Comment by lukan
2 days ago
We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
2 days ago
We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
Sure but moving from a few centralized sources of fossil fuels to a globally distributed and decentralized network of sources of synthetic biofuels means transport distances are a tiny percentage of what they are with fossil fuels.
This consequently scales down the scale of any spill or security issue.
Like the difference between nicking a capillary and nicking an aorta.
I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.
I don't think peacetime is outdated, but we do live in a time of increasing tensions and classical and asymetric conflicts, mixed with an increasing amount of people who believe they have nothing left to loose. So yes, I also prefer the concept of local ressilience as opposed to having many critical infrastructure points where everything else will collapse if those are damaged. Solar, Wind and batteries can go a long way here, to keep at least critical systems running.
I don't think any of tensions, classical conflicts, asymmetric conflicts, the amount of people with nothing left to "loose", or all of these together, are at particularly unusual levels compared to the previous 6000 years, though they're higher than they were 20 years ago. But, for most of that time, warfare was geographically localized; you could avoid directly experiencing warfare by not being a soldier and living inside a country that wasn't being actively invaded, or on the national border between two countries that weren't at war with each other or being actively invaded. Sometimes that was easier said than done, but most people managed it most of the time.
In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s... (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper#In... while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/.... Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJRqXBhnvCs.
Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of borderless war without end so vividly envisioned in Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA. Ukraine is already an order of magnitude past the headline number it opens with, "Customer pilots directed almost 3,000 precision strikes last year."
If you want to see what precision strikes on the Ukrainian battlefield look like, plenty of Ukrainian military units have posted fundraising videos, so you can watch terrified conscripts dying all day long if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIgTJ-73v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhQBf4VFMwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64TmBvbn1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUqJAnAP9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCoCxARDEio.
Those videos are a preview of what life will be like for you and your family in the years to come as war becomes borderless.