> The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology
> ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?
The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.
The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.
Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.
Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.
Digging up lithium is nowhere near the same as mining fossil fuels. You're literally just washing rock with water and you can clean the water afterwards.
> ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?
The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.
The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.
Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.