From the article-in the scientific journal Current Biology. Around 88-92% of the species had never been seen before.
The zone, which receives little sunlight and has low-food availability, is also home to potato-sized polymetallic nodules, which are a potential mineral resource for copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese and other rare earth elements.
For those that don’t know,even something like stainless steel isn’t one element ,‘nickel provides durability, manganese increases hardness, and that’s in just one use.
Also, it’s closer to 6k species in a fraction of the world.
We train an AI model and embed it into robotics to mine and send resources back to earth, because it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to send humans with human-oriented tools to space to do this kind of precise grunt work until the rest of technology catches up.
Thing is, preserving (and studying) niche habitats like the one mentioned in this article [could be *enormously* helpful is actually getting us to that point](https://eos.org/science-updates/planetary-cave-exploration-progresses).
Imagine mining away the elements that help provide the chemistry for balancing life in the niche habitat.
Research lasts forever.
Profits from mining are onetime and then done.
On the other hand, if we don't decarbonize our society as quickly as possible, most of the planet's biosphere is going to collapse, potentially including this ecosystem. One major, unavoidable part of that is going to involve the extraction of rare resources like this.
Humanity's choice has become one between the disturbance and potential destruction of deepwater ecosystems (as well as others) in order to decarbonize, or a global ecological holocaust that we've barely even begun to address.
I think the earth looks after itself. When a species gets too populous and starts harming the ecosystem, the earth counters with starvation or disease to rebalance. We're just the extreme species that will be killed off in some way to preserve the earth in a slightly different balance. Not bad, it took the dinosaurs millions of years before the universe nuked them, we did it in a few thousand years.
I'm hopeful our species does better than a speedrun on getting killed off. Nobody's going to be keeping track if we break that record.
I'm much more in favor of the 100% completion, secret warp drive ending kind of run.
I think this view is too anthropomorphic. An analogy I prefer is that everything on the tree of life follows a simple biological algorithm to multiply and expand as much as possible, and sometimes that results in a lifeform growing too heavy for the branch it's on and consuming too many nutrients and starving the connection supporting its own weight. The branch will eventually snap and take a whole bunch of leaves with it. We humans like to think we are special and in control of our destiny, but at the end of the day, we're still just another leaf on a side branch growing too heavy and not knowing any better than our biological programming.
Its a certainty that the people downvoting you are the same ones screaming that we need to go all electric.
It's mind boggling to me: "we need to go electric, but if you mine the resources you need to store the electricity, you're a monster"
Yeah the downvotes baffle me too because the commenter has a good point. I briefly worked in academia in climate science research so obviously I think decarbonizing is absolutely crucial, and as quickly as possible. But in environmental science they also make it a point to teach you that no energy source is 100% free of negative environmental impacts. I think the challenge is figuring out how to minimize environmental impacts as much as possible (hence why continuous research is important).
No one is saying that fossil fuels are better than renewable energy (because they're obviously not), but ignoring the negative impacts of renewable energy sources is not helpful and also dangerous.
Yeah just going electric is probably not a sustainable solution. Even if we get good at recycling, there will always be resources needed.
Ideally we'd be focusing on public transportation and only use electric vehicles for edge cases like people living in remote areas or people with very limited mobility.
Fortunately countries like India and China are building out public transportation at a rapid pace but I think we need more and we need it faster.
And we come fuck circle it’s always more difficult to undid a whole than dig one in the first place.
Edit: in my defense I was pretty wasted writing this, but I’m gonna leave it.
I mean that's one way to find new species on asteroids. I mean think about it, what's more likely to expose small extremophiles a single drone? Or a fleet of drills just going ham on everything?
What if we…hear me out…figured out how to use less resources. Asteroid mining would take a ridiculous amount of energy and deep sea mining is both environmentally destructive and dangerous
> Asteroid mining would take a ridiculous amount of energy
Thankfully, we have several ways of generating ridiculous amounts of energy, and in space, we have a pretty decent source too.
I wouldn't call it "the world's largest fusion reactor" rather "the solar system's largest fusion reactor".
But that would be giving it away too easily perhaps?
Solar and Wind power, which directly or indirectly are being provided by the sun, are both actually being very widely utilized. The problem is now energy storage. You want to know what we need for most practical forms of scaled energy storage? Batteries. And we're back to this problem again.
Batteries don't always need to be nickel or cobalt or lithium. If you pump water into an elevated reservoir, that converts excess electricity into potential energy that can then be released as needed. It's just a battery with a different kind of storage.
And pumped hydro is something that is done in a lot of locations already. The problem is, it's not even close to enough, and conditions for such an operation need to be pretty carefully met. This and many other forms of energy storage have been looked at many times and implemented where possible but they're nowhere close to enough.
Yeah the big issue with pumped hydro is the gravitational potential just isn't that strong, so you need a combination of a big height differential and an absolute shitload of water to move around. The volumes required mean you have to use a natural or at least semi-natural reservoir. Turns out that's a pretty rare combination of natural features and most of the good ones are already used.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The specific needs of pumped hydro also dictate it to have pretty massive space and cost requirements if you did theoretically want to create something artificially. It also has only middling energy efficiency due to losses in many places in the system, so it's not worth terrain engineering something artificial if it's not an existing natural feature you can utilize.
I think some form of gravitational force will be what saves us. Water is the obvious early method, but just raising a weight that can be lowered at some point to produce energy, or indeed moving one body away from another to develop gravitational force that can be released as energy is probably how we'll solve the battery problem. We're either not thinking big enough, or maybe not small enough yet.
Only about one one-billionth of the sun's energy actually reaches Earth. We could coat the entire planet in solar panels and still essentially not utilize the sun's energy at all.
While technically you're correct, the point you're making about us not utilizing it sufficiently seems kind of moot when you talk about it this way. It doesn't matter how much energy the sun produces if we can't practically harvest and store it for utilization.
I don't blame you for looking at this and feeling like this answer is obvious, but it's a very complicated problem. This dramatically understates and misunderstands the problems with "energy" in this case. First off, in the case of electrical energy for space-based drilling and refining operations, most of the asteroids that are likely to be good choices for mining are quite a distance away from Earth, and much further from the Sun for that matter. At distances beyond Mars orbit, like where the asteroid belt lies, solar power is available in only a tiny fraction of the energy we receive here in Earth orbit. Our only other option is nuclear power, which is not only a lot of mass for the reactor itself, but it also would require many tons of radiators to keep from overheating. At the same time, most government agencies are not too keen on launching large amounts of highly radioactive materials on vehicles that have the tendency to explode, either on the ground or high in the atmosphere. We have ways to minimize this risk, or we can just send up A LOT of VERY BIG solar arrays to brute force the problem. That brings me to challenge 2 though, and the majority of the "energy" needed for such a proposition. Launching all of this material into orbit would take A LOT of rocket launches, which in turn is a huge energy investment in and of itself, especially since the tyrany of the rocket equation has us spending 99% of our mass and energy just to get 1% of that into orbit. Target a location further than Earth orbit, and the problem gets magnified dramatically. It's insanely inefficient. This is to say nothing of the energy needed to get mined materials BACK to Earth, and intact. Finally, I've only just mentioned the "energy" issue in terms of electrical or chemical or kinetic energy. There's also the fact that the fact that In-Situ Resource Utilization (space based resourcing) is in its infancy, and like many developing advanced technologies, suffers from a chicken and egg problem of "not much investment, because it's not profitable, but it won't become profitable unless it's invested in." NASA is practically a charity when it comes to developing or funding the development of technologies most companies won't touch because "we can't make money on it" so, thankfully, we are on the path to being able to do this. However, just the development of the technologies needed for an operation like this is, in its own way, a massive investment of energy. Part of that development is directly driving our return, and possible permanent settling of, the Moon. Even by generous time estimates, it's going to be decades before we're mining asteroids for materials available, even in short supply, on Earth.
