environmental sustainability

What cool new technologies are you seeing emerge? How do we know we can trust them? Curious about all, but I'd especially love to see non-AI versions, like:

• New batteries for solar: storing heat in big piles of dirt
• A while back Tommy mentioned cowfart backpacks
• Maybe it's something old for you, but we're not in your field so we don't know about it yet

Even though a lot of what we share won't make it, for a variety of reasons, I always find get an overview of the cool stuff humans are creating really inspiring and hopeful.

Mars feels like a really important backup plan. If there’s even a small chance that Earth is fucked from global warming, we need to be able to go to Mars. I heard a cool concept that we can basically artificially create global warming on Mars by putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Unless it’s life or death, I personally wouldn’t move to a planet with less than a million people on it (imagine Austin is the entire world, that feels like the bare minimum for me).

How much money and time would it take to get a million people to Mars?

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.

What will the future literally look like? This idea comes from watching Mad Men- seeing smoking and drinking freely at the office for example, and my brother once pointing out that if a show or movie ever wanted to make it really clear that it was set in the 1990’s, all they’d have to do is have multiple people driving Saturn cars.

So here are a few of what I think (hope) the future will literally look like:

Gas stations will be very rare, and parking spaces will almost always have charging stations.

Having a garage in homes will be rare because car ownership will be rare. Using self-driving Uber-esque systems will be way more affordable, and car ownership then will be similar to antique car ownership now.

Lawns will be very rare, and permaculture-style of local fauna that doesn’t need care, upkeep, or watering will be common.

What do you think the future will look like?