Ben Matthews

That’s great progress, thanks for all the work!
Glad to see enhanced federation with rest of fediverse - a small detail : the link for ‘Automatically includes a hashtag with new posts’ should point to pull #4533 (not #4398 ) - should help discoverability from mastodon, especially if community tags become customisable.

Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i’ve been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo …

I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.

Indeed, as I mentioned in my main comment

Some of the ‘mandates’ are far too easily implemented.

At least that one requires a ‘parliament majority’ - otoh big groups are not in that parliament at all… Actually ‘ungrowth’ in the north may just happen anyway, slowly, for demographic reasons.
Maybe this type of game could provide a structure to help people to debate factors, if could vary (packages of) assumptions… ?
As it is, might encourage some to wait for a revolution rather than engaging current options.

Well you can ‘win’ leaving current nuclear fraction as is, the old stuff keeps working without any disaster (missing factor ??).
Otoh, nuclear fusion has been tomorrow’s breakthrough for half a century …

Thanks, I’m having a look.
Some elements quite sophisticated, seems a good use for wasm (although I prefer scala.js for an interactive model).
Use of Hector makes sense, but seems emissions drop more negative than I can get from my model, maybe it lacks some feedbacks, or has some double-counting of policy-impacts?
Are developers still active in this project - discussion of issues mostly a year or more ago ?

Sure, but this is also a real game we need to win (well, maybe not <1C in that timeframe) , and we only get one chance to play. This example helps people learn, but there are things to adjust.
Another (I didn’t mention above) is that construction (including new energy, ‘green’ cities etc.) takes massive time, energy, materials - it’s not clear that’s sufficiently taken into account, and likewise not by real “socialist” planners.

You can get those ‘accelerationists’ within the coalition by funding lots of research, just don’t expect it all to work, don’t even need to apply it. Actually I think that ‘bias’ is realistic. Problem is rather political groups that are missing - religious for example.

OK, so I tried this, able to win on the second round. :-)
First time you risk to do some things too early, others you must do early, but I won’t spoil the challenge by giving details.
Good emphasis on land-use limitations.

Concept is nicer than ‘fate of the world’ which was rather similar (and even fotw told me their idea was partly inspired by an idea on my website about 23 years ago). Both this and fotw based on ‘cards’, while prefer to adjust levers gradually, and see graphs move in real-time.
(btw going back even further, does anybody remember ‘lincity’ )?

Some things confusing - e.g. you adjust percentages not totals, but totals change, which hits limits in not-obvious ways. No mention of space-heating challenge eg heat-pumps (suggests made in tropics?), no modal-shift in transport (except inside cities). I’d like to see whether the numbers reflect current emissions of China, and Arabia (I doubt it, doesn’t fit the ‘south is good’ narrative). Overall I suspect that the calculations are too optimistic, but can’t say more without detailed plots of changes over time, or a view of the engine code.

But biggest unrealities:

• We don’t have such a scenario - there is no global planner - “god games” are too easy concept.
• The fraction of contrarians is larger (than the 3 groups I couldn’t satisfy in this game), maybe increasing (?).
• Some of the ‘mandates’ are far too easily implemented.

I ponder how to design a game which is more realistic in these respects.
Having said that, I think the ‘magic card’ has some merits, if everybody would play, maybe that helps tip the balance.

To make the most of the wind they’d need a flexible route adapting to the weather forecast (about 5 days in advance), a deal with rail companies to complete journeys along coasts would help make that doable.
Indeed the fences along railways are an issue, but likewise for big roads, eco-bridges with trees can help (there are examples eg in netherlands iirc).
An interplanetary drone to harvest gas for gentle wind-driven balloons back on earth, interesting combination of tech… but first priority I guess would be to keep the He on our planet (avoid leaks -> lost due to escape velocity).

The discussion below the original article mentions “Caspian Sea Monster” - which uses “ground effect”, but there are more modern versions that are not monsters - for example this electric sea-glider might be promising for coastal trips ?

I like this idea, the views could be fantastic. The article mentions the problem of prevailing winds - so plan circular trips following the trade winds, as sailing ships used to do. For example, from Spain to the Carribbean, up the coast, back further north (recall - global empires were run without plane-speed, people traveled the world and had interesting lives). Complement the network with sleeper trains overland where practical - for example train down the african coast, down brazilian coast, airship to cross narrowest gap). 48 hours transatlantic, that’s nothing compared to a week or more on trans-siberian (although a modern tgv could do Paris-Shanghai in about 48 hrs - if political will instead of obstacles).
Side thought - is there an issue regarding supply of Helium (or energy cost to separate it …?) if scaling this up?

There are still enthusiasts of alt/inter-langs, more modern than Esperanto, which only has european roots - I prefer those that also blend in words from Chinese, Hindi, Arabic etc.

See also this community .

However modern technology - such as instant translation built into phones (very useful for Ukrainian-French here last year) - changes the situation, maybe diminishes the motivation to learn such languages, although potentially facilitating their use.

This idea makes me think, that if those 10 billion were spread more evenly including deserts and wet-deserts (much of tropical ocean lacking nutrients), maybe there would be space, but then fundamentally the challenge is not flying machines but self-sufficient biospheres. If that size bubble really worked, same could float or crawl on the surface. Except that somebody controls the surface, however even your dream machine leaves a shadow there. But I’m sceptical about “claustrospheres” (did you read “This Other Eden”?).

Hmm, fun idea, but imagine if it became preferred lifestyle for 10 billion people, air-traffic control could be interesting… Solar Impulse got around the world, but it did land plenty of times. By the way to fly quietly and freely just try paragliding, with evening lift very peaceful.

Could be good, might need also a talk page, ‘rules’ (effort for mods) …? I suppose not too much demand on servers if just plain text, but how does this federate? For example, if I read a slrpnk wiki from sopuli, does sopuli have to pick up every edit, or only if I visit a page, or do i need an account on slrpnk to use it ?

Can you elaborate, how that would work ?
Indeed could be good to keep longer-term ideas, rather than just reaction to news.

Yes I like those things, what bothers me about the original question, is the implication that for many countries it would never be “realistic”, in that case no good futures are realistic anywhere in the world. So, maybe the question should be adapted slightly, by adding “first” before the ? ?

We all have to share the same atmosphere. So what’s the point to have some eco-topia in just a few countries ?

Thanks for posting this, many of us appreciate active communities on slrpnk.net, without seeing where it originated. Noting the “hopeful vs panic” issue, we shouldn’t waste our energy disputing “optimistic” or “pessimistic” visions - both are useful to help people to think, what’s important is to reject “fatalistic” thought.

About the art we see on slrpnk.net, it seems to me most of the buildings tend large, and like those of an architect selling grand projects, rather than buildings crafted by individuals on a smaller scale - is that intentional ?

Regarding the global warming goals, indeed 2.3 - while not good enough to avoid many critical impacts - is still better than 3 or 4, so we have made progress bending the projection curves since these began in 1990s. Having a long experience of such scenarios I’m trying to make an interactive tool to help illustrate such changes.