If You knew The Answer (TA)
If you knew the answer to the global problem — if it was a simple flaw of the human being and you knew how to fix it: what are your options?
Ignore it completely. Don’t just pretend but live as if you never knew.
Fix it within yourself. Clean your room or whatever you want to call it. You know the problem is personal and you can fix yourself.
Tell others about the problem. Tell them your thesis and hope they understand and try step 2 themselves.
Exploit the weakness. If people have problems, that means you can find a way to game it (Requirement: Bayesian Sociopathy).
Teach others about the problem. Different than just telling others, this might mean doing something much more interactive. Interactive teaching (read as a noun) may mean physical things, such as visual aids in geometry or teaching morals through animated television fables. Interactive teaching (read as a verb) ideally incites general creativity and creates meaningful practice in structured challenges that closely mirror real life situations.
Change the problem. This one means action; if you want global warming to end, then you better close the factories and pull all the cars off the road — it is that simple. You take their cars and their factories, turn them off, stop using fuels (heck, take out the farmers and their stinky cows too), and global warming is solved.
Change slower and smarter. Fight within the system, not against it. Learn the legalities and markets of oil? No! Become a spy hiding in the executive boardroom of OPEC meetings and learn the system that way (it’s effectively the same thing). You can measure the markets and pray to ween them off with new technologies and you will die before the problem gets too big anyways1.
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Which number will you make it to?
Quick lesson: remember when it was the year 2000 and the scientists said that we would run out of fossil fuels by 2100? We had found them in 1900 (protest, say earlier, but it makes my argument better). We didn’t know how much we had back then, but the fuel is what boomed our technology, not the other way around: we got better because of it, and then, to get more of it. Then we go ahead and say that it’s fine to run out by the year 2100, because Technology will keep us safe. We used the entire planets worth of fuel in 200 years and now we’re great but we have no concept of how people lived for the 10,000 years before that fuel. They had some math back then too, they just hadn’t figured out how to apply it yet (exponential growth or entropy, pick). Our math is even better, our computers are very small now, but that doesn’t matter if the only difference between 1900-2100 and the rest of existence for planet earth is the coexistence of our math, our knowledge about the potential of that fuel, and that fuel itself. Missing just one of those elements is a problem. One more time: the counter-argument is that there has to be a technological solution (i.e. nuclear is promising, solar and wind work a bit so we just make a lot of them… and let me know if you have more). This is always accompanied by saying that necessity will justify any amount of money spent. Pretend that we can transfer to 100% nuclear at 2100 and it will give us a 100% guarantee of fuel from 2100 - 2500; to make the transition, it would cost the “profit” or “net” of the yearly global GDP 150x over and take 50 years or it will take 100x the GDP and 100 years (pretend the 150x, 100x are adjusted for exponential growth and inflation, and that the “net” of our globe is positive). Essentially, this just means getting the plant to agree on something together; a super-project only makes sense to you in terms of capitalism (trade abilities) because that (and maybe aviation, space, some level of communication) is (are) the only global super-project(s). However, whether it is global GDP excess, or some combination of private and tax-raised government funds, this is suggesting that the money is going to follow the source of the fuel — if the best and only next step is nuclear, we will fund it all costs. Practically, this means raising your tax dollars or the electric bill going up, right? Final time: quality of life was poor, they found fuel in the ground, it got better, and quality is at an all-time high today. The part that gets glossed over is all the dead miners; the quality of life came at the cost of quantity of lives. When you see the glorious technological transition to the future energy source, where do you see this quantity coming from? If your answer was large machines powered by fuel or computers powered by… If you aren’t willing to sacrifice your quality of life then you must prepare to work 150% harder at what you’re doing until death or start to make the transition to the next option 20 years ago. Let’s hope the expert engineers got started on option 2 because I do not plan on working 150% harder until I die; I expect technology to make my work easier until I die (said the ‘service industry’ ‘information era’ engineer who writes ‘programs’ with the end goal of letting other people pick up your life-sustaining groceries for pocket change). You are floating off of energy mined from the ground. You are lucky enough to not know that you know that you are going to die before it matters. Our generation shows up to the party late to be cool and when we see that the cake is already cut, we’re still a little pissed that they didn’t wait for us. And even more so, we probably won’t eat any of the cake at all — why eat the cake if we weren’t there for the experience everyone else got — if we want cake, we’ll just go buy one that tastes better (of course, making the cake ourselves might taste better, or worse, doesn’t matter, it’s an entirely different experience that I’m not envious about right now).