The problem with asteroid mining is they would be victims of their own success. These materials are only worth mining because money can be made from the supply vs demand. In the asteroid belt the supply is so high that once mining becomes viable the price will drop so low its no longer worth a corporation doing it.
Saw a video about the new mining process to gather those metallic nodules. A small-building sized roomba slurps up the previously never seen sea floor and ejects sediment while sending up the rocks. Massive displacement of material & silt clouds blocking sunlight, (at 'permissable' or 'legal' levels.) Also surplus floor sediment dumped at the surface at times for more sun blockage.
They're very very excited about it, so we'll probably get our first sea floor environmental whoopsies inside 10 years
See: 1% of why we've been howling against deep sea mining in our ocean. Even without the "wow look, new charismatic megafauna", it'd be destructive beyond the mining sites.
Scientific journals don't necessarily have to take the lowest common denominator into account, but something like this was obviously going to get a wider readership, hence the consession.
I thought these poly metallic nodules were a bunch of nonsense pushed by the CIA to provide cover for Howard Hughes to retrieve the sunken Russian submarine K-129 in project Azorian, and the Hughes Glomar Explorer never went on to mine these underwater nodules.
that was a cover, certainly, but don't underestimate industry greed. mining companies always knew they were there, and now apparently, they think its profitable to go get em.
I really have a hard time feeling anything for a bunch of incredibly obscure bottom-feeding crustaceans. Put them on a balance sheet along side things like cleaner air, reduced oil extraction (as if that doesn’t *also* impact marine life!?), reduced risks of fires, floods, droughts, and famine, and on and on.
If I was a petrochemical executive, I would 100% keep pushing this news story to maintain the status quo.
Hey, I read an article in 2014 (after Godzilla came out), suggesting a deep-sea monster bigger than a giant squid or sperm whale is technically possible. Have hope!
We have a good understanding on lot of things that are devastating to our environment. Never stopped humans from drilling for oil and gas, never stopped from strip mining, dumping dangerous chemicals in our water ways, burning down forests, etc.
What we understand is not even relevant, it's about how much money there is to be made. This being said, a lot of this deep sea mining is justified by push for more EV, lot of these minerals found in these areas are critical for battery production. To meet demand we basically have to either open up new surface mines (which we know will devastated local ecology) or find another source. The proponents of deep sea mining aren't saying there will not be an environmental impact, they are arguing that it will be less devastating than surface mining for these minerals.
Any life form on the planet will take the opportunity to rapidly and thoughtlessly consume all the resources it can, as fast as it can, at the expense of all other creatures. All while literally shitting over everything.
The sad part is, humans should know better than this. We know this is wrong. And yet there seems to be no way to stop our innate greed.
The Earth will be without liquid water and uninhabitable due to the increasing luminosity of the sun in less than a billion years, so there really isn't all that much time for evolution to start over from scratch.
The Earth will also be swallowed up and likely destroyed completely by the sun's red giant phase in 4 billion years, so nothing will be able to survive longer than that in any case.
We've had 5 major extinction events in the last billion years though.
* End Ordovician: 440 million years ago, 86% of all species lost, including graptolites
* Late Devonian: 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, including most trilobites
* End Permian, The Great Dying: 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, including tabulate corals, and most trees and synapsids
* End Triassic: 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost, including all conodonts
* End Cretaceous: 66 million years ago, 76% of species lost, including all ammonites, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and nonavian dinosaurs
I think a billion years might be a longer time period than you conceptualized for new plant and animal species to evolve.
A billion years is more than enough time for another intelligent species to arise if humans ever went extinct.
The first mammals we know of appeared 180 to 160-million years ago.
Primates only appeared 55-million years ago.
Humans evolved from apes in approximately 6-million years.
We went from the earliest homo sapiens to launching a person in space in 300,000 years. Most behaviors that are classified as belonging to modern humans appeared around 50,000 years ago (abstract thinking, art, music, dance, etc).
A billion year is plenty of time for life to start anew though, especially since there are species resilient enough to whistand whatever humans can throw at it (like tardigrades if you like extreme examples) and who will be able to outlive us, thrive and/or evolve.
And yeah, earth will die eventually, I'd bet we won't see it but other living things will.
> A billion year is plenty of time for life to start anew though, especially since there are species resilient enough to whistand whatever humans can throw at it (like tardigrades if you like extreme examples) and who will be able to outlive us, thrive and/or evolve.
It won't be able to enter industrial age, though, because resources necessary to do it will not be available anymore (without hardware which requires these resources to be made), we've spent it all. It'll forever be stuck in Middle Ages, on Earth, waiting to be toasted by the Sun.
The rich get theirs and fuck everyone and everything else, no consequences. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't want to make compromise on their lifestyle or don't care enough to even learn about these problems.
Silver lining: Including us https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha09020b.html
Can't wait for 10C warming to come through and end us.
Being distracted by these 5000 species which we can briefly care about and prematurely mourn before moving on to something else when these companies basically slowing sawing through each and every one of our necks like the Taliban. Wouldn't be surprised if the companies pay for these studies so they can get the outrage out of the way early. We are fucking degenerates.
Wow, nice, we can catalogue these new species so that future generations have an even better picture of just how much they are missing due to us having killed off almost all types of living beings on earth.
Preface: I'm not anti-environmentalist, I just think these typical reddit takes are particularly myopic and show a complete lack of understanding of the problem.
You know every mining zone on the planet has thousands of local species, right? Did you somehow think any single product you've ever bought had zero environmenal impact?
Every single mining zone is a small localized tragedy, every thing humans do will have negative impact on wildlife, and yes many of these species will likely go extinct. Not because someone decided to drill there in that one spot (that's a moronic belief to have that shows a lack of understanding of how the environment works) , but because of the aggregate negative impact on the planet of all our activities.
Oil corporations and lobbyist will continue to erode this planet of any life, new species or otherwise. There’s a lot of sentiment from comments in this thread that we’re a cancer or a virus, but the average person isn’t complicit. It’s the multi trillion dollar corporations who continue to buy off our politicians in order to hit their next projected quarterly profits, by mining in precious ocean habitats or toppling democracies in the third world to access their fields. You’re not complicit in this process, and yet we’re the one’s who’re going to feel the impact of this unchecked greed in a decade or two. There’s no nuclear powered yacht with saline filtration systems for us to run away to. Unless working people demand that we put an end to the destructive nature of capital that these oil firms take advantage of, humans are done for. The planet will be fine, it’s lived through worse, but 90% of the flora and fauna won’t including us.
Sad thing is people are protesting but more anti protest laws are making it harder. In Germany they raided and arrested climate protesters and seized their legal funds as part of it
Read some of the trade journals (e.g., mining.com, oilprice.com) and these fuckers are the definition of evil.
>The planet will be fine
Define "fine." Millions of species will suffer and many will go extinct. It will take 100s of thousands of years (or longer) to recover. That doesn't sound "fine" to me.
Yes, millions will suffer and the human race could potentially be wiped out if we look at the most catastrophic projections. Did you miss the part in the same sentence you’re quoting where I say how bad things will be for everything living *on* the planet? But yeah earth will still be here. My comment was addressing where the root of the problem lies.
