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Science fiction pioneer Neal Stephenson says
humanity needs to be concentrated on the big issue — climate change. (He has
written about this in his technothriller Termination Shock.)
article here
“The only things worth talking about right now are carbon and the fracturing of society by social media,” he told Vox’s Peter Kafka during a recent episode of the Recode Media podcast.
“How do we reduce carbon emissions
and remove the hundreds of billions of kilograms of carbon that we’ve already
put into the air? I think we’ll beat that problem.
“But I think it’s going to be the
biggest engineering project in human history. It’s going to transform the world
— the built environment — because we simply can’t do it without doing
engineering on a massive scale. I think we’ll succeed at it. But we’ll have
some bad times between now and then.
“I think we’ll start to see the kinds of mass
casualty events that are described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, The
Ministry for the Future, where you might see millions of people dying of
heat stroke in a certain area over a very short period of time,” he continues.
“When the temperature goes up, the
humidity goes up, the power goes out. And when that kind of stuff starts
happening — which I sadly think it will in the next decade — it’s going to have
incredibly powerful political ramifications.”
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