Check out lab-grown beef AND impossible foods non-meat burgers (all plants that actually taste like meat). They will make our dependency on animal agriculture MUCH less messy overall. This is going to be proliferating in the next 2 years as lab grown beef gets its manufacturing costs to under $10 a burger and impossible foods finds its distribution. This is two very simple examples of RECENT breakthroughs that will have a very real impact.
Farm raised animals will still be around however but they will be local and a little more expensive. As a side note less cattle being farmed for mass consumption less CO2 emissions as a byproduct from that (both in machinery and the animals themselves).
Typically if we switch to less messy energy sources and the distribution of the power can be more even (hence, Tesla and its Powerwall) the cost and waste of energy production will be so much better than it is now. By a major factor. Google Ventures has a stake in pretty much everything from self driving cars to new age batteries to human genome projects.
So Bill Gates specifically has been working on
new batteries not dependent on rare earth metals to operate. I read an article in the summer about an even newer battery that runs predominantly on salt and outperforms traditional lithiom-ion batteries by 10,000x (probably hyperbole).
The point is small changes like this, and breakthroughs like the one I mentioned in food production have MASSIVE ramifications. These are humans using todays technology to out-progress the issues. Because historically that's always what we've done. Hell most of the vegetables we enjoy today were unrecognizable in 18th century — carrots were basically roots, peaches were all pit and banana's had seed's and tough skin. We adapted them to meet the social challenges of those times.
The common thread between most doomsayer-reports is that they are using today's calamities and arguing our position from yesterdays breakthroughs. I remember listening to doomsayers in the early 2000's talk about how we have a good 10 years left before all fish are dead. Actually in the gulf and East coast the fish have been on the steady INCLINE due to
fishing catch share programs the government instituted. Everyone gets a % of the overall shares they can catch in any given season. And so far all signs point to it working amazingly—mainly because fish apparently breed like fucking rabbits. Something most doomsayers never take in to account. Plus we also have farm raising now.
The trick is getting Japan, China and other large resource-rich nations to see the benefit of these programs and institute them on their coasts. Stuff like deforestation in nations without infrastructure and oversight is still an issue. That's why I mentioned less developed nations needing help but Robot got his liberal sensibilities all in a huffy about it.
Investment in improving living condition in slums will help — as poverty decreases this will become better. India's ground water there is so overburdened and polluted this is one area we could do better in. India's a tough one partially because its main religions believe in incarnation... if you live in a slum it's because you did something horrible in your previous life and deserve it. There are parallels to the religious right in America holding their beliefs above progress, too.
Maybe. I work with many of these people and have two good friends working at SpaceX and Google Ventures. Really smart people who are living their potential. They are going to get us to the future.
Like every doomsayer he's great at painting a picture of the issues we're facing and speaks a lot on the ineptitude of government to act. Every point in that article is "this is really hard!". But most of the solutions are independent of the government—hell even the fishing shares one was thought up by a liberal think-tank. The video/article also doesn't specifically give breaking points for the environmental disaster it's so adamant about. Basically there's a lot of smart people with a lot of money working on these issues and making interesting breakthroughs every year. Apparently a bunch of students invented a fridge that works without electricity.
My main problem with the pessimistic crowd is that it's pseudo-intellectual defeatism. "We've gone too far!" But what is too far? Why isn't it reversible? Why are you dismissing or not looking at the amazing things humans are inventing every year that can help?
Nobody is arguing the world isn't facing big challenges. Sea level rise, poverty, disease, bad food production practices etc. That isn't in dispute. What you're saying is we don't have the capacity as humans to solve them, when historically our ingenuity has proven otherwise. So I'm betting on that.
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Originally Posted by Drewbacca
Check out lab-grown beef AND impossible foods non-meat burgers (all plants that actually taste like meat). They will make our dependency on animal agriculture MUCH less messy overall. This is going to be proliferating in the next 2 years as lab grown beef gets its manufacturing costs to under $10 a burger and impossible foods finds its distribution. This is two very simple examples of RECENT breakthroughs that will have a very real impact.
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