536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) (opens in new tab)

I am not too certain of the logic of the arguement - namely because fossil fuels are actually pretty damn advanced in terms of "actual technology and societal infastructure to access and exploit them". We already went through this long ago with surface deposits of copper ore as well essentially millenia ago.

Effectively the time when it is useful is "when we don't have cheaper alternatives yet". We still should strive to make renewables and storage the cheaper option though.

To get really pedantic our 20th century understanding of power and energy are exactly backwards colloquially from what is really provided. Power is energy over time. The "power" infastructure was actually largely an energy infastructure with the exception of say hydro electric dams - you can only burn fuel once no matter how clever your ability to extract it. Meanwhile "renewable energy" provides power over its period of existence.

I would think the combination of windmills and wood supplies should almost always provide a (ssllooww) recovery path.

There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc.

Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for power to where we are now in about 250 years. On the one hand, if knowledge is retained, that can be sped up. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to go through that process without coal and oil.

I would guess the net effect will be that it will take longer, as one of the effects of not having coal and oil will be lower yields in agriculture and, hence, a much smaller world population that also has to make a bigger effort to produce food.

We still have nuclear tech.

> There's no way for anyone to make money by being responsible

Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and China). Two disconnected factoids to illustrate the level of dependency and consumption we have today: without ammonia synthesis from fossil fuel, worldwide organic fertilizer stock could sustain only about 4bln people - globally; China in-serviced more cement (which requires fossil fuels) in like five years than the US did in the last 100 years.

To reduce carbon output, you need to switch coal use to natural gas where possible. That's the best near term solution right now - isolate coal and oil consumption to the industries that really need them - e.g. transportation, manufacturing - and work on alternative sources of electric generation, i.e. hydro where available, nuclear where not, unless some miracle net-positive and reliable electric generation method becomes available in the meantime.

> We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine

Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.

It would almost be reasonable to say "They are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine".. whoever they are. The ones with cocaine mustaches presumably.

EDIT: Someone paid a lot of money to make this not an "our" choice but instead a "their" choice. If you feel like this is something you have any real control over, I urge you to change things.

Becoming multiplanetary IS handling it, just not in a necessarily "ideal" way. The problem is that we don't want to have the reset button hit and have every human in existence set back to the stone age technologically; having multiple self sustaining human societies on multiple planets mitigates that risk in a major way since the likelihood of a disaster being so large that it resets technology on both/all planets is much smaller than the likelihood of having a disaster that does it for just one of them.

The idea is not to avoid black swan events entirely, it is to have pockets that are missed by a given event. Earth goes cold? Well, good thing the moon base can preserve technology and knowledge for a hundred years. Solar flare? Good thing we have the under-ice base on Europa. Europa explodes? Good thing that we are still on Earth. Now if they all happen at the same time, like the sun dying, then that is why you want to get a star base even further away.

That's the issue. If we can't handle the black swan events in time, we'll at least have a backup.

Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse.

The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.

It would be very hard and very expensive to build a space colony that was self-sufficient, instead of requiring constant supplies from Earth. In fact, it would be very hard and very expensive to build a self-sufficient society on Earth which was up-to-date with modern technology. The range of products and materials required is vast, and the manufacturing of certain state-of-the-art products, such as the most advanced integrated circuits, has been centralized in only a few locations.

It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.

Making Earth better through comprehensive, global action: RAID

Putting people on Mars, and then other solar systems: Backups

12 Years since, and I still don’t understand why the UK went after Iceland for reparations. Landsbanki was a private bank operating in the UK, and one of the owners Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson is still doing business in the UK, and is now among the top 100 billionaires in the UK (even though he caused a 6 billion euro damage that the UK taxpayers paid).

Yes, it's an actual thing and you can see lots of photographic evidence [0] [1] if you look it up on google or read some of the many papers written on the subject. They're visible on many places on Earth, some even without any excavation needed. It sits pretty much as a clear separation between the previous geological epoch (Pleistocene aka Ice Age) and our current epoch (Holocene).

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/1/40/F1.large.jpg

[1] https://capeia-usercontent.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2019/07/...

But the title is "worst year to be alive", so while the contrast of 536 was likely the biggest, measured objectively by food availability, life expectancy etc 543 was the worst.

I am genuinely curious, what hobby of yours makes you track volcanic eruptions regularly ?

The White Island eruption was forecasted though. It's just that tourists kept going there regardless.

How would green/grow houses help in such a situation?

