[aoeu345]

If you're going to talk up preservation of the atmosphere while downplaying the enormous technological progress and bold, financially uncertain moves that SpaceX is making, you need to give your head a shake. The atmosphere has already been killed. And the methane that's being unlocked because of it's desecration will kill you, and it will kill me. We killed ourselves with the same type of ignorance towards new, uncertain technology that you have displayed in this comment chain. We took existing, working, and bad technology (ICE vehicles) and paraded it around to the world, and it worked, because we could show people how to use them to make money. We had an MVP with gasoline powered vehicles. People ate it up. Yet electric cars, the correct technology choice, get no mindshare with the serfs because they're heavier, slower, and can't exactly carry a dump truck full of aggregate rock up inclines for 24 hours a day.

You need to stop with the sour grapes, the tall poppy syndrome, and you need to start supporting the people who are actually doing shit. And you need to do it before the window of opportunity to use our technology to save ourselves closes. Keep in mind that me writing this comment to you is an enormous waste of my time, and I really thought it through, so please absorb the meaning in my words and stop having these pissing matches on the internet over things you completely misunderstand.

[averagewall]

If you're saying climate change will kill any significant fraction of people alive today - enough that you expect it to kill you personally, then I think you need some evidence for that. It seems like quite an unbelievable claim - effectively the end of civilization within our lifetime.

[simonh]

I don't believe it's going to kill a lot of people. The planet went through this before during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum[0]. Basically a quantity of carbon roughly equal to our industrial output estimate up to 2100 or 2200 was released into the atmosphere over about 20k years. It stayed there for several hundred thousand years, raising global temperatures by 8 degrees. We're talking aligators and crocodiles living in jungles on Antarctica. Massive die-outs of microbes in the oceans due to acidification and sea levels rising. 70m of sea level rise is locked up in polar ice and then there's also thermal expansion.

None of that is going to happen in our lifetime. But the lifetime of our great grandchildren? There's a good chance. After all, this isn't the first time. However we will have several centuries to adapt. The real issue is we're destroying the natural environment faster than it can possibly adapt or evolve, but we'd be doing that even without climate change.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

[oblib]

I haven't downplayed the tech advances at all here so that's a false narrative you concocted to make a point that ignores what I have done. That is I pointed out a few things that we should be discussing about this.

I really don't care if that causes some shade to fall on your fantasies of what this project might lead to. Not a bit. In fact, I couldn't care any less.

We are not discussing "Sci-Fi" here. This isn't a "Trekkie" convention, it's the real world effects of this we're talking about.