Drop in ocean pH might kill everyone in the 2090s! (Paper last revised 05/2022)

>What a lot of people are relying on is technology that doesn't exist yet. Which, to be fair, is a real possibility. There's a chance AI or quantum computing or bioengineering or something exolodes within the next 20 years into something that radically changes the human experience, and various solutions or problems can come out of that, depending on how it plays out. Maybe an AI invents a way to cheaply clean the air, or maybe it invents a way to control everyone to force us to live in balance. The chance is there, and not insignificant. I'm not attacking you, I come in peace. *b u t* It isn't a real possibility and the chance is 0. Cleaning the air is the perfect example. ​ Imagine you had a vial of, I don't know...soy sauce. You pour this soy sauce into a bathtub full of water. Now the water is a bit different, it's slightly off - color. You decide this was a mistake and resolve to clear the water of soy sauce. In a perfect world you could just tilt the vial back to its starting position and all the soy sauce would gather back up into it as if time was reversing. This is not a perfect world. This is a world of entropy. This is a world where time has a single direction. So how do you return the sauce to its rightful vessel? You don't, unless you're prepared for heavy sacrifice. It is a simple matter to take something of low entropy and make it high entropy. It's a simple matter to take a dense fluid and make it diffuse. It require no effort nor thought. You can do so by accident. The reverse is a leviathan task. The amount of energy and effort you would require to scour the water of its delicious, fermented soy-based contaminants is so great it feels plainly pointless. Might as well just draw new water and dump the old. That would be ideal anyway but we've no more water left in the reservoir. "At least we aren't dumping anymore soy sauce," we content ourselves. ...Right? We have o n e atmosphere. We cannot dump this one and start anew. It is incomprehensibly massive and we have billions of barrels of oil being dumped into it per day. Most of it diffuses into the world's oceans. The remainder is dispersed amongst the very air we breath. ​ In order to accomplish this task, we require a billion personal cars sputtering through metropolises sinking the very ground they lie upon with their titanic weight. Millions of factories. Billions of men and women working around the clock, 24/7 for a couple hundred years. The amount of material we move per year outpaces that of the Earth's natural processes. We've enveloped 40% of the Earth's habitable land with farms. We've killed or eaten half of the fish in the oceans. These impressive feats are sometimes likened to divinity. We're the effective gods of the world known as Earth. We are an incomprehensible, eldritch power beyond the realm of sanity to all of Earth's lower forms. We terraform the planet and shape it to our liking as a matter of daily existence. These feats, doubtless titanic, amount analougsly to the act of pouring the little vial of soy sauce into a bathtub, just on a larger scale. I want to be crystal clear to you: what you suggest is *beyond* the realm of the gods. It is the equivalent of turning back time. It is pure delusion. Perhaps it is out of desperation that some researchers bother. Naivete besides. I sometimes think this may just as well be why others are so enamoured with the promise of AI and the so-called singularity. If creating our problems was an act close to god-like power, then perhaps we can solve them too, if we create the ultimate intelligence. There is an unspoken prophecy in the techno-optimist canon in which we seem destined to create God in the machine to save us from ourselves. ​ This is fiction. The only salvation we have is to accept that we really fucked up and try to minimize the damage. How soon can we stop pouring the fucking sauce in the tub? We need to ask ourselves how we can salvage biodiversity. Can we build an ark of sorts? How do we save as many people as possible? Techno-optimism is a desperate, infantile fantasy borne of our own self-destructive hubris. Real solutions are going to be ugly and humbling to humanity's self-image.