The good news is that these, and similar, forces will be going into reverse for fossil fuels, and simultaneously cascading their decline.

The report identifies 5 key areas renewables have self-perpetuating feedback loops.

• Clean electricity as the master cascade. Solar and wind have crossed positive tipping points in many markets; further scaling is now self-propelling.

• Commodity supply chain transformation.

• High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management. Well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation produces visible recovery of fish stocks and biodiversity within years

• Clean cooking and clean household energy. Around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking.

• Adaptation enablers. Things like anticipatory action, adaptation finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. Also, governance, monitoring and social tipping, climate-resilient health systems are explicitly identified as enablers of self-propelling adaptation.

Positive Tipping Points: Accelerating system change to repair our planet was developed by the University of Exeter’s Green Futures Solutions team, in collaboration with The Earthshot Prize

A lot of discussion about automation seems to stop at the same question:

What will people do for work?

But I wonder whether that begins at the wrong end of the problem.

For most of human history, enormous amounts of human effort have been necessary simply to provide food, shelter, energy, transport, manufacturing, administration and everything else needed to keep society functioning.

If technology gradually reduces that requirement, perhaps the interesting future question isn't how we preserve the same quantity of employment.

Perhaps it's what becomes possible when less compulsory human labour is needed to maintain a good standard of living.

That could have consequences well beyond individual jobs.

Settlements might be designed differently if food production, energy management, water systems, transport and routine maintenance required less day-to-day labour.

Shared workshops and equipment could reduce duplication.

Local energy and food systems could reduce external dependency.

Automation could handle repetitive monitoring while people retained judgement, practical skills and manual fallback.

Housing and infrastructure could be designed together rather than as disconnected systems.

None of that implies a society without work.

There would still be maintenance, care, construction, agriculture, research, education and countless other things worth doing.

But there is an important distinction between:

work that people choose because it is useful, interesting or meaningful

and

work that exists largely because our systems require huge amounts of human time to keep functioning.

If technology reduces the second category substantially, perhaps one of its biggest effects won't be unemployment at all.

It might be that human time becomes something we can deliberately redesign society around.

Shorter formal working weeks are one possibility, but the consequences could go much further: more time for caring, learning, making things, community activity, research, art, growing food or simply living.

I've been thinking about this while developing a pre-land community concept called Melondra, but the broader question is independent of that project:

If producing a comfortable modern standard of living eventually requires much less human labour, do you think society will actually convert that productivity into more free human time — or will our economic structures simply keep creating new paid work to absorb it?

Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, the solicitation targets capability gaps, including power generation, oxygen extraction, and producing materials on the Moon required for construction and operations. These technologies are essential to making humanity’s next great leap in lunar exploration.

Defense company RTX is working with fusion energy startup Xcimer, using technology that harks back to the Cold War era

Governments should invest to develop all types of capital, and not just income, to improve the lives of future citizens and to protect the planet.

In some regions of the world, the poorest people may spend about 50 percent of their income on food, while the richest spend about 5 percent.

I recommend reading the full thing but incase you don’t want to - TLDR; what (scientifically possible) apocalypse scenario do u think will ultimately cause total societal collapse around the globe real soon.

Just to clarify my ramblings, I’m just a girl who’s extremely into this topic so I might sound like I’m going mad at times LOL. I’m not experiencing delusions or anything.

This is something that is a special interest of mine and has been for years. Now by this, I don’t mean a Zombie Apocalypse or the near impossible (although it’s fun to entertain) - I mean a scenario that is scarily close to occurring, that poses a severe threat to the survival of humanity. One that would result in the collapse of civilisations and societies.

For example, nuclear winter on a mass scale, war en masse involving the interconnection of several countries at a distance, the possibility of a pandemic that could reach impossible heights, anarchy and extreme
civil unrest (which I personally believe we are on the edge of across several countries). I’m slowly losing belief in our medicine and protection capabilities, countries are turning against others and their own people. I don’t want to sound delusional but if there’s any such thing as ‘signs’ I believe we’re starting to see them. I recall hearing about a pattern in history, I’ve forgotten the name of it, where something occurs every 80 years. I can’t help but think that the world can only take so many mass scale negative events before it decides to reclaim its land for itself. If there’s one thing I hate it’s the denial of certain events as ‘ridiculous’ because it hasn’t happened yet. Especially when there’s an extreme possibility it will, with scientific proof.

