I am kinda tired of this narrative that I am part of some responsible group and should walk through life riddled with guilt about each plastic bottle or gallon of gas that my existence consumes. I am not saying you should be throwing soda cans from your Hummer, but I feel a sort of fatalism around environmental issues and don't think individual self-deprivations is going to fix it. The people with actual power in the richest nations don't seem to care, and most developing nations don't even have it on their radar as an issue to care about.
I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Having concern for the environment and being conscious of your consumption isn’t some kind of mentally debilitating guilt that should keep you from functioning normally on a day-to-day basis. What’s the worst that environmental consciousness could do to you? Make you buy an electric over a gas-powered vehicle when electric vehicles finally become widely available? Avoid buying oily junk food and sugary drinks in non-recyclable plastic packaging? Properly segregate your waste? These aren’t “tiring” and “horrifying” things.
We all should be apologetic of our choices that are environmentally harmful and actively avoid as much of those choices as we can, because that collective individual disregard for nature is precisely what creates the “market demand” whom “people with actual power” would claim to be simply fulfilling. You’re passing all the blame on one side of the equation when, really, everyone across the board has a part to play here.
Most people on the planet cannot afford the time and money to change their lifestyles to be environmentally-friendly. And among those few who do, most have other priorities. It is naive to believe that a collective change in consument behaviour will scale up as the solution to Earth's environment problems.
I don't think the parent commenter meant the producers of goods as the "people with actual power". It is just as unreasonable to believe that businesses will suddenly start caring about environment, since that would put them at a disadvantage on the market. (Though I imagine the whole narrative that it is the consumer's responsibility to fix the environment is very convenient for some of the less-environmentally friendly corporations who might be afraid of additional burdens on them so there's an incentive to push that message)
In my opinion the root of the problem is that damaging the environment is not associated with an inherent cost. In my opinion, scalable solutions are those which "use the free market to regulate itself", i.e. things like carbon taxes (to make CO2 emission a cost), shifting cost of garbage utilisation to packaging producers (to make non-recyclable packaging a cost) etc. (+ corresponding change to social programs to lessen the impact of this change on consumers who would not afford increase in the price of goods). But for this to happen there needs to be a political will. For this reason I think that the most environmentally conscious things those of us who live in democracies can do is to vote for environmentally conscious representatives who understand the issue well.
Those changes you listed aren't nearly enough to stop the environmental onslaught. It seems our current trajectory is inevitable since there's so much short term profit to be made from mass consumption. Perhaps we'll turn it around once our actions cause resource scarcity, but that time isn't now.
Of course it's not enough, but isn't that such a trivial, impractical point to make? What small act is ever enough to make an impact on a large complex systemic effect? That's why you need an aggregate of counteractions--and you will never have that aggregate when you have too many individuals being defeatist and actively choosing to do nothing about a problem that threatens their very own survival.
And sure, short-term profits drive people towards a certain behaviors, but no collective behavior is set in stone and people's tastes are actually changing, which is why more and more companies are publicly positioning themselves to be sustainable even if it's just woke theater for many of them. Being cynical and defeatist about not compounding to the problem of environmental pollution is such a valueless position. It's really not impossible to make the reverse politically viable.
The point is that for almost every metric, consumers changing their habits will have a negligible impact on global aspects of this disaster. Even if everyone changes, companies are so extremely polluting that it will not change the fact that everything will turn to shit. What needs to change is companies.
It's not an excuse. I'm already actively limiting my own pollution by being frugal. I'm observing humanity-level trends and making conclusions. If you're definitely going to lose, being defeatist is also being realistic.
You don’t know that you’re going to lose, and trends can be reversed. They have been before. We’re doing the same thing to the global pandemic now with all these vaccines.
This captured everything I find upsetting about white backlash to anti-racism. Pointing out a problem doesn’t mean the response expected of you is guilt. Identifying that you benefit from it and have an opportunity to do something about it doesn’t mean self deprivation.
Imagine if the zillion things people admire on HN reacted this way. “Launch HN: infrastructure as a service being characterized as lock in, we didn’t build anything because we’re sick of being told what’s wrong with existing things!” “Show HN: I got tired of people complaining about privacy so I made my website purely out of tracking cookies!”
"Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation."
I think if one is truly doing their best then it wouldn't make sense for them to be feel guilty. I'm not accusing you of you not doing your best (only you can know that) but maybe you haven't integrated it all. The purpose of emotions such as guilt was to motivate us to action but if you're already doing what you think you should according to your own standards then you should recognize that and be confident that these movements either aren't targeting you specifically or are being unreasonanle as to what they're asking you.
I share the sentiment, but I noticed that sometimes I use it as an excuse for not doing what I can within my reach. One benefit I see with individual action is that it's a way to stimulate political change (another one being economical). Plus, it may be contagious and make changes for the next generations. Thus, nothing prevents us from adopting bidirectional planning, i.e., both top-bottom (political, schools, etc.) and bottom-up (individual). It intuitively seems faster than top-bottom only.
Restricting the greatest excesses of the rich and militaries (the US specifically) and some form of aggressive carbon sequestration, but I don't think any of that requires some kind of Year Zero political program.
Try to see money as a ablative material that allows to set up "alternative" realities. It has to be worn down and away by conflict, refugee streams, economic, environmental and social collapse before actual change can happen.
