[OT] Saving the planet is quiet work.

[Thaumaturge]

Monte posted a story about a man in the USSR who very likely saved the planet with his decision. Good stuff.

We talk about heros all the time in D&D. It's nice to read about RL heros every now and then.


Thaumaturge.

 

[Numion]

"When that prize was awarded in 1970, it was estimated that Norman Borlaug had saved the lives of over 1 billion people."

Humans are taxing this planets capacity to its limits. Some people think that the world could do without those extra 1 billion. Another mans hero is another.. how was it?

 

[Thaumaturge]

Yeah, I was more talking about the Soviet guy who didn't launch nuclear weapons at the US when a computer glitched told him we had launched weapons at him and his country.


Thaumaturge.

 

[Numion]

Yeah, I was more talking about the Soviet guy who didn't launch nuclear weapons at the US when a computer glitched told him we had launched weapons at him and his country.


Thaumaturge.

I agree, that guy had some balls of steel! If he had acted as he was trained, our lives would've been much different. And some of us wouldn't even have lives.

Strange thoughts, those.

 

[med stud]

Yeah, I think 100 % of the Americans on the board are alive just because of that man, and more then half of the Europeans. Strange in a way that a man who saved us from an apocalypse havent got any real attention :-/

 

[d20Dwarf]

Interesting who the villains are in the Borlaug story. The same people that supposedly care about the world so that our children can enjoy it are routinely condemning living children to starvation, disease, poverty, and death.

Everyone would do well to remember that adherance to ideals should not trump practicality and compassion.

 

[Numion]

Everyone would do well to remember that adherance to ideals should not trump practicality and compassion.

...nor common sense

Exponential growth of human population is unsustainable for long periods of time.

 

[kenjib]

Interesting who the villains are in the Borlaug story. The same people that supposedly care about the world so that our children can enjoy it are routinely condemning living children to starvation, disease, poverty, and death.

Everyone would do well to remember that adherance to ideals should not trump practicality and compassion.

Come on, now. The same "villains" also work very hard to prevent Montsanto's utterly dispicable and potentially catastrophic terminator seeds from being used as well as supporting sustainable growth rather than exponential expansion that may or may not continue to be supportable through the fairy tale of unlimited progress in science. Of course saving a billion lives is an amazing and wonderful thing, but the situation is far more complex than that simple article presents it. We will only know the full outcome of these things in another hundred years, but hopefully people will look toward more long term solutions to population management. Extreme high yield crops are great, but by themselves they are not a long term solution. For all we know this could just be paving the way for tens of billions of deaths 50 years from now.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

(VERY offended look)

Something needs to be said here.
I'm going to say it. I wouldn't normally do so, but some of the posts above require it, even from me.

Converting the entire Northern Hemisphere of the Earth into a smoking, radioactive ruin, and turning the sky of the entire Earth dark so that nuclear winter kills the flora and fauna of the equatorial and southern hemispheric regions, and (ultimately) killing most if not nearly all of humankind on the Earth ... IS A REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD THING.
The person who prevented that from happening (and who paid the price for doing so) did a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY GOOD THING.

End of discussion.

Finis.

Edena_of_Neith

 

[Tiefling]

(VERY offended look)

Something needs to be said here.
I'm going to say it. I wouldn't normally do so, but some of the posts above require it, even from me.

Converting the entire Northern Hemisphere of the Earth into a smoking, radioactive ruin, and turning the sky of the entire Earth dark so that nuclear winter kills the flora and fauna of the equatorial and southern hemispheric regions, and (ultimately) killing most if not nearly all of humankind on the Earth ... IS A REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD THING.
The person who prevented that from happening (and who paid the price for doing so) did a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY GOOD THING.

End of discussion.

Finis.

Edena_of_Neith

WTF? Edena, none of the posts above require that. None of them have contested that or disagreed with it.