Separate paragraphs, intended to be separate issues.
A 7 on the INES every fifty years means an accident that requires an exclusion zone and long term containment. The chernobyl sarcophagus needs to be maintained, and the accident is not ‘over’. Humans have committed to managing a problem (radioactive waste) that will be around longer than the human race has existed to the present point (100,000 years into the future, current radwaste will be a hazard). We are doing fine so far, whether that holds remains to be seen.
I read somewhere that there is enough ‘fossil carbon’ that if all of it is burned, it will be enough to cause a runaway, venus like greenhouse effect that destroys the biosphere and renders the earth uninhabitable. The timeframe for this I saw is ’500ish years’. Stephen Hawking said something similar and was panned for it: https://www.livescience.com/59693-could-earth-turn-into-venus.html
There’s an anthropic bias here. ‘We are not dead, so therefore we have not already drawn a black ball’. If we had, we would not be around to discuss it, so therefore, we are unlikely to ever be in a position where we look backwards and can say unambiguously ‘yep, that was definitely a black ball, we are irreparably screwed’.
Separate paragraphs, intended to be separate issues.
A 7 on the INES every fifty years means an accident that requires an exclusion zone and long term containment. The chernobyl sarcophagus needs to be maintained, and the accident is not ‘over’. Humans have committed to managing a problem (radioactive waste) that will be around longer than the human race has existed to the present point (100,000 years into the future, current radwaste will be a hazard). We are doing fine so far, whether that holds remains to be seen.
I read somewhere that there is enough ‘fossil carbon’ that if all of it is burned, it will be enough to cause a runaway, venus like greenhouse effect that destroys the biosphere and renders the earth uninhabitable. The timeframe for this I saw is ’500ish years’. Stephen Hawking said something similar and was panned for it: https://www.livescience.com/59693-could-earth-turn-into-venus.html
There’s an anthropic bias here. ‘We are not dead, so therefore we have not already drawn a black ball’. If we had, we would not be around to discuss it, so therefore, we are unlikely to ever be in a position where we look backwards and can say unambiguously ‘yep, that was definitely a black ball, we are irreparably screwed’.