I live in Trump country. My faith in humanity is at its nadir. I won't give up, not ever. But I think its clear what will make a difference (e.g. banning SUVs, coal, and fracking, restarting nuclear, subsidizing solar, population control, etc), and what won't (banning plastic straws, putting recycle bins everywhere), and I think its wise to accept that humanity, in the best case, will undergo a (voluntary, controlled) Contraction. In the worst case, it will be involuntary, and catastrophic. That's it. Those are our only two options.
What do you think is the root of the problem? You say faith in humanity but do you mean these people are failing? If so, are they the cause of it or possibly the media they/we are consuming? If you agree with that and that vested interests influence that media then what can we do? It seems like a fatal cacth-22 for the kind of democracies we have.
I live in Trump country, too. Which means I know a handful of people (not even anywhere near a majority) love to throw their impotent tantrums and we need to stop letting that scare us.
Many here at HN are financially literate, or at least conscious. Is that some sort of innate knowledge? No. You've learned and honed this new intuition, to think in terms of resources you have, can acquire, spend or invest. Climate and environment are no different, and you don't feel guilt over doing you finances either.
Its just being conscious of how you spend or create ecological resources, that's all. I find it even fun! (More fun than investing, and my financial ineptitude sometimes feels like something I should feel guilty about.)
It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire. It’s a way to explore. Now that I’m older I’m much more mindful about what I break. Are we collectively too child-like as a species?
Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice.
Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).
Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate.
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.
...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.
From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid ancestors self-domesticated.
Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish.
That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently.
If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work.
For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth.
I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins)
Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital.
This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.
Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas).
But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity.
But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
All of our antibiotics depend on biodiversity. So does many of our medicines, all of our fruit. We still can't synthesize blood from the horseshoe crab so we need that. Biodiversity is how we ensure a robust civilization with multiple specialist humans in varieties of lifestyles and interests.
A world without biodiversity is inflexible, therefore fragile. We already recreated it in minimally-diverse production systems, which have all been majorly screwed over as soon as covid required adaptation.
You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care.
It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors.
Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value".
This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.
I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers.
/Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.
> Are we collectively too child-like as a species?
See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc).
Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.
You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the glass")
No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult. Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology, wish to prove himself or practical need.
This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being economic automata who simply react to their circumstances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451
Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have cited this paper quite a few times because I think it offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've observed informally, that being that there's a few distinctly different personality types that pursue quite different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks, optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but I've found it an extremely useful model.
This seems related to Evolutionarily Stable Strategy [1]. Where certain behaviors stabilize other behavioral niches and prevent other behaviors from arising in a population until an shifting equilibrium between behaviors is reached.
That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc.
The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc.
"Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.
Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG.
Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.
> Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG.
Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth.
Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor.
But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them).
It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
In TNG most humans act like a different species altogether: almost angel-like beings who don't experience the broad range of negetive human emotions. I see no evidence that we are evolving in that direction in real life.
I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then heat it to 1700°c and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that pane with a rock? Takes an instant.
I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?
But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.
While this is true and a very important part of understanding life on Earth, our current situation as a species is the consequence of high energy density, non-renewable fossil fuels.
Solar, geothermal, wave and other forms of energy will surely continue to allow complex systems to thrive on this planet, but our particular system arose out of access to an abundant, but ultimately limited source of high energy density fuels. We could essentially view our civilizations work as assisting in breaking down the energy gradient caused by having very rich stores of energy locked in the bonds of hydro carbons beneath the surface. As this source of energy is exploited and depleted too will our civilization and possibly species begin to break down.
Oh, I agree with that, and think it's extremely necessary that we transition away fossil fuels prior to the onset of an energy famine, which seems imminent on a decadal timescale. Of course we are not going to run out of stuff to burn in only a few decades, but insofar as burning stuff requires additional air conditioning we are at or close to a tipping point.
Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?
I don't care. Worrying about such long timescales induces a sort of paralysis. The solution to uncertainty about truly fundamental questions of existence is to work on fundamental math and physics, to figure out where matter comes from, whether other dimensions exist and are accessible etc. If you just feel discouraged by the pointlessness of existence, that's just a sort of vertigo or cognitive overload. It's better to pick something you like and scurry around exploring it rather than being stuck in intellectual catatonia. The best cure for this is to engage in something you find physically enjoyable; rebooting your sense of physical autonomy helps to shake off the cognitive paralysis. Go for a walk, jump around to loud music, eat some of your favorite food, or amuse yourself with comical imagery so as to alter your mood. The seeming futility of existence doesn't matter because it's on too large of a scale for you to experience or impact; the feeling that it overrides all other considerations is just a feeling.
Comments like this are strange since anyone with eyes can see that the break down of the systems we rely on is not some far off future event, it's happening right now and will likely escalate fairly rapidly in the next few decades.
It's not surprising that people feel stress from this and "walking it off" is not all that effective of a treatment.
I'm responding purely to the cosmic timescale brought up in the grandparent comment. I'm saying it's pointless to obsess over cosmic entropy because it inhibits one from doing anything about current problems. While current problems are stressful, reacting to that by fretting over the ultimate pointlessness or unsustainability of existence over the lifetime of the stars/universe is an unhealthy response to stress. Self-care and activity are more effective and productive, even if those long-term uncertainties remain unresolved.