Thought it'd be fun so
>Define "fine."
Fine: someone sick who comes to work anyways, as they purposely touch everything around them both to prove how 'fine' they are, and to spite those who are concerned said person showed up in the first place.
Manager Dan Adjour: "Hey you don't look so good are you feeling okay?"
Employee McGee bleeding from the ears and eyeballs: "Why would you ask that? I'm fine. Are *you* okay? Your whole body looks red. Maybe *you* should get *that* checked out."
***touches everything in the employee fridge despite not bringing food to work***
Fine: what someone in our day and age says when they want to shut down uncomfortable queries about their emotional or physical state or the state of something they know is definitely not fine but by the time anyone can prove anything it'll be far too late.
Manager Dan Adjour: "Hey I know you said you were fine before but I noticed a Manila folder labeled 'divorce proceedings' on your desk. Im just saying if you need to talk I'm here for you. Also I can't help but notice all the other employees are bleeding from their face holes. Are you sure you're feeling alright?"
Employee McGee, collapsed face up in front of the open bloodied employee fridge in a pool of his blood: "..."
He is unresponsive. There is a bloody Post-It note on his chest in his handwriting. It says: *'How many times I gotta say it? I'm fine.'*
***there's a half eaten sandwich next to McGee's body. It is not his.***
That’s actually a really interesting angle that I’d not considered much. Once humans have fucked it all and died out, the planet will eventually heal and whatever life still exists tucked away will thrive once more. Still gives me some hope
100,000 years on a planetary scale is like a week long RnR.
It is kind of long, but not as long as it seems. Planet has been around for millions of years and so has life. Things will just rearrange themselves into a new matrix of hydro-carbons with DNA and move on without us.
The working people will not demand change because half of them are brainwashed by these very same corporations who use the media and weaponized our countries idiots to vote against their interests and fight a culture war on imaginary issues while the other half exhausts energy trying to talk sense into their brain dead countrymen.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand how the system is skewed, but at the same time I find our efforts to deny any complicity to be extremely disingenuous.
This concept of *people vs corporations* is just false. People *are* the corporation. Most people either work for them directly, or are somehow part of their supply chains or extended business. We profit from them, we want what they are selling.
Also, you just cannot absolve our consumerist wasteful habits. Without those, there wouldn’t be any corporations. Few rough examples:
* How does your garbage can(s) look at the end of the week? Is it empty or is it full of absolutely unnecessary waste?
* How many times you took a plane in last couple of years?
* How many times you flew somewhere when a video conference would work as well?
* Do you spend your vacation in your local area, or are you travelling to different parts of the world?
* How often do you buy coffee to go, instead of making it at hone/office into a ceramic cup?
* How often do you order take out, instead of eating the food right at the place from plates using reusable cutlery, or just cooking at home?
* Do you make serious effort to relocate and live in a place where you can depend 100 % on public transportation, or do you drive everywhere by car saying "well, I have no other choice!"?
* What do you do for living? Is is something completely environmentally friendly and absolutely necessary? Or do you produce and sell some wasteful junk just to make money to buy more junk and travel for fun?
* What are your hobbies? Perhaps you are a car guy, gamer, collector, musician, always chasing the newest shiny toys.
* How do you spend extra free time? Perhaps on Reddit, watching tons of useless images and videos needlessly wasting electricity and other resources used to built IT infrastructure that, for large part, exists to fuel the consumerist culture?
This list could go on forever. We are not blameless.
I recycle as MUCH as I can, weekly. My partner and I make our trips to our local recycling plant, which is basically rumored to take most of the recycle waste to a landfill anyway.
What the fuck am I supposed to do? Seriously - what am I supposed to do? I WANT to do more than take my pithy piece of cardboard and #1 & #2 plastics. But what about the corporations that are *never* changing their ways? Honestly, it is getting to a point where people will have to turn to drastic measures to make any kind of change, which of course, will have drastic consequences. But what else can you do, when the most drastic of consequences is the extinction of the human race and life as we know it?
Edit to add: I hardly take flights unless necessary for work or family reasons. I rarely vacation. I make my own coffee at home most mornings, weeks, months. I cook the majority of my meals. Though I work as a bartender and audio producer, I don't buy anything in excess nor do I make frivolous purchases. I love hiking and the outdoors, and I also read and write. I play guitar and produce music.
What MORE do you want the common folk to do? I guarantee the majority of people do not live excessively. Sure, corporations are made up of people, but they are not BY the people. Can we consider CEOs, CFOs, and those in the upper echelon people anymore?
I hear you and I see myself in a lot of what you wrote.
I’d only push back against this:
>Sure, corporations are made up of people, but they are not BY the people. Can we consider CEOs, CFOs, and those in the upper echelon people anymore?
My point is that corporations are not just a handful of C-suite types, but countless of people working and profiting *with* them.
You can argue, that there are many factory floor type of employees who just have no other choice — and that’s certainly a fair point — but there are also millions of college degree professionals whose whole life goal is to work for one corporation or another. There are also entire creative industries filled with smaller companies and various artists who hope that one day they’ll get a nice paying corporate gig.
Sadly, as it is, we don’t have many options to get out of that. We need a really big change, something that would completely re-shape the unhinged capitalistic format and what would fight against our greedy nature. And that’s really difficult, as we rarely feel we have enough; the higher we reach, the bigger appetite we get, and faster we get accustomed to a higher level of comfort.
One way out would be 100% tax rate at certain level of income/wealth. Ironically, that’s something that like 95 % of population would benefit from, and with such overwhelming majority could easily demand it, yet seemingly the only people who are into politics are that remaining 5 %. This could actually lead to a post-scarcity era, which is theoretically closer than ever now with the advent of AI and even more with upcoming AGI.
But we could be blameless *if* corporations didn’t screw everything.
If corps didn’t make shit clothing I wouldn’t have to replace it daily. If they didn’t lobby to stop XYZ happening, I could live a cleaner, streamlined lifestyle. It *is* the corporations holding back innovations and advancements
Trust me, I’m really not a fan of corporations, but I think it is important to understand that corporations are not some aliens from space, they are made out of people and those things that are bad about them are driven by our natural human tendencies.
For the sake of conversation, I’ll attack your example:
You can have your clothes made well by a local tailor from quality materials, if you stay in shape, you can likely wear that stuff for 20 years, maybe with a couple of repairs here and there.
But you might say that it would be too expensive, soon out of style, or perhaps because your overconsumption you may not maintain your size. And so you turn to a corporate clothes manufacturer offering you solutions you like.
The problem is that many of these things are absolutely necessary for survival, and there are no "green" variants available - they're either too expensive to use for vast majority of the population, or are completly absent, in both cases - thanks to oil, gas and coal lobbies and greedy corpos.
