Futurology

We have them in the UK as well, slightly less dramatic and dangerous I’ll admit. But there is a town called Fairbourne right by the sea. The Welsh government is no longer putting funds into the sea defences of the town. As a result over time the entire town will eventually be underwater, so now the people that live there can no longer sell there houses. Which effectively means they can’t leave.

As I said different to the situation in California but climate refugees none the less.

monsieurmistral

I’ve heard that home rents are plummeting statewide specially in the Bay Area and real estate listings have skyrocketed.

California doesn’t fall into the seas from an earthquake. The whole state becomes burnt to a crisp.

WhirrBuzzer

I heard it will get colder soon. Just hang in there. Winter is coming!

bigwinw

In some future nation, Little America is a part of town where you go get hamburgers and pick up uneducated religious fundamentalists to do day labor.

FitzPack

Climate refugees already existed. It didn’t suddenly become a thing because Americans experienced it.

condescendingpats

Great news. I hope this means less/no fresh water is needed. I was shocked when I read how much fresh water google bought this year to cool its data centers in the US alone.

Semifreak

> In a lights-out datacenter, all servers would be swapped out about once every five years.

That’s the bit I was wondering most about. Apparently the model would be to swap these out one container at a time. That raises some questions for how this works out in practice though, if you have hundreds/thousands of these things (like you’d need to replace a land data center) you’d spend a lot of time dragging these out of the ocean and putting replacements back in, and you need to figure out how to stagger this process so you don’t run into the situation where a third of your components have already failed by the time you start swapping them out, and of course you can’t swap them all out at once either.

Anyway, interesting that they keep mentioning takeaways for land centers rather than actually moving to sea centers in a big way. Of course they can’t just easily move away from a billion dollar installation you already built, but I expect we’ll build more in the future.

HKei

And all of the dangerous waste heat is safely disposed of in the ocean!

QuantumButtz

That is heckin’ cool.

I’d be interested to know how much heat is pumped out or radiate around these tanks just as a curiosity of impact to local marine life. I can’t imagine it’s too bad, but it’d be an interesting consideration if these move to scale, but we gain efficiencies in on land heat generation…

That reliability increase is crazy as well!

Sweeb_Potato

I did the electrical design of Natick! I’m so glad it was a sucess.

Fukurou83

I thought this was r/powerwashingporn for a moment. This sounds like a tremendous idea!

hmspain

First I’ve heard of it, and this is definitely an interesting approach. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the rackspace way of using a lot of cheap components so that failures are easily replaceable.

Combine it with an offshore wind farm and you’ve got excess power to sell, and the undersea real estate acquired

adinfinitum225

Why does it have to be underwater if it is air-tight? I understand the value of stable temperature, you could also bury them in the ground?

greg-en

But won’t putting servers underwater speed up the heating of the oceans 😮 /s

SucculentMoose

“On the surface, throwing an entire data center to the bottom of the ocean may seem strange…”

I see what you did there.

Chefgorilla

As someone who has genetic High LDL choresterol and triglycerides, I am super excited for CRISPR to fix it. My daughter is going to school to become a genetist so she can work on CRISPR. She also has the same genetic disorder. I would love to get off statins and stop thinking about fat all day every day. My LDL is 283 with statins and practically no saturated fats. I have occasional cheese and usually the white cheeses as they have less fat. I am young enough that I think I have another 20 years before I really start to worry. Hopefully, I can CRISPR this out before it’s too late.

mclassy3

For me the most interesting bit from this research is that people who inherited a mutation that suppresses these two gens DON’T GET HEART DISEASE. This shows that it is highly likely that if we make the same tweak through therapy that it will work.

Scope_Dog

> But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record.

Sigh. “First do no harm”, but how much baby is thrown out with the bathwater with all of the caution.

ConfirmedCynic

In my home country we just wrap the dead in cotton cloth and bury them with no markings (rocks, but no decorations). It’s more efficient, I never understood coffins

YAZEED-IX

I love this. I find it incredibly selfish that people expect a permanent space on the planet for their rotting corpse. Think of all the cemeteries that could be turned into forested and habitat protected areas.

Tenacious_Dad

Finally. I don’t want to slowly rot in a coffin. Send me back to nature.

