for what to do with their economy, as AI and robotics take every job from surgery to coding and repairing themselves. This will lead to increased civil and economic unrest, necessitating increased authoritarianism, as those in power decline to relinquish it, without being forced.

Simultaneously, climate change and technological advancements will increase conflict over finite sources of potable water, arable land, dwelling space within human temperature limits, rare earth metals, etc. The collapse of the oceanic food web due to rising temperature, acidification, and disruption of gyre currents like the Gulf Stream due to lowered ocean salinity, will destroy a significant portion of humanity's sustenance.

All of these effects will lead to increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities and immigrants, as societies become more insular in the face of dwindling access to habitable space, wealth, water, education, etc. This means an increase in terrorism, wars, corporate espionage, ethnic conflicts, revolutions, etc. Now couple everything I've just said with the typical issues of corruption in municipal development, engineering mistakes, human hubris (such as building "The Line" or "The World" archipelago), etc.

That paints a very unsafe picture for human existence. Placing humans in floating cities, which could be shore anchored or deep sea, invites all of the above calamities to impact that city, to an extent much greater than land bound or especially land locked cities. Floating cities are likely to be good candidates for bases of petroleum extraction, desalination, and aquaponic food production. That paints a giant target on that city when it comes to human conflict.

The hypothetical possibility of destroying a floating city utterly is far greater than for a traditional land based city. Making floating cities then prime targets for terrorism and first strikes by nuclear or conventional forces, not to mention pirates and insurgents. Additionally floating cities would be far easier for attacking forces to reach (you can't drive a boat to attack Denver).

Coastal cities have always been more vulnerable to attack for all of recorded history. This flaw would expand with floating cities, as they could be attacked from literally 720 degrees. Depending on the location of the city, it would be as vulnerable (likely more so) to damage from natural disasters, like the ones I mentioned in previous comment, as traditional coastal cities. A near shore city is highly vulnerable to typhoons (or hurricanes) which cover the majority of the world's oceans, in the prime human habitable latitudes. Even deep sea cities would be at risk from super storms, that will become increasingly common.

They are also more vulnerable to tsunami, as they couldn't be anchored in bedrock to the same extent a traditional city could. They would fare even worse than the cities we've built on dredged "reclaimed" shorelines. Likewise they are vulnerable to rogue waves, should they be open water or shore impacting. You need to learn more about rogue waves if you think they only occur on open ocean. One sank the Edmund Fitzgerald on a Great Lake, for example, and rogue waves can absolutely hit shorelines.

All of the climate and human based calamities I listed will be exacerbated by the factors I mentioned. On top of that, add the terrible job maintaining municipal infrastructure we already do as a species, which would be even worse when moved to a maritime environment. Now, maybe you understand why I said I would not live on a floating city. Or, perhaps you'd like to insult me again. Luckily, I do not care, either way, and am done with this conversation. Good bye.

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Iron_Baron t1_j6y7wqk wrote

No. Humans have never built something that can't sink and never will. Especially when these projects are inevitably plagued by corruption, lowest bidder construction quality, human error, consistent underestimating of the impacts of climate and weather, etc.

Rogue waves, super typhoons, tsunamis, pirates, terrorists, wars, etc. exist already. There's no telling what kind of frequency and/or intensity increases we'll see as the climate and seas change, driving natural disasters and human desperation to new heights.

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Iron_Baron t1_j34klkz wrote

No, but it's disingenuous and unethical to downplay the severity of the state of affairs on this planet or to fantasize irresponsibly that some other country or some other generation is going to fix all these direct threats to the planet and our species.

Such as calling people speaking accurately about such threats "doom and gloom" or "pessimists", when they are realists advocating for humanity to take climate change seriously. By seriously, I mean taking action in their lives, not just bitching on Reddit, or burying their head in an online echo chamber of misinformation and deflection.

Personally, I devote my career to trying to influence my country's policy for the better. That's not something most folks could or should be expect to do. But speaking accurately and responsibly on social media and voting based on facts, not feelings or propaganda, is everyone's civic duty.

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Iron_Baron t1_j347s6a wrote

Reply to comment by HeronSouki in Depressing subreddit by CatharticFarts

Utterly irrelevant. We could go zero green house emissions today and it wouldn't stop climate change. It's too late, the oceanic gyre effects are already destabilized and we can't unmelt Antarctica or the artic. Both poles will continue to shed/not form sea ice, further speeding up warming and desalination of the oceans, as fresh water alters ocean current cycles and destroys breeding and feeding grounds for the foundation of all life on earth, plankton.

The green house glasses already in the atmosphere (not to mention the glasses emitted by thawing permafrost that are so vast as to be incomprehensible) have passed the tipping point of irreversibility. The doesn't even touch on the methan hydrates frozen at the bottom of the sea floor all over the planet that are now melting and entering the atmosphere. There's enough down there to alter the air so much that the sky could literally catch on fire.

The species extinction rate today is 10,000% higher than Earth's historical base line. We are in a mass extinction and have lost tens, likely hundreds of thousands of entire species, forever. That doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of species so devastated by habitat loss, hunting, and poison environments that have left them with populations too small to be sustainable.

The things I've mentioned just barely scratch the surface of how screwed the planet is. I could spend all day listing what we've lost forever and what's irrecoverable. Almost all of the Gulf of Mexico is a hypoxic water desert, barren of essentially all life, where it isn't covered by the many oil spills that coat the ocean floor, invisible to us, but wrecking the sea flor for decades.

Anyone not depressed about the state of affairs is irrational or oblivious. There is no Chicken Little, this isn't being alarmist. Much of the planet is dying, if not already dead. Shop, work, and vote with that fact in mind, if were to mitigate these affects, at all.

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Iron_Baron t1_j33wv5e wrote

Reading the level of rose tinted delusion in these comments is disturbing. Amazing how a bunch of folks supposedly interested in the future don't understand that we build the future in the present; it doesn't just "happen".

Problems don't solve themselves. Thinking some later generation is going to magically reverse the dying of the biosphere is the exact kind of "kick the can down the road" willful obliviousness that got us where we are right now.

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Iron_Baron t1_j33vsji wrote

Reply to comment by HeronSouki in Depressing subreddit by CatharticFarts

A billion snow crabs just cannibalized themselves into near extinction due to the state of the ocean temperature and lack of food resources.

Crabs around the world that aren't dead have their shells slowly dissolving alive as the ocean acidifies due to increased carbon dioxide dissolved into the water.

Coral reefs are dying, and will take the entire ocean food web down with them, which includes much of humanity. We're literally in Earth's sixth mass extinction.

You have a strange idea of awesome and exciting.

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Iron_Baron t1_j33v2qw wrote

We're in the 6th mass extinction and significant portions of humanity believe in crystals and horoscopes over medicine and science.

It's not FUD if the environmental and socioeconomic trend lines around the world are both imperiling democracy and the over all quality of life, if not survival, of our species.

Anyone that isn't ringing an alarm bell is an apologist, a denier, or ignorant of the state of the planet and society.

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