Ask HN: Are We Destroying Earth?
we're creating thousands of megajoules of energy evvery second by splitting atoms,fusion, coal, wood,fossil fuels, water among other things, and over 90% of the generated enery is dissipated as heat in over 75% of electrical appliances that means billions of people contributing directly to destruction of earth daily
i'm concerned could there be a better way or it's the cost of evolution > thousands of megajoules of energy evvery second On a planetary scale, gigawatts are nothing. The total amount of energy that Earth receives from the Sun is about 100,000,000,000 megajoules of energy every second, 99%+ of which gets dissipated as heat. If this is about the climate, then it's important to remember that climate change and pollution ultimately are not a meaningful threat to Earth as a planet - both Earth and its life have been through far far worse[0][1][2][3]. They are only a threat to humans[4]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm... good to know, this reminds me of a quote that "the planet Earth existed before humans and will exist after us" When the Earth was formed, it was a big ball of hot magma, that cooled off to form the Earth's crust. The core is still molten, and when it cools off, we die. This is not likely to happen for billions of years, so we'll probably figure out some way to handle it by then, but you can rest assured that unless we get a Trantor-like population* heat leaving the planet is a bigger concern than heat released by its inhabitants. * Going off of Asimov's description of the population density, not the numbers he mentioned, which were orders of magnitude lower than how he described it. The problem is not the heat, the problem is the greenhouse gasses we’re releasing which trap more of the sun’s heat. It's just one half of the problem,
when looking over the impact of progression from industrial era, you might be able to see the cracks today, and we still won't do anything, humans proceed now to build AI datacenters and keep finding new ways to increase energy consumption, this creates a chart where each "advancements" is a nail in the coffin for tomorrow. Yes but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders