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Comment by lazide

1 day ago

Literally grow lights and nuclear reactors? (Or plain old gas turbine generators)

Technology is the only thing that can save anyone from that type of situation. Prayer sure wouldn’t help!

You think it's possible to put any decent percentage of our GLOBAL food production in greenhouses (remember with less light global temperatures go down) within ~6 months?

Billions would perish. If the luckier rich countries did not get nuked or invaded by armies or waves of endless starving refugees then they would be able to save a good amount of their population. At best world development goes back ~50-100 years. At worst, modern civilization basically ends from the combination of conflict and famine.

  • that doesn’t address the context of the response at all.

    is technology helping, or hurting in that situation?

    near as i can tell, it is the only thing that could help.

    we aso have significant food stores and buffers, and if it was the situation you described it would literally be a ‘drop everything and get working’ emergency. we’d likely do better than you expect.

    what else could possibly help besides technology?

    But yes, a lot of people would die.

You don't have the _slightest_ idea of how much energy and materials you would need to provide sufficient grow lights to feed humanity right?

  • Sure I do. Do you have anything else you can propose that would help at all?

    And if a couple billion people (minimum) would be dead if we didn’t do it ASAP, do you think that energy or material wouldn’t be expended at the drop of a hat?

    Hell, look at how much energy we expend just to serve cat videos.

    People generally respond to sudden, external, visible risks pretty well.

    It’s when risks are hidden, build slowly, or are caused by behaviors they consider ‘unsolvable’ and they’ve learned to adapt to that they suck.

    • Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare with 1 kWh LED lamps?

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