I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy.
And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us.
But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
Entropy is tricky when it comes to life and other forms of complexity.
The book "Into the Cool" explores this is away you might find very interesting. It spends a lot of time exploring the question of how the complexity of life emerges given the second law of thermodynamics. It argues pretty strongly that the second law still rules everything but we have to look at larger non-equilibrium energy flows to really understand it.
Energy fuels the complexity of our society, species and world. That wood you see burning is a solar battery in which complex life converted energy into hyrdocarbons over the period of many years.
Energy shapes everything about our society and will determine everything about our future. We life in a technical wonderland as a direct consequence of our species discovering extremely high energy density fossil fuels not all that long ago.
But in the end all of this complexity serves the second law in helping reduce energy gradients. All of that stored up potential energy in fossil fuels is being released into the environment, and we are the tools of nature to help. Thing of all of the energy we have spend freeing resources and energy from the grown. When we grow beyond the means of the energy supporting that system, all of it will break down.
We're starting to see this now not just in climate but the ecosystem, our economy etc etc.
The greatest illusion we've had as a species is that we are anything other than an expression of the second law in action.
Eventually, nothingness, no matter what we do - the increase in entropy cannot be stopped. That's an incredibly powerful thing though - if you can redirect the increase in entropy so that it happens in a direction that causes useful order in one particular part of the system, you can use the increase in entropy to create immensely useful things. That's essentially what life is - a clever pump that uses the universe's inevitable increase in entropy to organise a small part of a small planet into copies of itself and increasingly complex systems, in much the same way as a ram pump uses the flow of a large amount of water downhill to pump a small amount up. Not forever, of course, only for a few billion years which in cosmic terms is almost nothing. In human terms though that's still a lot.
Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.
Relevant quote from SMAC (one of many that struck me years ago when I played it):
"Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival."
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Pretty much sums up the extreme capitalist view for me.
I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent.
But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.
This is a disaster, and we must be deeply ashamed as species for it, but I think in many of us there is some consolation in the implicit thinking "ok, we are destroying our planet life, but there are other planets and surely there are many biodiversity pockets out there in the Universe". Or.. "ok, maybe we are transforming the Earth to a naked rock, but let's wait a couple of billion years and surely there will be another rich ecosystem as the one who made us".
Now consider the following: we don't really know if that is true. We can be materialists, atheists, and post-copernicus evolutionists, but we don't have the confirmation there is life in other planet. Also, we are not really sure if the process can be repeated, we can guess it can be, but we don't have the confirmation.
So maybe we are extinguishing all the biodiversity emerged through eons of evolution on the only planet in the entire Universe with life on it. Just imagine that as a possibility, because life in other planets/future is only a theoretical idea, not a known fact. We simply don't know, maybe we are burning the only chance for life and his richness in all the eternity. In any case, we need to change.
It's been repeated on earth several times. That said, ocean life is still a shadow of it's Devonian reef glory, and land animals have never reached the dizzying heights of the Cretaceous again, and probably never will. And as far as we know, intelligent life only evolved once, and we don't have time to run the whole tape again start to finish if we get this wrong.
Without intervention, Earth will become uninhabitable to almost all life in ~500 million years. As the Sun ages, it expands; eventually, surface water will have evaporated, leaving a dead husk behind. Long before that, our descendants will likely have found hospitable planets around distant, slow-burning stars, upon which they'll have sown the seeds of Earthly life.
> This is a disaster, and we must be deeply ashamed as species for it
It is shameful; fossil fuels, ingenuity, and greed probably mixed this situation inevitable.
What "Five Whys" would you ask and answer, seeking to understand the path we've trodden to disaster?
In the next 100 million years several stars will be within a 10th of a light year from us.
If you get the delta-V right you won't even have to slow down the whole way on the other end. But if that's still a problem then you're taking a one-way trip on a worldship anyway.
Why? If we're all gone then there will be no life to value life and thus no suffering. Are you saying life is inherently and objectively valuable? If so, how?
The complexity (low entropy) is really something very special and rare in the Universe. I don't know what, but something extraordinary might come out of it, if it evolves further.
There's nothing wrong with a universe without life, just as there's nothing wrong with a world without life. Mars, for example, is without life (as far as we know). Does that mean there's something wrong with Mars? I don't think so, in the same way there's nothing "wrong" with the Sun because it doesn't support life.
That said, Earth's biosphere is a unique system that has endured terrible degradation in the past; the fact that so-called "rational animals" would cause it, not even out of malice but sheer intellectual laziness and moral cowardice, seems to me to define a very clear test of our collective mettle as humans. Right now, we're failing, and accelerating the failure.
> That said, Earth's biosphere is a unique system that has endured terrible degradation in the past; the fact that so-called "rational animals" would cause it,
It's only on the brink of extinction that humanity will better itself. A trauma of WWII levels may have to happen before we really change our societies. I wish it wasn't the case, but our lifestyle is just not sustainable as of now.