That's very interesting. But if we're talking about O(10 years), isn't a more foolproof and probably cheaper plan just to stockpile dried and canned food?

Thanks! I'm the director of ALLFED. dcolkitt, if we knew we had 10 years, it would be possible to store up 10 years worth of food. However, the catastrophe could come sooner, it would cost tens of trillions of dollars, and it would inflate the price of food significantly, exacerbating current malnutrition. Whereas getting prepared to scale up alternative foods quickly would only cost around $100 million: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13753-016-0...

Thanks for sharing this. Allfed is doing important work.

One angle on the TP problem is that we didn't just have a shock, we had a shock and then lasting change in demand. I saw an article that says demand for residential sized TP rolls is up 40% because a lot of bathroom visits are happening in homes that used to happen in work places.

Recovery is patchy. Some locations are fine, others are still having problems.

The bigger problem is the lack of any economic or physical contingency planning. There was some medical planning of a sort for a pandemic, but there seems to be no economic planning of any kind for catastrophes.

National governments seem to have improvised economic solutions to COVID with varying degrees of competence and success.

This is negligent and inept. Catastrophes are more or less guaranteed, and there should at least be some thought given to making sure that the first thing that falls apart isn't the national economy.

From what I can see in the Boston area--not that I've gone to stores much--you still see bare shelves and you can't really go to the store and expect to get everything on your shopping list.

On the other hand...

Getting food to eat was never a problem at any point. And today, reliably getting meat, chicken, dairy, paper products even if not exactly what you want, most baking supplies, etc. is pretty much a non-problem.

> In what sense have we “recovered” from supply chain disruptions?

The initial shock has past, and consumer product makers have had plenty of time to do whatever they were going to do.

"Recovery" is a word that sets up certain expectations. It seems to me that what happened during the first half of this year is more usefully considered "change".

> I go to the store and still routinely see empty shelves where TP should be;

Huh, so that is why Google Maps keeps asking me whether TP was in stock every time I go the store - I did not realize there were still actual shortages on that elsewhere, I thought it was just a couple of days of panicing in March and that Google was just being weird / behind the times.

FWIW, I haven't noticed such disruptions here (Finland) since March, so it probably varies a lot regionally.

Personally, I haven't seen any empty shelves or shortages since early May, and the only rationing I've seen in June is on hand sanitizer and instant noodles. I guess I don't know whether my area is uncommonly good or yours is uncommonly bad.

It's hard to find good information on this subject but from the absence of non-US comments in this thread I'm inclined to conclude that supply chain disruption of the scale described is largely (not exclusively) a US problem.

So it presumably has something to do with how US supply chains work compared to, say, Europe rather than being solely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

IDK where you live (and I won't ask! because I respect privacy and stuff), but in central Texas (Austin) and most of the urban markets I have been to (HEB, Central Market, Randall's, Trader Joe's, all the regional BBQ joints), I don't think I have seen any disruption in anything the whole time, except TP, briefly hand-sanitizer and a pop in the price of milk. I'm guessing the first two (at least) were because of people doing the lemming-thing and over-buying.

I understand that this is/was not the case across the country, and I have been a bit baffled about that. (Although I do recognize the supply chains to restaurants and to corporations (TP) and to grocery stores are not the same and don't easily switch on a dime. But, we have meat and yogurt and eggs and milk on the shelves, but some friends in Connecticut or NYC, for example, say that they do not. And I can not understand why.

Link?

> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman".

Except that Constantinople had essentially continuous government dating from the 300s AD until it was sacked by the army of the 4th Crusade in 1204, whereas the Holy Roman Empire's first emperor--Charlemagne--was crowned in 800 AD, some 324 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. The Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne was, as you imply, an entirely different beast from the original Roman Empire.

Byzantium is not a thing. Just Frankish propaganda that has enthralled the west for centuries. There is unanimous agreement among all scholars that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman" if "Roman" means the continuous Roman Empire that ruled from Rome and then several other (modern) Italian, French, German and Turkish cities. Certainly not the same as some overblown Frankish warlord calling himself 'Roman Emperor'. Unless you argue that Constantine the Great himself by virtue of setting up the Capital on the Bosporus became non-Roman, it is almost an impossible position to maintain. There is continuity of rule beyond the end of the 6th Century. Asia Minor and much of the East remains under Roman control.

> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say

Finland!

https://imgur.com/gallery/eNuUdTd

It's still the same empire.

The Roman Empire was home to many different ethnicities and was ruled at various times by different ethnicities. Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.