FlandersFlannigan

I’m sorry to be the one to ask the question here…what kind of mushrooms would I make? Would they be edible?

absterge17

Or, you know, just use a wooden casket. If there’s one thing I learned growing up having to deal with deaths is that the funeral business is 1 big scam based on emotional blackmail. The prices those thugs dare to charge are fucking absurd. Fuck your profession.

nelsonbestcateu

Hi there,

I get the jokes and stuff, but if you have any questions about this, it was my PhD work so I could answer questions if you have any.

AaronDoesScience

24 Karat Carcinoma. Couldn’t stop that thought. But sounds fascinating and I hope it helps a lot of people.

A_Necessary

Just makes me think of the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer of gold dust as a metaphor of the healing process.

Guess it eventually could be much less of a metaphore with this practice.

capitaine_d

So south park was right. You just have to inject money directly into your veins

HotPocketDisaster

Of course the cancer is opposed to previous techniques lol.

Aqqusin

While it would be nice, I don’t believe a single word they say. They’ve had more than enough time and opportunities to do something and prove that they really care.

I think it’s most likely just a strategy to get the government and people of their back. That’s the magic of promises.

FuckSwearing

and yet it feels like they also said yeah but u have 50 years

evilroots

Explaining BP’s very recent shift towards renewables.

KaneCreole

Thankfully, corporate overlords still breath the same air as us. Let’s hope it continues for a while.

Tencreed

This is a small first step in the right direction. It is said that corporations view their purpose as bringing value to their shareholders. Shareholders have now publicly informed their corporations that the value they seek is not strictly financial.

DeDannan

History, for as long as that will last, will look upon the oil industry as the grave diggers of human civilization. It’s a good thing that it’s past it’s peak, but it will go out knowing that the damage it did is irreversible.

TheFluffiestOfCows

How will this effect the economies of countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others the depend on oil exports?

KermitMadMan

Still pushing the false narrative of peak demand. We are living through the peak oil era. Not a peak demand era. They say this to avoid panic and reassure investors.

MQSP

I sold my car and bought an electric scooter and second battery

Radekzalenka

So, are we gonna see gas prices under the $2 range? Maybe under the $1 range?

I highly doubt it.

Alukrad

Being lied to by their own government tends to piss off a few folk.

OttoManSatire

What about civil unrest?

“You’ve already had it.”

“We’ve had first civil unrest, yes. What about second civil unrest?”

anothernaturalone

I fail to see the problem. A little rebellion might be a good thing at this point. At least in certain countries. Not gonna name any names.

Hyjynx75

Even more so than the epidemic itself, the mass unemployment caused by it adds to unrest. Even if the unemployed are 100% taken care of financially, they still have nothing to do with their time

Meme_Pope

We should label police as non-labor and break their unions, and scale back for-profit medicine. These two tactics alone will help keep us competitive in international markets, a healthy and intelligent population is good for representative democracy like our republic has.

ImPolicy

Natural climate change happens in long cycles. In history it has been indicated by levels of carbon in the atmosphere. So much of this is natural climate effects, and there are positive feedback loops that can create sudden shifts in temperature.

There have been times in the relatively recent history of the planet where the high temperatures on the planet got up over 80 degrees Celsius average global temperature. This is often accompanied by mass extinction as life tries to adjust to the heat. What would it be like for us if the temp swung that high. Remember that is global average, imaging what the equatorial temp would get up to on a hot day?

BUT…

There is more carbon in the atmosphere today than there was back in the last extreme hothouse age. Volcanoes and wildfires are natural, and then on top of that natural effect humans are dumping 20x more carbon gasses into the air than nature does. So if scientists are right, we have created conditions where we could see more than 80 degree average global temperature….good luck with that.

The only consolation is that nature is slow by our standards and only goes up a tiny bit each year…as far as we know. But we have never seen this kind of carbon increase ever happen in nature, so are are just guessing how fast it will go up and what thresholds there are for positive feedback loops. Because nature is slow we may be able to return to normal cycles…for sure what has happened the last 10 years is not natural.

Jumper5353

And there’s no such thing as global warming. No sir.

haternation

The fires were lit by Antifa arsonists, not climate change.

evilrobotted

The far left wackjobs going around starting fires doesn’t help. Look it up.

rampitup55

Blimey! Posting A LOT on r/futurology lately, got to farm that Reddit karma cabin boy?

RobinJ1994