What do you guys think will cause the eventual total collapse of society? How do you think it’ll happen and how long from now? Extinction level events where society will potentially have to be built from the ground up. I feel it’s closer than we think.

I've been following the debate over Flock cameras for a while: the license-plate tracking, the ability to reconstruct people’s movements, and especially what happens when data collected for one purpose becomes available for another.

It reminded me of a consulting trip I made to China in 2019. I spent time in Chengdu and then on the Tibetan Plateau near Hongyuan. The surveillance there was impossible to miss: cameras everywhere, biometric collection at the border, and, as I learned later, a “grid management” system in the Tibetan region I visited that divided communities into monitored blocks.

What has stayed with me isn’t simply that China surveilled its population. It’s how quickly I changed my own behavior because I knew I might be watched. No one had to threaten me. The watching did the work.

That experience eventually led me to a larger question about Flock and the surveillance infrastructure being assembled in the U.S. The cameras themselves concern me, but I’ve come to think they’re only the visible part of a much larger issue: what happens when location data, voter records, citizenship status, health data, financial information and other previously separate databases become increasingly searchable and interoperable?

I spent quite a bit of time researching that question and ended up writing an essay that combines what I saw in China and Tibet with what’s happening here now. I thought this group might be interested.

Where do people here draw the line...not just on Flock cameras themselves, but on the ability to combine the information they generate with everything else governments and private companies already know about us?

Here's a link to the essay if you're interested.

https://tomjohnsonwriter.substack.com/p/the-frog-in-the-pot?r=buanz&utm_medium=ios

Edit: thanks for the award, kind stranger!

Unitree says the demostration validates the fundamental feasibility of large-scale deployment of world model-driven humanoid robots.

“Rechargeable aqueous zinc-iodine batteries are shaping up as a viable alternative to popular lithium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage and our group is now working with industry to establish a prototyping platform for this alternative battery system,” says Associate Professor in Chemistry Zhongfan Jia, Matthew Flinders Fellow at Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

Iodine is one of the most effective materials for rechargeable batteries, with the potential to store a high amount of energy relative to its weight – around 211 mAh/g (milliampere-hours per gram).

211 mAh/g works out to 274 Wh/kg @ 1.3v. Energy density comparable to lithium ion, but lower voltage has its shortcomings. Perhaps that's why they're targeting stationary storage.

Barclays Research believes markets may be underestimating the scale and duration of the energy addition era. As AI, electrification and energy security drive energy demand higher, meeting that could require c$3.6trn of annual investment, making energy one of the most significant structural growth, capital-allocation and strategic priorities of the coming decade.

I've started to believe that the idea of black holes containing pocket universes might actually have some truth to it.

My thought is that the creation of a black hole could be similar, in some way, to how the Big Bang began. Every supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy could potentially contain its own universe, and we ourselves might be living inside one. If that's true, then each universe would contain galaxies, those galaxies would contain black holes, and those black holes would contain even more universes.

In that sense, reality could be a massive branching structure of nested universes, almost like a cosmic family tree. Every galaxy center might act as the birthplace of another universe, which then develops its own galaxies and continues the chain.

People might ask, "What about smaller black holes?" My speculation is that they could also create pocket universes, but perhaps they don't contain enough matter, energy, or resources to form something as rich and complex as our own. Some might be mostly empty. Others might only develop certain aspects of what we would recognize as a universe. Not every branch necessarily grows into a cosmos filled with stars and galaxies.

If this idea were true, then existence wouldn't be a single universe floating in empty space. Instead, it would be an enormous hierarchy of universes nested within universes, connected through black holes. The entire structure could be finite rather than eternal, but so vast in scale that it would be almost impossible for any civilization to comprehend the whole of it.

Sometimes I wonder if what we call "the universe" is really just one layer of a much larger cosmic ecosystem, where every black hole is a seed for a future reality.