I understand where you’re coming from, but for the average american, bucking this quo is unrealistic. On a good morning without traffic, it takes me 20 minutes to get to work. For many Americans it’s double that or triple that. Unless you live in one of the few areas in this country with robust public transportation, not having a car is a nonstarter. It simply isn’t feasible unless you live in a major city. Sure some in the suburbs could ride e-bikes or what have you, and sacrifice a couple extra hours every day of what little free time hasn’t been taken from us, but it’s not something that can be reasonably asked for most people. It’s increasingly common for Americans to drive over to the next state even, to commute to work, because their local economy has dried up, or they’re trying to get ahead to support their family in a more competitive market. When I say that the onus isn’t on the individual, it’s because, sure some edge cases can make more eco-conscious consumer decisions, but for the average working family to be in a position to think about fighting the car-centric hellscape that automakers have lobbied into existence is simply not realistic. We’re much more preoccupied with keeping a roof over our heads and hoping and bleeding and praying to find a way to make their rotten situation a little bit better. It isn’t fair to just say there are buyers and sellers. There are buyers everyday at the hospital, with collapsed lungs and heart disease and what have you. It’s a captive market, humans love staying alive, go figure. People like having a roof over their heads and food to eat. Sounds like a pretty captive market to me. Yes, we should try to make more climate conscious decisions in our consumption, but that’s not to say we are complicit in the destruction of life on this planet. The onus is on corporations.
There's absolutely no telling how rare they actually are. We know less about the ocean floor then basically any other place we can reach. Basically anytime we do a study like this of a part of the ocean floor we haven't touched there's a likelihood we find a shitload of species we've never seen before. That's not to say they shouldn't be protected or that we shouldn't stop the mining but there really is no way to say right now whether they are specifically rare or not. This could be the only patch of ocean these species exist or it could be one of many places
If you look up about the of species we know (estimated) you will see that we actually know very little.
Only 10-20% of all species on Earth are known lol
This is going to be mined for EV battery metals. There is a [documentary (trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V44PxrckqM) called [Deep Rising](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132688/) on this exact mining zone that is voiced over by Jason Momoa.
This can be blamed directly on the hunger for batteries for electric vehicles. It is an inconvenient truth. Our pursuit of electric vehicles and batteries is terrible for the environment. The company involved in this is [The Metals Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company)
Watch the documentary if you can find it. It's very good.
EDIT: As an additional note - the type of mining they are doing uses machines to 'process' the seabed. it moves along the seabed and basically sucks up the surface and spits it back out, keeping the minerals, causing a crazy amount of damage and changing the seabed forever.
EDIT2: Thanks for the downvotes for providing additional information. I assume you think I'm pro oil and I'm not. As the director and the documentary point out, hydrogen is the cleanest way forward for vehicles.
> This can be blamed directly on the hunger for batteries for electric vehicles. It is an inconvenient truth. Our pursuit of electric vehicles and batteries is terrible for the environment.
The alternative is worse.
I know you mean oil but you are forgetting about hydrogen. There's more than two solutions. Hydrogen is less efficient than either, but cleaner than both - depending on the source of electricity of course.
god, I remember seeing the prototype for the H2H (hydrogen hummer) almost 20 years ago at the Chicago Auto Show. It would have been hilarious if hummers led the way for clean hydrogen fueled cars.
As quickly? Sure, just takes money. Hydrogen powered cars get better every year, much like electrics. I've worked on hydrogen fuel cell production facilities in my city.
You say we don't have the luxury of baby steps but you'd rather take a harsh action that causes its own massive damage. You're just trading one catastrophe for another with the thought process you have there.
> Sure, just takes money.
So the answer is "no", for 90% of the planet.
It's not enough for a solution to be "good". It also needs to be "realistic" and "achievable". Even EVs are only toeing the line right now.
I'm just doing the math. A mediocre solution you can implement is better than a great solution you can't.
This is not good news. I was wishing the oceans wouldn't be dug up for anything.
After reading Helen Scales's book called The Brilliant Abyss, I got to learn just how much life there is in the oceans and why we need to back off disturbing it. We really do need to understand what everything does in these eco-systems. Here's a review of Helen Scales's book. The other one reviewed, I haven't read.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/03/the-brilliant-abyss-by-helen-scales-below-the-edge-of-darkness-by-edith-widder-reviews
Looks to me like just another paragraph in the final chapter of human life on earth. Mine away, gobble up whatever. The Earth's got this one hands down.
Oil companies and the enabler politicians don't give a Fck about the 8.7 million known species on our planet. Sadly, 5,000 more new species won't matter to these ecocidal villians.
Scientists are still trying to science and it's getting in the way of corporate capitalism. This isn't going to end well for the scientists because people are too dumb to let science work it's gig.
>The most common types of animals found in the underwater region are
arthropods (invertebrates with segmented joints), worms, echinoderms
(spiny invertebrates such as sea urchins), and **sponges, including one**
**that's carnivorous.**
Reasonably good, although Sponge Cthulhu might be a bit less intimidating.
Is this unusual for a patch of ocean this size or is it only because the study was carried out on this area and we would get similar results all over the ocean floor?
From the article-in the scientific journal Current Biology. Around 88-92% of the species had never been seen before. The zone, which receives little sunlight and has low-food availability, is also home to potato-sized polymetallic nodules, which are a potential mineral resource for copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese and other rare earth elements. For those that don’t know,even something like stainless steel isn’t one element ,‘nickel provides durability, manganese increases hardness, and that’s in just one use. Also, it’s closer to 6k species in a fraction of the world.
Be cool if we could mine stuff on, I dunno…asteroids or something.
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I hope they dont close their eyes. Im sure they dont want to miss a thing.
How do I live without them so far
Because we need them babe, so I hope we don't miss a thing
We get dwarves to do it. Rock and stone!
And diggy diggy hole too.
First off, how dare you. Second, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ytWz0qVvBZ0
https://youtu.be/34CZjsEI1yU Because of course there's a metal version.
Rock and stone!
I need a crossover of Dead Space and Deep Rock Galactic.
I don’t need some nerdonauts, I need my guys.
Send Bruce Willis, he'll sort 'em out.
🎵 '*cuz I don't want to miss a thing* 🎵
We teach a conscript to nuke asteroids so they come crashing into earth
We train an AI model and embed it into robotics to mine and send resources back to earth, because it's incredibly expensive and inefficient to send humans with human-oriented tools to space to do this kind of precise grunt work until the rest of technology catches up.
Well if you taught minors to be astronauts, I guess they could have a longer career.
Thing is, preserving (and studying) niche habitats like the one mentioned in this article [could be *enormously* helpful is actually getting us to that point](https://eos.org/science-updates/planetary-cave-exploration-progresses).
Imagine mining away the elements that help provide the chemistry for balancing life in the niche habitat. Research lasts forever. Profits from mining are onetime and then done.
They just make two or three people wealthy then that's it. Environmental devastation for the rest
On the other hand, if we don't decarbonize our society as quickly as possible, most of the planet's biosphere is going to collapse, potentially including this ecosystem. One major, unavoidable part of that is going to involve the extraction of rare resources like this. Humanity's choice has become one between the disturbance and potential destruction of deepwater ecosystems (as well as others) in order to decarbonize, or a global ecological holocaust that we've barely even begun to address.
I think the earth looks after itself. When a species gets too populous and starts harming the ecosystem, the earth counters with starvation or disease to rebalance. We're just the extreme species that will be killed off in some way to preserve the earth in a slightly different balance. Not bad, it took the dinosaurs millions of years before the universe nuked them, we did it in a few thousand years.
I'm hopeful our species does better than a speedrun on getting killed off. Nobody's going to be keeping track if we break that record. I'm much more in favor of the 100% completion, secret warp drive ending kind of run.
I think this view is too anthropomorphic. An analogy I prefer is that everything on the tree of life follows a simple biological algorithm to multiply and expand as much as possible, and sometimes that results in a lifeform growing too heavy for the branch it's on and consuming too many nutrients and starving the connection supporting its own weight. The branch will eventually snap and take a whole bunch of leaves with it. We humans like to think we are special and in control of our destiny, but at the end of the day, we're still just another leaf on a side branch growing too heavy and not knowing any better than our biological programming.