It is indeed possible there is no complex life elsewhere. Although, I tend to think there is, because single-celled life and also tardigrades are hardy and could potentially travel encased in rocks ejected from planets during impact events. And now we know from recent research that nuclear reactions can support pockets of life potentially for hundreds of millions of years via producing hydrogen. Statistically, it is just way more likely that life came here that way from out there instead of life originating on this random one planet. But in any case, you are right that we should be ashamed of short-term human greed and economic systems that are needlessly destroying so much life. And further, such ways of thought and action are also causing so much needless suffering of humans and other living creatures including by unaccounted for negative externalities like pollution. A system that encourages people to privatize gains and socialize costs and risks is not long for this world -- even ignoring the irony of scarcity-fearing fools misusing plenty-providing tools to create artificial scarcity.
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep. In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space. With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure. You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward. We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away and take eons more before I get this close again to having the children I always wanted.
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The preceding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in Earth's history. [I had also learned earlier that the Earth's surface will likely be uninhabitable within a billion years or sooner due to the Sun's continuing expansion and increasing heat output.]
The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired it written at the same time.
===========
If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five million years ago, how should one feel about this?
Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed. Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.
Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.
Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will occur where the more specialized creatures will be the most likely to go extinct. Complex food webs will either loose species to become simpler or they will be replaced entirely by new simpler webs. This will create opportunities for generalists to move into vacated niches. It will also produce more robust species and food webs. In the long term this may make the biosphere healthier in the same way pruning a bush makes it grow more.
New forms of life existing as ideas are now living and will likely continue to expand. Language and culture and technology are possible with humanity's growth. These allow new patterns to be created and selected for, giving evolution a new canvas. Also possible are new combinations of ideas and life as philosophies evolve in combination with ecosystems.
A process that may well lead to the extinction of 30 to 99 percent of all species has been initiated unintentionally. Conservation of biodiversity should be done if only for aesthetic and spiritual reasons. Anger and sadness should not overwhelm one and keep one from making the best of the inevitable.
Thank you for articulating this. I agree that anyone who doesnt feel deeply ashamed of this fact at this point in time has never spent time in actual nature; "outside" doesnt cut it. In addition, they are deluding themselves that "someone will come up with something", or are just incapable of truly internalizing the truth that (at least for the boomer generation) "we are fucking this up/have already fucked it up". Its a basic defense mechanism.
I encourage anyone who has thought deeply and actually cares about these issues to read Jem Bendell's "Deep Adaptation" paper.
A periodic reminder that if you're concerned with climate/biodiversity issues, it's increasingly a waste of time to work on persuading skeptics and fatalists (who either eny it's happening or say it doesn't matter for philosophical reasons). Some are sincere,s ome are not, but the pursuit of persuasion and consensus is ultimately founded on the hope that the 'marketplace of ideas' will move to a new stable equilibrium; available evidence suggests that this may take longer than changes in the underlying conditions, such that the more effort you spend in arguing the worse worse the problem will get. I suggest it's better to pursue unilateral policy goals wherever possible.
It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again, luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next time evolution comes up with something psychologically better suited for long term survival then our own species since we are so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as some kind of higher being who is independent from the consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time to start over, I’m sad that we failing to realise we don’t.
What we have to worry about in the mean time is environmental changes leading to crop failures. The earth will be fine, whether we are able to continually feed ourselves in this society is an open question that we are actively trying to solve. But it's an uphill battle when even liberal minded people have villianized GMOs. GMOs are the tools we need to use to ensure our world is not like what was pictured in Interstellar. Inaction means famine.
That is the point I always see when someone is promoting "save the Earth", Earth will be fine. It is humans who will have it tough while some bugs or bacteria will not even notice when those pesky people died out.
If you just mean that the earth will continue to exist, or that some manner of organism will live on it, then yeah that seems like a safe bet. But a lot of people think it would be a bad thing if we drove elephants to extinction, or destroyed the Great Barrier Reef (and not for any prudential reasons tied to human interests, either), and that's what they mean when they urge us to "Save the Earth."
Extinct elephants and destroyed reefs are small steps towards the total annihilation of humanity. It'd be much easier on personal level for everyone to justify not using plastic and voting for people who prioritize sustainability over short-term profit if green movement campaigned for saving our grand children from living in hell, than saving a floaty rock from an ephemeral threat.
Crops can't grow in barren soil however hardy they are. Soil is dying at an amazing rate right now, it's a living ecosystem that gets renewed and changes constantly, with all the bacteria, fungus, worms, dead organic matter, minerals, air and water cycling around. Many farming methods that we use at the moment don't prioritise it, and long term they destroy the productivity of the soil. GMOs might be part of the solution but they aren't all of it.
With GMOs you would have a wider variety of profitable crops to rotate in your fields to rebuild soil conditions between harvests of certain crops. This sort of practice is already done in some areas where this farming is permissive, like with corn and soybean. No till practices and other soil rebuilding efforts are also finding their way into larger and larger operations.
I am fine with GMO and other genetic technology in principle. But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of deploying more and more herbicides. Unfortunately that's what it has been about mostly in the past.
> But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of deploying more and more herbicides.
If you want to deal with herbicide use (or pesticides more generally), target that, not GMOs. Because targeting GMOs means that while the existing major established uses with a sold revenue model can find ways to take the hit — so the big herbicide producing chemical/GMO giants are only modestly inconvenienced, and their tweaks and refinements to their existing products barely affected — all the startups doing development of GMOs for yield and nutrition traits which are more speculative, higher risk, and not as politically connected are screwed.
