As I wrote in response to the not really view, I’m deeply pessimistic about the future, and the hope that I appreciate here is only for slightly extending agricultural yields so that I can keep eating cheap food for a few more years. Overall, we’re all fucked. I guess I’m not allowed to celebrate one bright spot in the enclosing darkness, thanks.
The one in 1957. Maybe it doesn’t deserve the definite article since the 1964 one was a bigger deal, but there have been several things called the civil rights act at the time.
The main reason I bought it up is to point out just how far apart he was from what currently calls itself the Republican Party. Neither one would approve of the other.
I like Ike.
I do love native plants and I will deeply mourn the mass extinction of the Anthropocene. You’re not wrong.
But I was choosing the bright side here. It’s a lovely contrast to the destruction of NASA, the NSF, and all the trickle down effects in the science world. This bee work is delightfully from the UK and will be harder to cancel. It will help agriculture keep up with exponential human growth amid climate change and water overuse for slightly longer than it would last otherwise. I’m deeply pessimistic, but the bee thing is a little hopeful, ok?
This is the most uplifting science article I’ve read in a while. The process they describe in the article sounds long and involved with many dependent steps. Great work!
Boy they sure are owning the libs. “…peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind” is such a pansy-ass mission. If we do great stuff and just share it with everyone, no billionaires get any richer!
NASA was created enthusiastically by Eisenhower, a Republican war hero who had governed American-occupied Germany during WWII and was the first supreme commander of NATO just prior to becoming president. He unleashed an era of American greatness, including the entire interstate highway system which unlocked decades of future commerce growth and is named after him. If you had to name a single president who embodied the Greatness of which one might want to Make America embody Again, there are many strong arguments to be made that Eisenhower is the man.
He also signed the civil rights act and enforced school desegregation, in addition to warning the public about the rise of the Military Industrial Complex on his way out of office. In fact, he’s not at all what the nazifascist cheerleaders behind the worst president in American history would ever have thought of as great, but the MAGA slogan was a lie from the very beginning. It’s a very sad time to be an American.
Renewables have actually been making enormous progress, at least wind and photovoltaic (which is by far the cheapest source of new large scale energy production). I assume that’s why our current dear leader is going so far out of his way to stifle them as much as possible. He’s just following the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation, which seeks to preserve the failing US hegemony that is dependent on the petrodollar as the world reserve currency.
But I think you’re right about everything else, including how great my life is right now personally. I just see us on the precipice of doom, like Wile E. Coyote having not yet realized he has run off the cliff’s edge. I understand that it’s hard for a lot of people to project into the future and accept the doom. That requires both a broad understanding that most don’t possess and the nerve to look into the void.
I recently reached more peaceful acceptance about our impending climate and societal collapse after I read Cadillac Desert and realized that even without climate change our water needs are unsustainable and we’re heading for an agricultural collapse.
In the mean time I’m trying to participate in activities that I love and help my children to find activities they love. Might as well get some good times in.
The hole in the ozone layer is a great case study in effective amelioration of an anthropogenic climate problem. People got whipped up into a frenzy and politicians listened both to them and to the scientists. We switched refrigerants and have continued research and development to the point that heat pumps are now good enough to work in the winter in most places, using refrigerant blends. The ozone layer is well on its way to recovery. The overall response was excellent, and the Montreal Protocol was likely the most successful international agreement ever. That’s a stark contrast to our modern climate denialism and the vilification of science.
The nuclear threat is still real, but mutually assured destruction turns out to have been a pretty effective deterrent. But hey, maybe nuclear winter is the answer to global warming.
I don’t think anyone saw AIDS or 9/11 as an existential threat. I agree that there have always been things to dread, but you’re just building a strawman.
Dread about uncontrollable geologic forces is natural, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Yellowstone could erupt, sure. Many other geologic disasters could also occur, and humans would be along for a short ride of doom. That’s just life, and that’s okay.
But it’s especially depressing to watch the slow-motion failure of our social species to be able to communicate and organize effectively enough to stop a climate problem of our own making. It’s technologically preventable, but not socially. And at this point, I argue that it’s morally wrong to create children without realistic hope for a better future.
Yep, they did. But they weren’t on the brink of tipping-point climate change negative feedback cycles. Exponential growth is great for the economy until it overruns the carrying capacity of the underlying fundamentals.
I expect to live to see worldwide famine and an unimaginably large worldwide refugee crisis as the equatorial band becomes uninhabitable. The groundwater we’ve been pumping out of aquifers took geologic timescales to accumulate, and as it runs out the effect on agriculture will be severe. The Colorado river is enormously oversubscribed, and almost none of the problems that Marc Reisner wrote about over 30 years ago in Cadillac Desert have improved.
I could go on, but it’s all depressing. Yes, this time is much worse. We might claw our way back out of fascism in a reasonable timescale, sure. But the underlying physical realities of the earth’s systems will start have already started to come crashing down and will only intensify within my lifetime, and definitely within the average lifespans of children born today.
As a parent in the US, yes. The future looks very dim among climate change, water overuse, corruption of civic institutions by the capital class, etc.
Even people born 20 years ago have it rough - they’re just now graduating college into a crummy job market and massively inflated housing market, with MAGA policies and AI destroying the economy for both blue and white collar folks as quickly as possible.
It seems cruel to create new life in this environment. Are you going to tell the kids that it’s their job to fix the world that the previous generations abused and degraded for short term gains, because it’s somehow our duty as sane humans to produce more sane humans to continue the fight? Many people today already live a worsening paycheck to paycheck existence, with too little free time to focus on systemic change. How will adding to that help?
Nearly every generation has felt pessimism at one time or another that the world is the worst it’s ever been. But it sure seems different this time.
The folk heroes of tomorrow will be people like Greta Thunberg and Mario’s brother, and that’s not a great existence to root for.
Hey now you whippersnapper, just be happy it’s not CVS anymore.
So it’s been about a month. OP, how did it go? Did you get the job? How were the interviews?
I used one of these in the mid-90s over AMPS. It wasn’t mine, but I made a few call on it on several occasions. What a beast.
There’s nothing bad whatsoever about a breakthrough discovery allowing for essentially nutritionally-complete synthetic pollen. It’s all positive, full stop. The negatives you want to emphasize are that it doesn’t also solve other related problems. I never said that it did, only that it was the most uplifting science story in a long time. I read the whole dammed article, not just the headline, and I was very happy to have it get into a lot of details.
Feel free to have your middling reaction without celebration. I’m excited to have a positive science story I can discuss with my kids, and I’m sticking to that.