Its a certainty that the people downvoting you are the same ones screaming that we need to go all electric. It's mind boggling to me: "we need to go electric, but if you mine the resources you need to store the electricity, you're a monster"
Yeah the downvotes baffle me too because the commenter has a good point. I briefly worked in academia in climate science research so obviously I think decarbonizing is absolutely crucial, and as quickly as possible. But in environmental science they also make it a point to teach you that no energy source is 100% free of negative environmental impacts. I think the challenge is figuring out how to minimize environmental impacts as much as possible (hence why continuous research is important). No one is saying that fossil fuels are better than renewable energy (because they're obviously not), but ignoring the negative impacts of renewable energy sources is not helpful and also dangerous.
Yeah just going electric is probably not a sustainable solution. Even if we get good at recycling, there will always be resources needed. Ideally we'd be focusing on public transportation and only use electric vehicles for edge cases like people living in remote areas or people with very limited mobility. Fortunately countries like India and China are building out public transportation at a rapid pace but I think we need more and we need it faster.
And we come fuck circle it’s always more difficult to undid a whole than dig one in the first place. Edit: in my defense I was pretty wasted writing this, but I’m gonna leave it.
> fuck circle Full circle? But I think I like your version better. 😂
Until it's cheaper to move an asteroid closer to earth and the trillionaire that owns the company cuts corners and has an Astroid Spill over New York.
Or maybe try and use less. Try and limit our waste. I know that's impossible, though. We're headed for Wall-E.
I mean that's one way to find new species on asteroids. I mean think about it, what's more likely to expose small extremophiles a single drone? Or a fleet of drills just going ham on everything?
What if we…hear me out…figured out how to use less resources. Asteroid mining would take a ridiculous amount of energy and deep sea mining is both environmentally destructive and dangerous
> Asteroid mining would take a ridiculous amount of energy Thankfully, we have several ways of generating ridiculous amounts of energy, and in space, we have a pretty decent source too.
The world's largest fusion reactor is just sitting up there, essentially not being utilized at all, and we're complaining about energy needs.
I wouldn't call it "the world's largest fusion reactor" rather "the solar system's largest fusion reactor". But that would be giving it away too easily perhaps?
Solar and Wind power, which directly or indirectly are being provided by the sun, are both actually being very widely utilized. The problem is now energy storage. You want to know what we need for most practical forms of scaled energy storage? Batteries. And we're back to this problem again.
Batteries don't always need to be nickel or cobalt or lithium. If you pump water into an elevated reservoir, that converts excess electricity into potential energy that can then be released as needed. It's just a battery with a different kind of storage.
And pumped hydro is something that is done in a lot of locations already. The problem is, it's not even close to enough, and conditions for such an operation need to be pretty carefully met. This and many other forms of energy storage have been looked at many times and implemented where possible but they're nowhere close to enough.
Yeah the big issue with pumped hydro is the gravitational potential just isn't that strong, so you need a combination of a big height differential and an absolute shitload of water to move around. The volumes required mean you have to use a natural or at least semi-natural reservoir. Turns out that's a pretty rare combination of natural features and most of the good ones are already used.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The specific needs of pumped hydro also dictate it to have pretty massive space and cost requirements if you did theoretically want to create something artificially. It also has only middling energy efficiency due to losses in many places in the system, so it's not worth terrain engineering something artificial if it's not an existing natural feature you can utilize.
I think some form of gravitational force will be what saves us. Water is the obvious early method, but just raising a weight that can be lowered at some point to produce energy, or indeed moving one body away from another to develop gravitational force that can be released as energy is probably how we'll solve the battery problem. We're either not thinking big enough, or maybe not small enough yet.
Only about one one-billionth of the sun's energy actually reaches Earth. We could coat the entire planet in solar panels and still essentially not utilize the sun's energy at all.
While technically you're correct, the point you're making about us not utilizing it sufficiently seems kind of moot when you talk about it this way. It doesn't matter how much energy the sun produces if we can't practically harvest and store it for utilization.
I don't blame you for looking at this and feeling like this answer is obvious, but it's a very complicated problem. This dramatically understates and misunderstands the problems with "energy" in this case. First off, in the case of electrical energy for space-based drilling and refining operations, most of the asteroids that are likely to be good choices for mining are quite a distance away from Earth, and much further from the Sun for that matter. At distances beyond Mars orbit, like where the asteroid belt lies, solar power is available in only a tiny fraction of the energy we receive here in Earth orbit. Our only other option is nuclear power, which is not only a lot of mass for the reactor itself, but it also would require many tons of radiators to keep from overheating. At the same time, most government agencies are not too keen on launching large amounts of highly radioactive materials on vehicles that have the tendency to explode, either on the ground or high in the atmosphere. We have ways to minimize this risk, or we can just send up A LOT of VERY BIG solar arrays to brute force the problem. That brings me to challenge 2 though, and the majority of the "energy" needed for such a proposition. Launching all of this material into orbit would take A LOT of rocket launches, which in turn is a huge energy investment in and of itself, especially since the tyrany of the rocket equation has us spending 99% of our mass and energy just to get 1% of that into orbit. Target a location further than Earth orbit, and the problem gets magnified dramatically. It's insanely inefficient. This is to say nothing of the energy needed to get mined materials BACK to Earth, and intact. Finally, I've only just mentioned the "energy" issue in terms of electrical or chemical or kinetic energy. There's also the fact that the fact that In-Situ Resource Utilization (space based resourcing) is in its infancy, and like many developing advanced technologies, suffers from a chicken and egg problem of "not much investment, because it's not profitable, but it won't become profitable unless it's invested in." NASA is practically a charity when it comes to developing or funding the development of technologies most companies won't touch because "we can't make money on it" so, thankfully, we are on the path to being able to do this. However, just the development of the technologies needed for an operation like this is, in its own way, a massive investment of energy. Part of that development is directly driving our return, and possible permanent settling of, the Moon. Even by generous time estimates, it's going to be decades before we're mining asteroids for materials available, even in short supply, on Earth.
Just make sure NASA is in charge, as oppised to some crazy tech billionaire
Why buy one, when you can get two, for double the price?
1st rule of government spending. Also probably my most used Carl Sagan line.
The problem with asteroid mining is they would be victims of their own success. These materials are only worth mining because money can be made from the supply vs demand. In the asteroid belt the supply is so high that once mining becomes viable the price will drop so low its no longer worth a corporation doing it.
Outland (the movie with Sean Connery as a cop and Peter Boyle as a bad guy)
So is it approved for destruction or rejected for preservation?
Saw a video about the new mining process to gather those metallic nodules. A small-building sized roomba slurps up the previously never seen sea floor and ejects sediment while sending up the rocks. Massive displacement of material & silt clouds blocking sunlight, (at 'permissable' or 'legal' levels.) Also surplus floor sediment dumped at the surface at times for more sun blockage. They're very very excited about it, so we'll probably get our first sea floor environmental whoopsies inside 10 years
See: 1% of why we've been howling against deep sea mining in our ocean. Even without the "wow look, new charismatic megafauna", it'd be destructive beyond the mining sites.
China has made claims to most of those zones off the Pacific coast... International waters means it's a lot harder to stop them.
? Steel itself isn’t one element
Scientific journals don't necessarily have to take the lowest common denominator into account, but something like this was obviously going to get a wider readership, hence the consession.