Even the Ottomans considered their empire a continuation of the Roman Empire – one of the Sultan's title's was "Caesar of Rome". So you can add Turks to that list too.

It was already a Greek speaking Empire by the time of Justinian. The lingua franca of the Empire doesn't, imho, determine continuity. Hellenism and speaking Greek was popular from the time of Hadrian (and before). Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations in Greek and Emperors before Justinian were more comfortable in Common Greek than Latin. Calling it a Greek empire is falling for a thousand years of Papal and Frankish propaganda. They want it to seem 'other' as they never wanted the (Eastern) Roman Empire to appear legitimate. It is the church in Rome that is other. It broke from the one true Orthodox faith, not the other way around.

You are way way way oversimplifying nearly 1000 years of history between the plague of Justinian and the fall of Constantinople.

The Justinian expansion was untenable. If you look at it on the map - there are strong enemies on literally all sides. It was a desperate but hopeless attempt to regain the Western Empire.

The plague made it worse - but was hardly the catalyst. ...and the East Roman Empire was far more than a city state for a majority of the remaining NINE centuries.

It is not that long ago, and the land is really well studied. I think I trust the Icelandic volcanologists over the middle age historian regarding the source of the 535 eruption. This size eruption would definitely leave sizeable evidence that wouldn’t be that hard to find given the barren landscape of Iceland.

See compare this to the 1783 Laki eruption which caused similar weather events. Unlike 535, the weather events from the Laki eruption were limited to the Northern hemisphere.

It is much more likely that this eruption happened close to the equator, where evidence erode much quicker and the ash has an easier time effecting the two hemispheres.

OTOH nuclear weapons decay and we're rapidly losing the tacit knowledge required to make new ones (at least here in the US). If the Test Ban stays in place and is enforced, it may only be a few more decades until we as a species would have to do another Manhattan Project to rebuild them. This takes about 4 years of concerted effort within military and industry, and the only shortcut is the tacit knowledge that nuclear weapons designers can pass on. Maybe WW3 will actually be an "aw hell no" response to some country trying to develop nukes after they're we've lost them.

Here are counterarguments for counterbalancing your pessimistic view, do what you want with it: humans are not stupid, and god doesn't exist.

A CEO said last November '2020 Is Going To Be Better. It Has To Be'.

I'm pretty sure everything that's happened is his fault.

Current projections of Earth's population have a peak population of about 11B (only 40% higher than today) towards the end of the century and then declining. It's always hard to know what's going to happen in the future, but currently it's pretty unlikely that we'll ever see a worldwide population all that much higher than what we already have.

Maybe within 100 years. Hopefully not within 10.

Human lives are worth less and less as time goes on and the population increases, so by the time this happens the loss of life might not be anymore troubling than say the amount of people killed in car crashes in a year.

Interesting, can you elaborate?

Although it's worth asking, did the eruption affect agricultural output in Iceland? Maybe modern farming is just resilient enough against volcanic eruptions, as it is against all the other things that used to cause famines.

I looked it up, but according to this, it isn't due for a big one, it's merely media hyperbole.

>Although fascinating, the new findings do not imply increased geologic hazards at Yellowstone, and certainly do not increase the chances of a 'supereruption' in the near future. Contrary to some media reports, Yellowstone is not 'overdue' for a supereruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera#Volcanoes

www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2014/01/reactions-yellowstone-supervolcano-study-ranged-hysteria-ho-hum24449

Don’t think it’s “overdue”[0]. I think that’s just a myth in popular culture.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/yellowstone-overdue-eruption-when-...

> one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans.

That may be, but the set of things that humans can prevent gets larger over time. For example, 100 years ago, an asteroid hitting the earth would be an act of God we could do nothing about, but today it is at least within the realm of possibility that we could observe a large asteroid on a collision course and send in a spacecraft or missile to divert it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance

There's some debate about whether we can build a geothermal power plant on top of a volcano to manage the temperature of the hotspot.

A solar storm of similar magnitude passed through Earth’s orbit in 2012 but missed hitting Earth. [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012

That would be quite the challenge since fine silica and other particles would foul just about any kind of machinery.

Katrina has a death toll measured around 1000-2000.

The population of New Orleans alone is 1.5 million, so 1‰ of the population died.

That's a pretty small number, and tells me that society coped just fine.

Crop failures caused by volcanic eruptions, which kill 50% of the world population, is a far bigger issue. It is also something mankind will recover from in a couple of generations.

USA is about 4% of the global population, the US government stance is not really relevant.