Yes, but OP's point is that GMO has been mostly used to enable chemical use. I am inclined to agree with them, without data.
BT corn, roundup ready corn and beans, and other herbicide tolerant strains of common field crops are very, very prevalent and enable the use of not just more glyphosate to compensate for resistance in the weeds, but also accompanying chemicals for the same reasons.
There is more to this narrative than meets the eye. Before roundup ready crops we used far worse herbicides and pesticides that are much more prevalent in runoff and in the local ecology, like atrazine, metribuzin, and alachlor. So while they use more pounds per acre in some cases, it's usually stuff that is far less harmful to the environment.
BT corn is brilliant. Bt has been used in organic farming for 50 years and doesn't harm people or animals or pollinators. Having the corn produce it directly rather than having to spray excess amounts of it regularly over your crops is a boon. You use far less since it's concentrated at the site where it matters: in the tissue the insect bites into.
We have to take these measures. If we didn't treat with pesticides and herbicides, we go back to biblical plague levels of insect blight and are unable to feed our population. It happens even in backyard gardens. I've seen cabbage loopers turn my tomato plant into swiss cheese in a matter of days.
Oh, I 100% agree with you. There is no going back, without massive famine and death. Glyphosate causing cancer is, I would bet, going to be mostly ignored due to the unbelievable human suffering that would occur if it was banned.
Again, though, the point of OP was not that more is used, or better chemical are used, it was that GMO has, in terms of row crops, been mostly organized around chemical use. That stands true, in my opinion, regardless of whether the chemicals are more or less harmful.
If the 6th extinction we are in takes humans with it, I doubt that new intelligent species that pop up as a result of evolution on earth will behave any differently. One powerful difference that could change that: our fossil records. We can look to dinosaurs and see that with a little bit of bad luck we could be wiped out, but it's not a strong enough message. Our remains will show future species that collectively, individuals have the power to completely destroy the earth, and that might be a strong enough lesson to prevent this from happening again.
I'm afraid that evolution favors a species that can quickly and efficiently exploit resources. Honestly, I'm afraid that our problems are such that they're at the genetic and species level, and therefore unsolvable. I am honestly afraid that we are literally unable, as a species, to fix these things, because it's what we are.
And I believe that will be the case for whatever comes after us as well.
How do you come to the idea that evolution would ever come up with something more psychologically suited for long-term survival?
Nothing is going to optimize for long-term survival. Any species that is not using all its capacity to extract resources and reproduce is going to be out-competed by everything else. A sensible long-term approach for regenerative resource consumption is not something that nature will ever select for. It will optimize for eat-as-much-as-you-can-without-having-to-vomit and reproduce-the-shit-out-of-the-free-energy-available-in-the-environment.
I'm sad about us failing too. Humans are a fascinating species, and I think we have a lot of 'redeeming' qualities, ike our incredible ability to cooperate and our empathy. It's a shame that we're a dead-end.
I wonder, how exactly do we determine the ideal amount of biodiversity for the planet / a given region?
Outside of ideas like ‘we should not exterminate entire species’ and ‘we should not hunt so much that we ruin hunting grounds for future generations’ it does not seem obvious to me.
I guess maybe we are so far gone that the only thought is to damage control.
Do you think questions like that can ever be answered?
There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese Farmer," by Alan Watts.
The gist of the video is that reality is so unimaginably complex that we cannot know if a given change is going to be a net positive (over what time frame?) or a net negative (again, over what time frame?).
This pretty much informs my thinking these days, and when something happens that I notice, I find myself more able to refrain from labeling it as either good or bad.
And do microscopic and subsurface diversity count? If they do the proportion of anthropogenic diversity decline might look a lot smaller. Or do we only care about visible flora and fauna for this purpose?
Human pollution creates new niches that didn't exist before. Microbes in particular can adapt to them in dramatic ways, increasing genetic diversity. Surely we don't want to promote diversity by finding novel ways to pollute. Biodiversity can increase as a sick ecosystem decays, so sustainability is a crucial consideration. Below some threshold more radiation increases biodiversity. But is it worth more mutant babies?
So changes in absolute quantities of biodiversity might not be a good way to measure the health of the environment. Optimal biodiversity probably depends on for who, and is different each species and niche.
I really enjoyed the beginning of that book, but it had way to much fluff in it and I'd say I finished it in disappointment. Can't say I would recommend it.
It is definitely typical Kim Stanley Robinson in that it explores large ideas and delves into details that don't pertain directly to the plot. As a rumination on a possible non-dystopian future, it is excellent and I highly recommend it. The wandering plot and digressions into hikes in the Swiss Alps is also quintessentially Robinsonian. I loved it but you have to know what to expect.
So much this. I'm 3/4 of the way through and am really struggling to finish despite starting strong. I'm now skimming over the "policy" chapters and am focusing on the character action. Oh well, it's happened before with KSR.
Only millions? What are we taking about then! Who cares, there is more time between the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus than there is between us and T-Rex (about 100 million more). And we have about 4000-5000 million years before the sun gives out.
Look at 500–600 million years. The sun's increasing luminosity means rising temperatures and falling CO2, which means no plant life at some point. The high estimate for plant and animal life is 1.2 billion years.
