469
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
469 points (87.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44196 readers
1204 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Many good things have been said. I would add that what give me comfort is that in the present moment, it is really, really hard to tell signal from noise. You often don't know the impact of people or events until many years out. We often said in grad school that you can't write history until at least 30 years have passed from the event. So, it seems chaotic and confusing because it is hard to for us to understand what it important and what is not.
The other thing is that every generation often sees the sky as falling in. An ancient Greek philosophy lamented about his parents had it all figured out and his children where going to ruin everything. That same sense of doom is pretty pervasive.
That is not to dismiss any of the real terrible things out there. Climate change is the big problem on the horizon. Nuclear waste is another. But I think on the balance, we are going to muddle through fine. The great blessing of humanity is that we are adaptable. The curse of humanity is that we are adaptable.
Wow. How did you so quickly leap from an actual problem, Climate Change, to one of the most overblown NON-issues there is?
It does serve as a wonderful example of exactly what they are talking about, funny enough.
I agree with you that climate change > nuclear waste. It is the poly-crisis that touches everything. And I agree that nuclear stuff can be overblown. Most of the time it is fine. But when it goes wrong, it REALLY goes wrong with long term consequences that stretch into tens of thousands of years. It will be dangerous longer than we have had writing or civilization. We will need to signal its danger beyond the current confines of human speech. I feel similarly about the idea of some forms of pollution which will affect places for thousands of years. The thing that gets me is the timescale.
I was watching a post-apocalyptic show the other day and started wondering: if society suddenly collapsed, what would happen to the nuclear power plants? I mean, I know that there are procedures to ramp them down but what then? How would you decommission a nuclear power plant without electricity? Without expertise? What would happen to all the nuclear weapons? I have always wondered if there are catastrophic scenario SOPs for these things.
Now, I have thought that if society does collapse, it will happen more gradually than suddenly. But this little thought exercise made me think that nuclear waste / nuclear energy is one thing that necessitates a certain level of knowledge, expertise, and energy to maintain. A certain level of civilization or modernization.
Again, I could be wrong and I'm willing to change my mind, but that is where I stand at the moment.