Will Technology Save the Planet?

Hello Good People.

Will technology save the planet?

I don't think so. What we really need to do is just leave the planet alone. There are
no technologies that do that. High technology is the worst offender of all, because
it requires, by definition, more diverse resources and more production steps.

The problem, of course, is that technology makes jobs and investment income
and leaving the planet alone does not.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, eh?

Littlefoot

 

i know what you mean.. actually we need to change our habits, there is no magic here (ok solar power etc is good, iat helps, but it is not the main change)
but we think that technology can fix everything and we can just kick back and continue drive in cars and eat shit food that destroys and pollutes the earth and being addicted by consumtion. its time to stop

 

we cant continue lying to our selves. there is no short cut

 

Littlefoot, you and laeyne are both correct. High technology is not the answer, as it requires resouces that are mined, and other environmental harms are done during manufacturing, shipping, using, and disposing of the technology.

 

as I heard someone else say in a different thread, technology should be a tool, not a goal.
I believe technology should coexist with nature; and it can. I believe it can... somehow.

 

What is your definition of "technology?" Technology is a rather broad word and can mean anything from stone arrowheads to this computer I'm typing on.

Also, if we reuse materials that have already been refined, it will minimize the amount of resources needed to be mined for whatever "technology" exists. If we reused materials from out dated computers for newer computers, our footsteps on this Earth will be softened. Let's make do w/ what we have and recycle what would normally go to a landfill. I had a geology teacher say we will be mining landfills for aluminum and other resources when that becomes cheaper than mining and refining raw sources. Why not skip the mining step and recycle?

Peace and love

 

Technology might save the environment and billions of animals each year.

If you take a look into the future, it might be possible that meat will not be produced out of animals any more, due to reasons of efficiency, ecology and world hunger, but also very important, animal rights or health. It might be produced directly from cells, using tissue engineering methods. The result is called "cultured meat" or "in vitro meat". Improved vegetarian meat might be another option for the future. See http://www.futurefood.org.

 

how we USE tecnology, our culturally driven choices about that, and about what tecnologies to use, are PART of what will. but not by clinging to existing idiologies. neither capitolism nor marxism are going to do it. monarchies could, but wouldn't be likely to. using advanced tecnologies to live 'closer to the earth' will contribute to doing so.

using clean tecnologies for energy and transportion are at present the most visible part of it. though human population levels are an even bigger and far less visible part of it. but clean fuel isn't a clean tecnology. that one is a myth and a con game.

wind, solar, hydroelectric (with considerable neccessary limitations), and geothermal IN COMBINATION are clean. nuclear is not (spent fuel and politics) and hydrogen is still pretty much pie in the sky, and may always be as a motor fuel. i really don't see a clean way of propelling mechanical transportation other then some form of stored energy, in combination with making as much as possible of it more energy efficient by putting it on some kind of rails.

but i really see no fundimental problem with swapping out buying our energy centrally and indenturing ourselves to a personal motor vehicule to swap in, indenturing ourselves, if thats what it takes, to generating our energy on every roof and backyard, and purchasing our transportation centrally, as in public, preferably guideway based and small form factor, wherever possible.

that and drastically reduced human birthrate are the only reasonable and most probably effective path to sustaining the environment our own existence depends upon sustaining.

people need to be allowed to construct their own houses in their own individual way, from materials that consume a much smaller percentage of forest products as well. that require less felling of trees.

just leaving the planet alone would certianly do the trick, IF there were any way physically possible to do so. last time i checked, there isn't.

but yes, the less we do to screw it up the better. unfortuanately, the profit motive doesn't encourage this, if anything, almost everything it motivates is just the opposite.

which really is the real problem with it. well that's part of it. but our population levels are the other. and there's no other solution to that, then to stop increasing them somehow. and not even everyone killing themselves, let alone each other, is as PERMINENTLY effective, as somehow lowering human fertility accross the board without bias or exception.

=^^=
.../\...

 

There is definitely a middle ground to be found. Technology can coexist with nature, moderation is the key.

 

Technology should be used to coexist and help nature. If anything we should turn our technology research towards ways of fixing the ozone layer, fixing global warming, bringing back endangered and extinct species of plants and animals, and curing diseases.