The sun swells to a red giant around 5 billion, swallows the Earth around 7.5, and shrinks to a white dwarf around 8.
I'm not convinced that the Sun's expansion will be the demise of intelligent life on this planet. If there is a civilization of intelligent beings here ten million years in the future, let alone 100 or 1000, I'm tempted to think it would be trivial for them to A) Move the Earth farther out, or maybe better B) Change the composition of the sun to prolong its life (i.e. remove helium and other heavier elements with... the Sun's own energy).
Us SFIA fans aren’t worried ;) [0]. We’ll be black hole farming with our minds and every living thing ever sustained virtually at landauer limit efficiency up to 10^53 years from now.
Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.
This is why it's been so dangerous to allow anti GMO rhetoric into our grocery stores. It's normalized. GMOs are seen like harmful pesticides to the lay public, but GMOs are what we will need to rely upon if we are to ensure our grandchildren don't go hungry. We will have to introduce biodiversity ourselves as we lose it in our monocropped cultivars.
GMO -- separated from the pure research angle -- is a tool, a method of production. And like any tool in an industrial capitalist society, the primary purpose of it is to increase profits. Industrial capitalism increases profits through mechanization. This isn't a recipe for diversity. In fact, given the fact that the primary use of GMO at this point is to allow for large monocrop farms via wide application of herbicides to resistant plants, it is having the opposite effect.
I know personally what happens when the farmer next door to my hobby farm (and forest) sprays his field of GMO soy. And is the opposite of an increase in plant (or animal) diversity, let me tell you that. The effects of spray drift is visually obvious immediately, god knows what it does in the long term.
The science behind genetic engineering has the possibility of increasing diversity. Market forces do not. At least not for now. Perhaps some competitive pressure will eventually get us there. But primarily this is just about making lots of soy, maize, and sorghum. Mostly to put into animal feed.
A) I don’t think that’s true. GMOs are not the kind of biodiversity we need. We can move to mechanized automated organic farming and get all the biodiversity we need from healthy soil and diverse planting regimes. I am working on this problem and making our solution open source so the technology can quickly spread. [1]
B) In practice GMOs are used to enable massive use of harmful biocides (glyphosate) which poison the soil, the workers, and our food. So the idea that they are like pesticides is not exactly correct but it’s not far off. [2]
C) GMO patents have allowed large firms to extort farmers with predatory business models and Monsanto/Bayer for example have filed hundreds of lawsuits against farmers who accidentally had some contamination with their “patented” seeds. [3]
GMOs are not a cure all. The whole reason we have problems in farming is our failure to see the whole system of life and our reliance on pinpoint “solutions” that only cause more problems.
I agree the lawyers are a cancer, but the technology is golden. Mechanized automated farming does not get you biodiversity in your crops, it's unrelated. These organic farms plant monocrops just like nonorganic farms, and these cultivars will also fail no matter how you harvest them since the farmer has selected for a handful of commercially desirable traits even if they are farming organically.
For example, an organic banana you buy in the store is the exact same cultivar of cavendish banana you get that is nonorganic. It is also susceptible to the blight that is spreading around central America and whiping out entire plantations of banana. The cavendish is selected by the farmer because it transports better than land race varieties you can also grow in central America. genetic modification could include increasing expression of traits found in the cavendish, like a more durable peel, in these other cultivars that are naturally resistant to this blight. Suddenly you have a new banana cultivar in grocery stores in America that is resistant to blight. Blight actually whiped out the cultivar that used to be found in grocery stores in the 1950s, the gros michel banana.
Reliance on monocrops is a huge issue for our food supply as the environment changes. Genetic modification is an excellent tool to perform changes that might take dozens of seasons making crosses in the field otherwise, with many more perhaps unfavorable traits also being inadvertently selected for thanks to linkage.
But I have been studying small scale regenerative organic or “biodynamic” agriculture and it seems that biodiversity in the soil itself - a healthy complex microbiome - is an important part of fighting disease. Stressed soil leads to stressed crops that can’t fight disease when it comes.
And I agree completely that monocropping is a problem. But look at the farming of JM Fortier or Eliot Coleman. There is no monocropping. I am hopeful that with my open source farming robot we can help make farming like that viable at larger scales without sacrificing biodiversity in the soil or the crop patterns.
Genetic engineering is something that does not get taken into account in these dystopian predictions. Humans can learn to accelerate the evolutionary process as well as reconstitute extinct species. This is especially true if we consider the rate of technological change and that natural evolution moves at a snail pace.
We can't just flip a few genes around and call it a day. We don't know how to engineer a sustainable food web from scratch. We can hardly balance our own artificial ecosystems without tons of intervention. What good is biodiversity if it's just a planet-sized zoo?
It won't recover, our species won. It'll be just us, and whatever we eat and keep as pets. So prepare for a world of cats, dogs, cows, chickens and pigs.
I don't like it but that's the natural course we're taking.
Human species have lost to each other several times. Those "us" may be pretty different. Homo cyborgus, no need for meat, direct neural communication link to cats, dogs, polar bears, bee hives, ...
We're past that, our cultural evolution is orders of magnitude faster, and we're otherwise evolving as a single species. That species will change slowly, but I doubt we'd "lose to ourselves".
