| ▲ | sheept 5 hours ago |
| > My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places. Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes. The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear. |
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| ▲ | adrianN 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is. |
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| ▲ | vintermann 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused. | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | mlrtime 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities. | | |
| ▲ | oblio an hour ago | parent [-] | | The amount of people that want truly rural environments is infinitesimal. Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from neighbors. But then they want the state of the art hospital to be close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly, etc, etc. What I've discovered is that humanity has mastered the ancestral art of "having the cake and eating it, too", also called delusion and/or hypocrisy :-) |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ssl-3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time. We're humans. We do that stuff. And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are. |
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| ▲ | vkou 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life. The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but... https://xkcd.com/1338/ | |
| ▲ | oblio an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs). |
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| ▲ | mlrtime 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city. |
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| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans Where's the food going to come from? |
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| ▲ | defrost 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now. It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent [-] | | So not really "fairly untouched", then. You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet. | | |
| ▲ | defrost 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside. I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect. as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet. what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview )and there are other grain basins about the globe. The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines. That and making sure the front doesn't fall off. |
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| ▲ | bwv848 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship. |
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| ▲ | gambiting 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement. | | |
| ▲ | bwv848 an hour ago | parent [-] | | What's the difference? All have to live under central planning, all have to live with hubris of the rich and elites, at least Mars sounds way cooler than living in cities. | | |
| ▲ | oblio an hour ago | parent [-] | | If you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're sorely misunderstanding his point of view. Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!). | | |
| ▲ | bwv848 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I agree with your point but you guys really have to take a look at what I was replying to and was I being serious at all. | | |
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