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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I used to hold more or less the same position as you and am probably still much closer than the median user here, so hopefully I can provide some helpful insight. As far as fossil fuel supplies go, the EROI argument holds in the long run, but the supplies of unconventional oil are quite large and have only been exploited on a large scale in North America as far as I know. This means that absent some other energy revolution, American shale oil and gas production may collapse in the near future, but that would only make us dependent on supplies from places like Australia, again postponing collapse. Other petroleum-derived chemicals can be produced biologically through genetically-modified bacteria and yeast. This is not currently economically viable, but it will be if prices rise high enough and is sustainable in the long-term, particularly if we use things like food waste and sewage as the raw material.

There is a possible solution to both the intermittent nature of wind and solar power and some of the concerns over the implementation of nuclear power, and that is molten salt batteries. The basic idea is that you have a tank that you heat up when you have spare power and can run a steam turbine with when you don't (salt stays liquid under a much higher range of temperatures than water, which is one reason it was selected). What does nuclear have to do with this? Well, if your molten salt battery needs a boost, why not spike in some enriched uranium-derived salts? Even better, a liquid expands as it heats up, so rather than melting down like a solid fuel rod, your salt will naturally move the uranium apart as it reacts, killing the process before things get too hot. As far as supplies of uranium and other radioactive isotopes go, we can use breeder and thorium reactors to extend the timeline until we either find a better power source or start digging it out of the moon and asteroids.

Will any of these solutions be implemented? I have no idea. I still believe in some modified form of John Michael Greer's Long Descent, but I think that sociological factors are as much to blame as physical ones, that there will be no apocalyptic collapse (the Romans didn't go to sleep one night in Augustus's city of marble and wake up in the Dark Ages the next morning; many hardly noticed the change as it happened), and that such a decline will only pave the way for future civilizations to emerge, whatever be their form. Hell, even if the worst-case climate change scenario occurs, all of our descendants living at the poles will be standing on a completely unexploited bounty of natural resources, minerals, and fossil fuels that no one has touched because they are currently under miles of ice, and will be able to start again from there.

Lastly, I think there's something more to this topic besides the engineering aspects that is worth engaging with, and that's the question of whether technological progress and human flourishing are at all aligned. Western culture and its linear concept of progress over time is an anomaly in human history, and as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on whether the whole experiment was a good idea. Most of us here I presume having been raised in this particular worldview, and perhaps an even more extreme version of it in the Rationalist sphere, even contemplating the idea that we might never get to colonize space or achieve immortality is a punch to the gut (or amputation of destiny, if you will). Talk to someone who grew up in basically any other culture about these issues though (to get someone truly non-westernized, they will probably have to be both elderly and illiterate), and they just shrug and get on with their lives, even in the face of societal collapse. The wheel of time spins on and the universe doesn't owe us anything. Time will tell who has the healthier attitude.