We'd need some cultural event that segregates us rather drastically for us to split into subspecies again and compete.
This will happen if in theory we populate the Solar System, but since there are no habitable planets, that'd rather remain in the realms of limited research and small bases.
just imagine some embryo DNA modification which as a side effect comes without "backward compatibility" - i.e. impossibility to procreate (or more probably - with very bad results in case of procreation) between the people whose parents were able to afford the modification and the ones whose didn't. That is all it takes. No need for hundred thousand years of evolution.
In economic terms. This is an externality. The assumption, imho, is that others can profit from externalities. This externality may endanger our grandchildren and possibly even ourselves.
The article mentions the Yucatan asteroid setoff a 5 million-year extinction event. I'm assuming this was due to a slow-reacting chain reaction of extinction events in the ecosphere? It wasn't actually directly due to the asteroid right? Those immediate effects would have gone away in a few decades I'm assuming?
I'm not so much worried about the biodiversity as such - earth will recover, and rather quickly I think. Humans may be a very peculiar extinction event, but just one among many.
But I do think that the loss of biodiversity is also telegraphing troubles for humanity, or at least the experiment in civilization we're currently all taking part in. The predatory ecosystem exploitation that we have been doing for the past two hundred years is catching up with us . And if we want to retain any chance to continue this experiment a few hundred years, we seriously have to change our approach in evaluating the worth that the earth's eco system has for us. You know, our very own life support system.
Currently we're losing about 30% of animal population every ten years. This cannot continue. We're wrecking the place. We are killing ourselves.
Well you can still empathize with the pain that other feeling, conscious creatures on Earth experience as a direct result of our actions. It's one thing if a meteor strikes the earth and you simply witness a mass extinction, it's another if you ARE the meteor.
We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans AND because it affects other living things which also have emotions and feel pain and will suffer as a result of what we've done. "Mother Earth" as a concept doesn't exist but other animals do. I think that's what people usually mean by that phrase.
I honestly don't think we need to be so pessimistic about this issue, since we can all do something to enact change, no matter how small! This past year with the pandemic, I think we've all learned the importance and value of nature and how we need to take care - what takes care of us! I also go by the motto that we don't need to change the world necessarily, start with creating the change in yourself by noticing where you can be more environmentally friendly, maybe pick up a scrap/junk on the sidewalk wherever you can, and it doesn't have to be a mandatory thing that weighs you down, more like a change of lifestyle! Once we start changing one by one, then collectively others may notice and follow along
99.9% of all species ever existed are gone today. Earth have been through 5 mass extinctions.
Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, nature gives us a hostile and unsafe environment we make safe through our impact of the planet.
Yes we need to get better at many things and luckily we are, but the idea that humans are the destroyers of biodiversity is simply untrue. We might in fact be the only species who will be able to not only avoid mass-extinction but also rebuild biodiversity. No matter what. Nature doesn't care about us and have no issue adding us to the 99.9% if we don't learn how to control and manipulate the planet and our nearby solar system.
I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so powerful. We out compete everything.
And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from the past.
>> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that
I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we probably do it at the optimal rate.
What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together. We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
All we have to to replicate Chicxulub is build a million copies of a bomb we've made before? The iPhone might be harder to make than a bomb, and we've made 200 million of those.
Probably easier option is just redirecting an asteroid bigger than Chicxulub impactor. But the point is that even that is not enough to eradicate life.
As I said, you would need something like Late Heavy Bombardment or Venus like greenhouse effect and even that may not be enough.
Based on the Moon craters Late Heavy Bombardment would include:
- 22,000 or more impact craters with diameters >20 km (12 mi),
- about 40 impact basins with diameters about 1,000 km (620 mi),
- several impact basins with diameters about 5,000 km (3,100 mi)
It's also important to highlight that everywhere were our ancestors appeared soon after megafauna population got reduced by 20% - 70%:
If I'm reading this right, it took evolution about 3.5 billion years to get animals, and there's only 1.3 billion years left until it's too hot for eukaryotes.
Who said we don't belong to the weaker things? Us dying off would just be the proof that we belonged to the weaker things, if weaker things means by definition things that don't survive.
Also I don't believe that we have the power to annihilate every living thing on the planet, no matter how many nukes you throw on it. If we die off, then those who survive us will have been proven to be the stronger things.
The sooner the "we" stops pretending to care, the better for everyone involved. The environment is going to take a beating for as long as humans walk the earth. No one here actually gives a rat's tail about the environment. If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability and we all know where that road goes.
It is pretty obvious that nobody cares. Most of the people are doing an amazing job of just filtering the fact of mankind's destructive impact out of their daily lives. And others -- like many on HN -- have an almost religious believe in a technical miracle. The Elon will save us all.
Don't expect any talk of accountability. That would mean biting the bullet of accepting that we -- as a species -- are seriously messing up and are in the act of driving the car against the iceberg. Or something like that.
Better not to rock the cradle and just enjoy the last few good decades we have. The pest on all our children, no concern for them is going to ruin this party!
It appears this analysis is limited to freshwater species. I wish that werent the case. It would be nice to be able to share the "higher rate than the extinction of the dinosaurs event" statement without that big old "but" attached.
Note that a declining number of species doesn't mean fewer living animals.
