Financial_Exercise88 t1_j1fmyjj wrote on December 23, 2022 at 11:38 PM

Reply to comment by rixtil41 in Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated by strangeattractors

All humanity relies on a precise balance between O2 and CO2 in ambient air. Hemoglobin binds CO2 100x more than O2; it only works as an O2 delivery system because there's a hyper-abundance of O2 (declining currently, FYI). Genetic engineering or O2 supplementation mechanisms require extensive supply chains that won't exist if only a few survive.

And if we (humanity) survive but we (you & I) don't then the former matters little.

rixtil41 t1_j1g8wnr wrote on December 24, 2022 at 2:37 AM

But what about the future where genetic engineering requires less and does not rely on a large number of people? Unless you think humanity will die off before that becomes a reality.

Financial_Exercise88 t1_j1hd2ce wrote on December 24, 2022 at 10:20 AM

Can AI come up with an alternative to Hb that we can genetically engineer babies to have before the imbalance ambient air is lethal? Probably. But no one is working on it. It will probably affect behavior & intelligence in imperceptible ways long before humans see it as an issue worth pursuing. And then we depend on animals... we're going to replace the whole ecosystem with genetically engineered variants that can thrive in higher CO2/lower O2 environment (are we going to also change our dependence on the Krebs cycle which needs O2) ? No, I don't believe that is realistic. Supply chains will be long gone, humanity too, before then. Or, we could just tax the f out of fossil fuels. No. Brainer.