Spot on. We no longer have a government for the people, by the people, of the people. Just take a look at the net worth statistics of our congresscritters and their voting records.

In fact, we never really have. Initially, only free, white landowners could even vote!

Edit: ah, found yet another “thing you can’t say on HN,” I suppose. :) Talk about lack of TP in stores: +6. Talk about how our “representatives” don’t represent most of us: -2

I considered myself an "aspirational Prepper" before the pandemic, but I'm getting more and more serious about it. Watching society totally freak out over as little as going without TP for a few weeks and going without their manicure for a few months has been eye-opening.

My plans to stock up on survival supplies and buy a little bug out property in a remote spot have gone from "wouldn't that be neat?" to "maybe it is time to set some money aside and start building up a savings for this" pretty quickly.

Throughout the current situation, did it make sense to keep a few weeks of non-perishable food in the house in the event of quarantine and even temporary power outages? Sure.

But, if they were being logically consistent, anyone arguing for a 12 month supply of rice and beans should also have:

- Headed for a place in the hills/woods

- Stocked up on guns and ammo however unpopular an opinion that might be in certain circles

- A generator and gasoline

- Lots of large containers of water

- Seeds/tools/etc.

The list goes on. It's one thing to guard against short-term disruption to supply chains. It's another to basically guard against civilizational collapse. And if you just hoard 12 months of rice and beans in your suburban, much less urban, apartment, you're way overdoing it for the former and not preparing at all for the latter.

You've got to buy things that you'll eat anyway - like canned beans, etc, and use them and replace them regularly.

It doesn't need to be expensive at all. Perboiled rice is cheap and lasts literally 15 years. Canned food can last years. ...and if you're eating food, you can naturally rotate out what you have in the basement.

Rice and beans are inexpensive and if you pack them right twenty years no problem. I've got six full five gain pales.

Yes. Marine cloud brightening has also been proposed. IMO we'll almost certainly see either that or stratospheric aerosols as nations begin to feel the increasing effects of climate change and grow more desperate.

Whether it might be uni- or multilateral is also interesting, given the possibly serious effects on e.g. agriculture in "downstream" geographic regions. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it kicking off some kind of war.

pretty much any metric you could come up with to "measure" civilisation -- literacy, urbanisation, economic output, monetary economy -- went to historic lows.

slightly orthogonal to this, but the original motivation behind the 'dark ages' label was that for large parts of europe there are very few written records for the 5-7th centuries. e.g., we know practically nothing what happened in 5th century england because the only written source -- gildas -- is mostly concerned with pontificating about sinful behaviour in artful ways. even some actual people he mentions in passing get biblically coded nicknames so we have to make wild guesses who's he referring to. and that's our only source for pretty much a century.

Excellent article. I guess it is especially important to be somewhat skeptical of “exciting” new research that hits the popular press and make sure to read all the analyses.

Back then, people had to downvote by bleaching only a portion of the illuminated manuscript. Unfortunately the original karma logs were lost when the Knights Templar were disbanded.

In the timeline on the page, it uses both uses - "Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C" and "Summer temperatures drop again by 1.4°C–2.7°C in Europe".

It took a few reads and an internal debate over whether European summer temperatures could possibly have been 4°C in the 6th century to understand what the author meant.

Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200BC, while in the Americas the necessity of writing things down triggered the same invention around 600BC. Main reason was because Eurasia was in the east-west plane where climate is similar and communication/commerce was not difficult to employ which helped Europe, ME, Asia, and far east to increase interaction. Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south. When European showed up on the shores of Caribbeans and the mainland of Americas it was already too late.

Though worldwide it's difficult to keep records intact for a thousand years, the Mayans had writing systems for nearly two thousand years. The Spanish priests burned any writing they found during the Mayan conquest,

Oral traditions record, among other things, historical events.

Doesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.

This is an interesting point context matters.

I have no skin in the game either way but it seems like any book that tries to tackle controversial materials would have some people who don't like it. Interestingly the Wikipedia page only lists negative feedback in the Reception section, despite the book having generally good reviews and accolades from multiple different experts.

The fact that the book won awards from NYT, Royal Society of Literature, BBC, and many other publications and is well-reviewed, yet Wikipedia only lists negative feedback in the Reception section indicates to me that there must be bias in the Wikipedia article. I don't see any other answer for why more than half of the article is just listing criticism that doesn't seem to be reflected across the broader industry.

Again I haven't read the book and don't really care about the subject matter either way, but the Wikipedia does not seem to hide its bias.