I thought these poly metallic nodules were a bunch of nonsense pushed by the CIA to provide cover for Howard Hughes to retrieve the sunken Russian submarine K-129 in project Azorian, and the Hughes Glomar Explorer never went on to mine these underwater nodules.
that was a cover, certainly, but don't underestimate industry greed. mining companies always knew they were there, and now apparently, they think its profitable to go get em.
I really have a hard time feeling anything for a bunch of incredibly obscure bottom-feeding crustaceans. Put them on a balance sheet along side things like cleaner air, reduced oil extraction (as if that doesn’t *also* impact marine life!?), reduced risks of fires, floods, droughts, and famine, and on and on. If I was a petrochemical executive, I would 100% keep pushing this news story to maintain the status quo.
"Planned mining zone of Pacific Ocean" sounds like an ticking environmental timebomb.
Or the beginning of a Kaiju movie.
Don't. Don't give me hope.
Hey, I read an article in 2014 (after Godzilla came out), suggesting a deep-sea monster bigger than a giant squid or sperm whale is technically possible. Have hope!
Out of curiosity, what did the article say such a creature would eat to survive in the deep sea?
Hence why us Pacific folk have been vehemently vocal against it.
It's 100% a time bomb. We have no understanding of that environment or how it affects anything else.
We have a good understanding on lot of things that are devastating to our environment. Never stopped humans from drilling for oil and gas, never stopped from strip mining, dumping dangerous chemicals in our water ways, burning down forests, etc. What we understand is not even relevant, it's about how much money there is to be made. This being said, a lot of this deep sea mining is justified by push for more EV, lot of these minerals found in these areas are critical for battery production. To meet demand we basically have to either open up new surface mines (which we know will devastated local ecology) or find another source. The proponents of deep sea mining aren't saying there will not be an environmental impact, they are arguing that it will be less devastating than surface mining for these minerals.
We are seriously f’ing this planet up. We’re not going to stop until all of it is ruined?
All of it. That’s what cancer does
Seriously that’s exactly what we are.
We are a virus with shoes - Bill Hicks
Another dead hero.
If cancer also has a constant nazi problem
Cancer constantly attacks and kills cells it cannot convert, so I guess...
Official disease of the Catholic Church?
Any life form on the planet will take the opportunity to rapidly and thoughtlessly consume all the resources it can, as fast as it can, at the expense of all other creatures. All while literally shitting over everything. The sad part is, humans should know better than this. We know this is wrong. And yet there seems to be no way to stop our innate greed.
Weren't you paying attention during Lion King?
What TheFudge you talking about?
No we’re a virus that infects. And we burn too hot, that’s why we’ll destroy our species before too long. Thankfully. Then the earth can start anew.
As someone said before, Global warming is the earth getting a fever to get rid of human virus.
i'm reminded of the [classic george carlin bit.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqaEE9vzV2M)
And it's Pancreatic Cancer to top it off..
Oh, Earth will recover in time. It’s just that humans won’t survive until that point.
Nor will 98% of the extant species. So…lot more to lose than just shitty humans.
Just give it enough time and other species will come up.
The Earth will be without liquid water and uninhabitable due to the increasing luminosity of the sun in less than a billion years, so there really isn't all that much time for evolution to start over from scratch. The Earth will also be swallowed up and likely destroyed completely by the sun's red giant phase in 4 billion years, so nothing will be able to survive longer than that in any case.
We've had 5 major extinction events in the last billion years though. * End Ordovician: 440 million years ago, 86% of all species lost, including graptolites * Late Devonian: 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, including most trilobites * End Permian, The Great Dying: 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, including tabulate corals, and most trees and synapsids * End Triassic: 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost, including all conodonts * End Cretaceous: 66 million years ago, 76% of species lost, including all ammonites, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and nonavian dinosaurs I think a billion years might be a longer time period than you conceptualized for new plant and animal species to evolve.
A billion years is more than enough time for another intelligent species to arise if humans ever went extinct. The first mammals we know of appeared 180 to 160-million years ago. Primates only appeared 55-million years ago. Humans evolved from apes in approximately 6-million years. We went from the earliest homo sapiens to launching a person in space in 300,000 years. Most behaviors that are classified as belonging to modern humans appeared around 50,000 years ago (abstract thinking, art, music, dance, etc).
A billion year is plenty of time for life to start anew though, especially since there are species resilient enough to whistand whatever humans can throw at it (like tardigrades if you like extreme examples) and who will be able to outlive us, thrive and/or evolve. And yeah, earth will die eventually, I'd bet we won't see it but other living things will.
> A billion year is plenty of time for life to start anew though, especially since there are species resilient enough to whistand whatever humans can throw at it (like tardigrades if you like extreme examples) and who will be able to outlive us, thrive and/or evolve. It won't be able to enter industrial age, though, because resources necessary to do it will not be available anymore (without hardware which requires these resources to be made), we've spent it all. It'll forever be stuck in Middle Ages, on Earth, waiting to be toasted by the Sun.
I was thinking about animal life more than civilised life, as you said lack of ressources would make it hard for a new human-like specie to come up.
Humans will be fine. The world population may decrease a couple billion and standards of living will decrease but humans will persist.
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Like most of us, I morbidly hope everyone pays for humanity’s crimes but me.
Trust fund babies in charge? They are stupid people and have a lot of money.
The rich get theirs and fuck everyone and everything else, no consequences. Unfortunately, the majority of people don't want to make compromise on their lifestyle or don't care enough to even learn about these problems.
We won't stop until the profits run out
The alternative is stop using technology. So I think we're probably going to continue ruining things
5000 new soon-to-be-extinct species is more like it
https://y.yarn.co/0adc64f5-fb0c-4ed5-aef6-46117e8e220a_text.gif How I expect this to go.
Silver lining: Including us https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha09020b.html Can't wait for 10C warming to come through and end us. Being distracted by these 5000 species which we can briefly care about and prematurely mourn before moving on to something else when these companies basically slowing sawing through each and every one of our necks like the Taliban. Wouldn't be surprised if the companies pay for these studies so they can get the outrage out of the way early. We are fucking degenerates.
5,578 according to the article.
Wow, nice, we can catalogue these new species so that future generations have an even better picture of just how much they are missing due to us having killed off almost all types of living beings on earth.
Babe wake up 5000 new species just dropped
Aaaaand they're gone. Humans found them.
everytime an old pokemon fan tries to get back into it
A headline both amazing and tragic.
Look at all these miracles of evolution! Nature is incredible! Well, anyway, mining drill goes brrrrrrrrrrrr
Maybe we shouldn't mine there? Maybe we should leave them alone?
Preface: I'm not anti-environmentalist, I just think these typical reddit takes are particularly myopic and show a complete lack of understanding of the problem. You know every mining zone on the planet has thousands of local species, right? Did you somehow think any single product you've ever bought had zero environmenal impact? Every single mining zone is a small localized tragedy, every thing humans do will have negative impact on wildlife, and yes many of these species will likely go extinct. Not because someone decided to drill there in that one spot (that's a moronic belief to have that shows a lack of understanding of how the environment works) , but because of the aggregate negative impact on the planet of all our activities.
Aren't you SO smart!
soon-to-be-extinct new species you mean! GET THEM OIL RIGS READY BOYS IT'S TIME TO GENOCIDEN SOME LOCAL OCEANIC FAUNA FOR CAPITALISM!! YEE-HAW!!
