It's pretty clear that the HN crowd wants to solve a mute problem with bioengineering and hacking. The ACTUAL problems, you know, the stuff that's so daunting that few startups will ever take on - well, we burry our heads in the sand. Any mention of this fact gets you downvoted.
The same story with energy generation. HN has a big crush on nuclear. Nevermind that nuclear takes decades to approve and to build out - time that we just don't have. But hey, as long as we can feel good about it, right?
> Nevermind that nuclear takes decades to approve and to build out - time that we just don't have. But hey, as long as we can feel good about it, right?
A big part of this is bitterness over the way nuclear energy has been treated. We used to have decades, we spent billions upon billions on renewables while demonizing nuclear energy, and now we don't have decades. Hell, it's very likely that we'd have fusion by now if all that money and effort was redirected to fusion research.
Yep. We had decades of time. We put those decades into what amounts to a boondoggle, with wind and solar and vague hopes that efficiency of generation and storage technology would just materialize with no real clear path. So we have basically nothing to show for the last 50 years.
We could have invested in replacing fossil fuels with extant nuclear technologies and put a huge dent in the problem. And put more research into fusion, which is still subjected to a painful lack of funding that is the biggest roadblock to its eventual viability.
The problem with renewables is that we are not deploying enough of them. I don't see how you can say that we have nothing to show for the last 50 years.
The EU gets 55% of electricity from nuclear + renewables.
Germany is playing on hard mode by shutting down it's nuclear power plants and the added renewables far exceed what little capacity they have shutdown so far.
The root problem is that we consume too much energy and other resources, increasingly. Both per capita and in total. Our biological instinct is to grow in numbers as much as we can, and economical incentive is to sell (and consume) more and more. What can you do about these?
The same story with energy generation. HN has a big crush on nuclear. Nevermind that nuclear takes decades to approve and to build out - time that we just don't have. But hey, as long as we can feel good about it, right?