 

Hi Littlefoot,

Actually, nature creates it's own technology.

Man merely uses these technologies and tries to replicate them as much as possible.

 

The way I see it, there are two planet saving possibilities: technology saves the planet or everyone dies, thus leaving the planet alone and saving it. I know which one I would prefer. For an interesting look at how technology and the environment can coexist peacefully you should check out the book Cradle to Cradle. It's about recycling in a way similar to what hippie chick666 mentioned.

 

technology will do what people use it to do.

the problem is the way economic interest, blind to anything but their own self fulfillment, are using the most harmful because that is what works for them.

its not a satan, its not a magic wand,
it won't save or destroy anything by itself.
it isn't even an it.

combustion based technologies, plus population
plus corporatocracy are destroying the web of life.

noncombustion technologies exist but are not favored by corporatocracy.
population and corporatocracy itself are still part of the equasion.

corporatocracy we don't need, and population can be tamed by lowering fertility.

 

Technology can be good, especially for information sharing, which is expanding on the connections and communication we have. I think we can work for technologies that will progress health of humans and nature instead of economy.

But things like HAARP are completely fucked up, and a waste of money.

 

lots of things are fucked up, but the biggest things that aren't mostly distractions to lead us off the scent, are oil and coal, the scale of their production, consumption and use, and of course population is an element of that scale.

 

The scary thing is that human health is completely dependent on fossil fuels. Our food, power, healthcare etc. The only reason world population has increased so much in the last 100 years is because of cheap oil. So what happens if the production peaks? Food spikes in price and people starve.

So can technology replace fossil fuels over the next century? I'm not sure. Solar power is promising, but it requires oil to produce.

 

I don't know the answers, so it's hard to even speculate. Though I do not suggest we move away from fossil fuels, but perhaps modesty and balance as someone has already suggested.

 

If technology doesn't save or at least preserve the planet, nothing else will. I wouldn't say it's impossible for technology to protect Mother Earth. What used to be magic in ancient times is science now, so maybe we'll discover magic that will save us all. Or at least keep our planet kicking for a few more generations.

 

the question "Will Technology Save The Planet?" has nothing to do with it, Cuz its up to us humans to save or destroy the planet. Technology helps humans with what they want to accomplish, but technology isn't gonna save the planet. The only thing technology is saving is humans from ourselves.

Technology has been hindered immensely though due to the monetary system. Monetary systems work on profit whether it be a capitalist or socialist system, and profit grows from inefficiency. This is why they make computers that get outdated so easily, or why companies make cheap materials. Along with the inefficiencies, companies aren't conscious of environment, waste, and energy consumption. Everything about the companies become dependent upon another factor furthering the inefficiencies. These efficiencies are even strung out to improve job-loss, for example car companies spread their business in so many directions, and it costs so much money for the buyer cuz they're paying for all the people and individual parts in between, to get a car that'll just gussle gasoline until it wears down and taken into a junkyard.
Technology can work alongside nature, but our business-mongering and money-eyes are blinding us

Do you see what I mean? What we know of technology right now is held back. Technology is much more capable of delivering human's healthiest concerns, but until we humans realize we're holding ourselves back by this corruption-making system, things will never work out as we want them to.

 

But a capitalist system specifically aims to cut as much inefficiency as much possible specifically to make more profits. Take computers, they don't become outdated because of inefficiency, they become outdated so quick because the technology is moving so quickly as each company makes something better to outdo their rivals/last product. The amount of time and money going into computer science by both governments, companies, and people on their own free time means it's the fastest growing growing technology we have.

Cars too, if you picked up a car directly from the factory it'd be cheap. I've had two friends who worked at car dealerships since the father of one of them owned two dealerships. Cars are so expensive because of the dealership, they mark them up so much, as one of them put it "We ruined so many lives selling people hunks of junk for $20,000 for something they could've got on craigslist for $3,000" But cars are pretty cheap to make(when you consider how much electronics goes into a car these days, a car has more memory and computing power then the Apollo spacecrafts did) because of vast advancements in technology years ago in making them. Cars are old news now but until the technology was perfected were hard to make, even design. It seems simple now but the internal combustion engine is actually a very advanced model of an engine, this is why it took so long to come up with something different.