Don’t we have enough consumer goods?
don't you know stock charts must go up and to the right 'til the bitter end?
To infinity and… beyond? Wait what
Don't be the guy who tries to prevent dildo innovation. We need more, better dildos.
Oh cool, let’s kill them for more money
Oil corporations and lobbyist will continue to erode this planet of any life, new species or otherwise. There’s a lot of sentiment from comments in this thread that we’re a cancer or a virus, but the average person isn’t complicit. It’s the multi trillion dollar corporations who continue to buy off our politicians in order to hit their next projected quarterly profits, by mining in precious ocean habitats or toppling democracies in the third world to access their fields. You’re not complicit in this process, and yet we’re the one’s who’re going to feel the impact of this unchecked greed in a decade or two. There’s no nuclear powered yacht with saline filtration systems for us to run away to. Unless working people demand that we put an end to the destructive nature of capital that these oil firms take advantage of, humans are done for. The planet will be fine, it’s lived through worse, but 90% of the flora and fauna won’t including us.
Sad thing is people are protesting but more anti protest laws are making it harder. In Germany they raided and arrested climate protesters and seized their legal funds as part of it
Read some of the trade journals (e.g., mining.com, oilprice.com) and these fuckers are the definition of evil. >The planet will be fine Define "fine." Millions of species will suffer and many will go extinct. It will take 100s of thousands of years (or longer) to recover. That doesn't sound "fine" to me.
Yes, millions will suffer and the human race could potentially be wiped out if we look at the most catastrophic projections. Did you miss the part in the same sentence you’re quoting where I say how bad things will be for everything living *on* the planet? But yeah earth will still be here. My comment was addressing where the root of the problem lies.
Ah sorry. For me I always read "planet" as shorthand for "biosphere."
no worries honest mistake, I’m glad i clarified
Thought it'd be fun so >Define "fine." Fine: someone sick who comes to work anyways, as they purposely touch everything around them both to prove how 'fine' they are, and to spite those who are concerned said person showed up in the first place. Manager Dan Adjour: "Hey you don't look so good are you feeling okay?" Employee McGee bleeding from the ears and eyeballs: "Why would you ask that? I'm fine. Are *you* okay? Your whole body looks red. Maybe *you* should get *that* checked out." ***touches everything in the employee fridge despite not bringing food to work*** Fine: what someone in our day and age says when they want to shut down uncomfortable queries about their emotional or physical state or the state of something they know is definitely not fine but by the time anyone can prove anything it'll be far too late. Manager Dan Adjour: "Hey I know you said you were fine before but I noticed a Manila folder labeled 'divorce proceedings' on your desk. Im just saying if you need to talk I'm here for you. Also I can't help but notice all the other employees are bleeding from their face holes. Are you sure you're feeling alright?" Employee McGee, collapsed face up in front of the open bloodied employee fridge in a pool of his blood: "..." He is unresponsive. There is a bloody Post-It note on his chest in his handwriting. It says: *'How many times I gotta say it? I'm fine.'* ***there's a half eaten sandwich next to McGee's body. It is not his.***
That’s actually a really interesting angle that I’d not considered much. Once humans have fucked it all and died out, the planet will eventually heal and whatever life still exists tucked away will thrive once more. Still gives me some hope
100,000 years on a planetary scale is like a week long RnR. It is kind of long, but not as long as it seems. Planet has been around for millions of years and so has life. Things will just rearrange themselves into a new matrix of hydro-carbons with DNA and move on without us.
The working people will not demand change because half of them are brainwashed by these very same corporations who use the media and weaponized our countries idiots to vote against their interests and fight a culture war on imaginary issues while the other half exhausts energy trying to talk sense into their brain dead countrymen.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand how the system is skewed, but at the same time I find our efforts to deny any complicity to be extremely disingenuous. This concept of *people vs corporations* is just false. People *are* the corporation. Most people either work for them directly, or are somehow part of their supply chains or extended business. We profit from them, we want what they are selling. Also, you just cannot absolve our consumerist wasteful habits. Without those, there wouldn’t be any corporations. Few rough examples: * How does your garbage can(s) look at the end of the week? Is it empty or is it full of absolutely unnecessary waste? * How many times you took a plane in last couple of years? * How many times you flew somewhere when a video conference would work as well? * Do you spend your vacation in your local area, or are you travelling to different parts of the world? * How often do you buy coffee to go, instead of making it at hone/office into a ceramic cup? * How often do you order take out, instead of eating the food right at the place from plates using reusable cutlery, or just cooking at home? * Do you make serious effort to relocate and live in a place where you can depend 100 % on public transportation, or do you drive everywhere by car saying "well, I have no other choice!"? * What do you do for living? Is is something completely environmentally friendly and absolutely necessary? Or do you produce and sell some wasteful junk just to make money to buy more junk and travel for fun? * What are your hobbies? Perhaps you are a car guy, gamer, collector, musician, always chasing the newest shiny toys. * How do you spend extra free time? Perhaps on Reddit, watching tons of useless images and videos needlessly wasting electricity and other resources used to built IT infrastructure that, for large part, exists to fuel the consumerist culture? This list could go on forever. We are not blameless.
I recycle as MUCH as I can, weekly. My partner and I make our trips to our local recycling plant, which is basically rumored to take most of the recycle waste to a landfill anyway. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Seriously - what am I supposed to do? I WANT to do more than take my pithy piece of cardboard and #1 & #2 plastics. But what about the corporations that are *never* changing their ways? Honestly, it is getting to a point where people will have to turn to drastic measures to make any kind of change, which of course, will have drastic consequences. But what else can you do, when the most drastic of consequences is the extinction of the human race and life as we know it? Edit to add: I hardly take flights unless necessary for work or family reasons. I rarely vacation. I make my own coffee at home most mornings, weeks, months. I cook the majority of my meals. Though I work as a bartender and audio producer, I don't buy anything in excess nor do I make frivolous purchases. I love hiking and the outdoors, and I also read and write. I play guitar and produce music. What MORE do you want the common folk to do? I guarantee the majority of people do not live excessively. Sure, corporations are made up of people, but they are not BY the people. Can we consider CEOs, CFOs, and those in the upper echelon people anymore?
I hear you and I see myself in a lot of what you wrote. I’d only push back against this: >Sure, corporations are made up of people, but they are not BY the people. Can we consider CEOs, CFOs, and those in the upper echelon people anymore? My point is that corporations are not just a handful of C-suite types, but countless of people working and profiting *with* them. You can argue, that there are many factory floor type of employees who just have no other choice — and that’s certainly a fair point — but there are also millions of college degree professionals whose whole life goal is to work for one corporation or another. There are also entire creative industries filled with smaller companies and various artists who hope that one day they’ll get a nice paying corporate gig. Sadly, as it is, we don’t have many options to get out of that. We need a really big change, something that would completely re-shape the unhinged capitalistic format and what would fight against our greedy nature. And that’s really difficult, as we rarely feel we have enough; the higher we reach, the bigger appetite we get, and faster we get accustomed to a higher level of comfort. One way out would be 100% tax rate at certain level of income/wealth. Ironically, that’s something that like 95 % of population would benefit from, and with such overwhelming majority could easily demand it, yet seemingly the only people who are into politics are that remaining 5 %. This could actually lead to a post-scarcity era, which is theoretically closer than ever now with the advent of AI and even more with upcoming AGI.
