Me too! I think some things like “unsustainable food production” will probably slowly resolve itself with increases in automation and efficiency, but I do think runaway global warming will need a drastic solution.
What other ones do you think will be hardest to solve?
>runaway global warming will need a drastic solution
I look forward to our subterranean future. I think the combination of vehicle automation and tunneling technology will allow us to build massive underground systems. If things get too rough on land, we can go below the surface.
I secretly believe that for all of the bluster about Mars, Elon's real goal is to produce the technology base necessary for humans to live here on Earth following the collapse of the biosphere.
Why go to Mars to encounter an atmosphere hostile to life when we can all collectively experience right here at home?
Storms washed out your fiber optic cables? Starlink. No place to hide from the hostile surface? Boring Co. Need to remediate the atmosphere? Solar panels / Powersats -- I believe he's being reserved about Powersats. Need to move things around without easy access to transport? Electric vehicles. Need energy storage through the night time because the baseload power stations have all fallen into disrepair? Grid storage. Building your Gigafactory in a desert? Future-proofing.
It is a nice theory, but there is a problem. The problem is that in the event of collapse, only SOME can reasonably be supported this way. And how to keep the unlucky masses from tearing down the means of survival for the lucky few?
The most effective answer is distance. While unlucky mobs can walk to your solar panels in the desert after civilization breaks down, how are they going to get to Mars? Get a good trampoline to jump on?
>The most effective answer is distance. While unlucky mobs can walk to your solar panels in the desert after civilization breaks down, how are they going to get to Mars? Get a good trampoline to jump on?
On some Mars colony with the foreseeable level of technology for the next 100-200 years you're even more prone to death and to worse climate than whatever might happen here on earth.
Beyond 200 years, Elon Musk could not care less about...
On what evidence do you think that Elon Musk doesn't care about the future beyond 200 years?
I believe that he wants to go down in history. And he wants there to be a history for him to go down in. True, he won't be there for that. But the thought of what it might be is a positive motivation for him.
First of all, the government won't go down without a fight. Those teaming mobs won't be squaring of with Elon's plucky group of scientists, but with a military tasked with defending them and motivated by a promise of survival for themselves and their families.
Second, we don't have to worry about protecting acres of land-based solar panels from damage if we're beaming microwaves from orbit. The receiving arrays would be smaller, more defensible, and cheaper to maintain. The powersat could be weaponized to defend its own receiving array.
Third, regarding distance, it's really hard to dig more than a few meters underground without heavy equipment.
Fourth, in a total collapse scenario -- no food, air becomes unbreathable due to methane pollution from melting permafrost --, the people remaining on the surface will die off rapidly. The death squads may last longer, but aren't going to be able to present a significant risk to a deep underground military base protected by the members of the former government with a powersat on overwatch.
After the chaos of the collapse, these locations could quickly begin the effort to repair the atmosphere using all of those terraforming approaches that we would not tolerate being deploying today: ocean iron seeding, orbital shades, bioengineering.
Then the hardened survivors could return to a generally functioning planet, and then maybe go to Mars with their newfound skills.
EDIT: This might seem preposterous, but it's far more viable than shipping one million people to Mars and building up a manufacturing base under time pressure capable of keeping everyone alive and fed while also reproducing a supply chain capable of developing integrated circuits on a world with a different gravitational constant.
This would make sense if Elon's goal was to keep the government alive. It doesn't if his goal is to keep himself and those he cares about alive.
Also most collapses to worry about are not "the Earth just became immediately uninhabitable" but instead "there is a complete collapse in civil order". Think the power grid goes down like it did in 2003, but on a wider scale and doesn't come back up. As we go from inconvenience to mass starvation, what happens?
If you hide away, the survivors aren't just going to conveniently die off. They are going to remain, and WILL have a grudge.
Sure, I would agree if we weren't facing the threat of multiple degrees of warming causing climate changes that will threaten to upend the social order and melt the permafrost within our lifetimes.
If we had room to speculate on the wide variety of disasters that may befall the Earth within the next, say, 200 years, then perhaps hiding underground isn't the optimal best solution.
Aside: I'm sure you'll agree that it'll be easier for Elon to keep his family alive if he's adequately defended. Regardless, he might not have a choice. The third amendment was not always a thing.
My point remains. Disrupted enough to cause the social order to collapse is a lot less disrupted than disrupted enough to cause the environment to be lethal to be in.
As an example of the difference, consider "widespread crop failures followed by food riots causing a general breakdown of transportation networks". The social order is destroyed. But the air is still breathable. And where you live the local crops might even have been fine until pillaged by hungry people.
On a side note, the 3rd amendment has only come up in one legal case, and it was decided in that one that the violation of the 3rd amendment happened, but the government had a qualified immunity because a reasonable person would not have known of the rule. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engblom_v._Carey for the bizarre case.
Too many humans is ethically unsolvable. There is that solution from the book Inferno where they (spoiler alert) release a chemical warhead of somekind that causes the majority of the world to become infertile. But try voluntarily convincing people they aren't allowed to have children. At least it is better than a war that kills off part of the population.
We also use other limited resources in unsustainable ways even if it won't deplete in the next 50 years it is obviously inevitable. I hear about usable sand for construction being depleted at a rate faster than it is replenished.
What other ones do you think will be hardest to solve?