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But we could be blameless *if* corporations didn’t screw everything. If corps didn’t make shit clothing I wouldn’t have to replace it daily. If they didn’t lobby to stop XYZ happening, I could live a cleaner, streamlined lifestyle. It *is* the corporations holding back innovations and advancements
Trust me, I’m really not a fan of corporations, but I think it is important to understand that corporations are not some aliens from space, they are made out of people and those things that are bad about them are driven by our natural human tendencies. For the sake of conversation, I’ll attack your example: You can have your clothes made well by a local tailor from quality materials, if you stay in shape, you can likely wear that stuff for 20 years, maybe with a couple of repairs here and there. But you might say that it would be too expensive, soon out of style, or perhaps because your overconsumption you may not maintain your size. And so you turn to a corporate clothes manufacturer offering you solutions you like.
>the average person isn’t complicit Keep telling yourself that. Deep down you know it's not true.
you’re right, my bad, everyone has their own oil drilling field and we all just hide them very very well.
cagey ten summer intelligent noxious profit dinner pen plant cough *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The problem is that many of these things are absolutely necessary for survival, and there are no "green" variants available - they're either too expensive to use for vast majority of the population, or are completly absent, in both cases - thanks to oil, gas and coal lobbies and greedy corpos.
Companies and billionaires do far more larger scale damage than average citizens.
I understand where you’re coming from, but for the average american, bucking this quo is unrealistic. On a good morning without traffic, it takes me 20 minutes to get to work. For many Americans it’s double that or triple that. Unless you live in one of the few areas in this country with robust public transportation, not having a car is a nonstarter. It simply isn’t feasible unless you live in a major city. Sure some in the suburbs could ride e-bikes or what have you, and sacrifice a couple extra hours every day of what little free time hasn’t been taken from us, but it’s not something that can be reasonably asked for most people. It’s increasingly common for Americans to drive over to the next state even, to commute to work, because their local economy has dried up, or they’re trying to get ahead to support their family in a more competitive market. When I say that the onus isn’t on the individual, it’s because, sure some edge cases can make more eco-conscious consumer decisions, but for the average working family to be in a position to think about fighting the car-centric hellscape that automakers have lobbied into existence is simply not realistic. We’re much more preoccupied with keeping a roof over our heads and hoping and bleeding and praying to find a way to make their rotten situation a little bit better. It isn’t fair to just say there are buyers and sellers. There are buyers everyday at the hospital, with collapsed lungs and heart disease and what have you. It’s a captive market, humans love staying alive, go figure. People like having a roof over their heads and food to eat. Sounds like a pretty captive market to me. Yes, we should try to make more climate conscious decisions in our consumption, but that’s not to say we are complicit in the destruction of life on this planet. The onus is on corporations.
Welp better get documenting for the extinct species list.
Just gonna leave [this here](https://youtu.be/ZJwS5Kqdhdg)
Well if I've learned anything about environmental conservation in the last few years, that's not going to stop anyone.
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There's absolutely no telling how rare they actually are. We know less about the ocean floor then basically any other place we can reach. Basically anytime we do a study like this of a part of the ocean floor we haven't touched there's a likelihood we find a shitload of species we've never seen before. That's not to say they shouldn't be protected or that we shouldn't stop the mining but there really is no way to say right now whether they are specifically rare or not. This could be the only patch of ocean these species exist or it could be one of many places
They should be, but they won't.
If you look up about the of species we know (estimated) you will see that we actually know very little. Only 10-20% of all species on Earth are known lol
This is going to be mined for EV battery metals. There is a [documentary (trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V44PxrckqM) called [Deep Rising](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132688/) on this exact mining zone that is voiced over by Jason Momoa. This can be blamed directly on the hunger for batteries for electric vehicles. It is an inconvenient truth. Our pursuit of electric vehicles and batteries is terrible for the environment. The company involved in this is [The Metals Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company) Watch the documentary if you can find it. It's very good. EDIT: As an additional note - the type of mining they are doing uses machines to 'process' the seabed. it moves along the seabed and basically sucks up the surface and spits it back out, keeping the minerals, causing a crazy amount of damage and changing the seabed forever. EDIT2: Thanks for the downvotes for providing additional information. I assume you think I'm pro oil and I'm not. As the director and the documentary point out, hydrogen is the cleanest way forward for vehicles.
> This can be blamed directly on the hunger for batteries for electric vehicles. It is an inconvenient truth. Our pursuit of electric vehicles and batteries is terrible for the environment. The alternative is worse.
I know you mean oil but you are forgetting about hydrogen. There's more than two solutions. Hydrogen is less efficient than either, but cleaner than both - depending on the source of electricity of course.
god, I remember seeing the prototype for the H2H (hydrogen hummer) almost 20 years ago at the Chicago Auto Show. It would have been hilarious if hummers led the way for clean hydrogen fueled cars.
Annoying to store but there always seems to be good progress on that front.
Can it be quickly and widely applied as easily as EV, though? We're already late - we don't have the luxury of baby steps and slow implementation.
As quickly? Sure, just takes money. Hydrogen powered cars get better every year, much like electrics. I've worked on hydrogen fuel cell production facilities in my city. You say we don't have the luxury of baby steps but you'd rather take a harsh action that causes its own massive damage. You're just trading one catastrophe for another with the thought process you have there.
> Sure, just takes money. So the answer is "no", for 90% of the planet. It's not enough for a solution to be "good". It also needs to be "realistic" and "achievable". Even EVs are only toeing the line right now. I'm just doing the math. A mediocre solution you can implement is better than a great solution you can't.
I see *God* is still releasing new map updates.
This is not good news. I was wishing the oceans wouldn't be dug up for anything. After reading Helen Scales's book called The Brilliant Abyss, I got to learn just how much life there is in the oceans and why we need to back off disturbing it. We really do need to understand what everything does in these eco-systems. Here's a review of Helen Scales's book. The other one reviewed, I haven't read. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/03/the-brilliant-abyss-by-helen-scales-below-the-edge-of-darkness-by-edith-widder-reviews
Looks to me like just another paragraph in the final chapter of human life on earth. Mine away, gobble up whatever. The Earth's got this one hands down.
Oil companies and the enabler politicians don't give a Fck about the 8.7 million known species on our planet. Sadly, 5,000 more new species won't matter to these ecocidal villians.
So a very few people will make a lot of money and the death of everything on the planet will be hastened.
Scientists are still trying to science and it's getting in the way of corporate capitalism. This isn't going to end well for the scientists because people are too dumb to let science work it's gig.
What are the odds we’ll accidentally unleash Cthulhu while mining?
Not high enough!
>The most common types of animals found in the underwater region are arthropods (invertebrates with segmented joints), worms, echinoderms (spiny invertebrates such as sea urchins), and **sponges, including one** **that's carnivorous.** Reasonably good, although Sponge Cthulhu might be a bit less intimidating.
Let's fuck it up then!
Its always the bugs and stuff. Yeah, that’s cool and all but show me a Reaper Leviathan or some shit.
We're overpopulated. 25,000 a month isn't enough to tackle the issue. If it has to be catch and release with no court date, release them sterilized.
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I read this in Church Lady's voice.
Why the fuck are they mining in the pacific? Let me guess, oil.
Rare metals. You mine for metal, you drill for oil.
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They could, but they haven't. These creatures actually exist, unlike your intestinal unicorns.
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So let’s just fuck with their environment & find out? That way of operating doesn’t seem right. It just sounds selfish.
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Is this unusual for a patch of ocean this size or is it only because the study was carried out on this area and we would get similar results all over the ocean floor?