As the world globalizes, 10 isolated bird species occupying an ecological niche can be replaced by 1 species across the planet, without there being fewer birds total.
And millions of animal species occupying thousands of ecological niches are being replaced by 10 species across the planet: humans, the animals that humans eat, and the animals humans keep as pets. Even if the quantity of biomass is relatively constant, I think we can all agree that a planet with only humans and cows and chickens is a pretty bleak outcome.
I expect the endgame here is the whole planet is a managed park. We'll still keep Yellowstone and Serengeti looking as is, but there won't be any true wilderness.
There is nothing unsustainable about this, but I agree that it is quite dull.
Consume more porn and have less actual sex. (Because sex leads to babies. Duh.)
Someone should start a religion around those tenets. This stuff is not hard, you just have to apparently con people into living right or some nonsense.
You mean, beat up whoever is weaker then you and take kids out of families to indoctrinate them into violent dictatorship body? Have them kill slave as rite of passage?
Could not resist, was reading about sparta lately.
Comments like yours make me thankful I am American so I am given the liberty to defend my life (and I will pass on the porn and have more sex, thanks.)
You should probably listen to him and walk more since you're much more likely to die of heart disease than you are from anyone trying to take your life.
With genetical engineering we'll create an infinite number of new species better adapted to the changing environment and also more useful to us. In just a few years, not millions.
We are but fruit fly lifespans in the grand schemes of the universe. We will be here and then gone and the earth will rotate away.
All our damage to the ecosystem will be folded in like the asteroid that impacted tens of millions of years ago and we'll be fossils for others to discover. I wonder what they'll make of our cryptocurrency farms.
Well in the meantime I derive enjoyment from the animals and plants around me and believe this finding helps explain why similarly present-minded folks should be concerned about the survival of what remains.
While I don't necessarily doubt any of the data cited in this article, this article isn't science, it is fearmongering propaganda. Not that we shouldn't be fearful. But the information should instill fear if there is something to be afraid of, not articles like this that are almost entirely devoid of information. Terrible, terrible article.
Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years.
Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.
The biodiversity is going down because of habitat loss (global warming, human encroachment). How will cloning help when there won't be a habitat to sustain the clones?
Global warming alone will destroy the vast majority of habitat for existing creatures. The change is faster than evolution can deal with.
With genetic engineering you can introduce favorable traits or increase diversity in monocrops to buffer against changing environments. This is already done to some extent and will be done for pretty much all food we consume in the future, as our climate changes faster than planted crops can adapt to produce yields under these changes.
In 500 years, all energy may be clean energy. Enough societal change or depopulation can result in the re-establishment of nature biomes. I don’t see this as utopian or wildly unlikely.
I wonder what makes so many people - even here on HN - so furiously jam their fingers in their ears and go "Lalalala" whenever you get realistic about the impact of our predatory ecosystem exploitation or about the consequences of population migration because of climate change.
Actually, climate change is likely to have “major economic consequences” in ~2038, followed by “globally catastrophic events” in ~2067. After that, the economy and civilization as we know it will presumably no longer exist.
So, this human civilization is on schedule to collapse in about 50 years.
Of course, science in this matter has improved since 1980, but I like that report because it correctly predicted the current state of things 40 years ago. Also, it was written by the big oil companies. It’s difficult to argue they were being intentionally alarmist or had the science wrong.
Like you said, what remains may no longer be as we know it, but then again humanity has gone through so many paradigm shifts (and the shifts are accelerating due to technology) that it would be surprising if civilization was the same 50-100 years from now.
Science isn’t fortune telling. It doesn’t predict the future.
I’m sorry, but a PDF from 1980 isn’t exactly a reliable source of information about the future. It’s a little scary how people think this is a real possibility.
Of course science can predict the future. Drop a pen off your desk. Newton correctly predicted what speed it would hit the floor at, and he did it back in 1687.
If not science, what do you suggest people use to predict the future?
Anyway, here’s a more modern source. It was peer reviewed, and is considered up to date and also reliable:
I suggest reading it, but if you scroll halfway down, you can type in a county, and it’ll provide more detailed predictions. I suggest checking it against recent news. You’ll find that the areas it predicts will soon be uninhabitable are already showing signs of ecosystem collapse. (Especially the US southwest)
Let me get this straight: climate change models predict conditions likely to lead to the collapse of civilization and you say "the map is not the territory, no need to be alarmed", but your extrapolation of our cloning capability should totally be respected?
I didn’t say there was no need to be alarmed, I said civilization isn’t going to collapse.
These also aren’t the same things. Cloning is a technology that will likely continue to be more and more possible. It’s not really a question of if, but when. Even then it was just a creative suggestion.
Modeling civilizations responses to climate change is basically science fiction. Yes, bad stuff will happen. No, you can’t predict that society will collapse because of it.
No, it isn’t, it’s being realistic. Human beings aren’t going extinct because of climate change, nuclear weapons, or anything else. Some people would survive and they would inevitably repopulate.
I think the unbounded optimism / arrogance is that life as is will continue indefinitely, or just get better and better.
That might happen, but climate change is one of very few things that will stop it (others being nuclear war, asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares and other disease)
No but if we keep polluting at this rate, in 500 years civilisations will crumble. If food supply chains fail we’ll see a bunch of wars break out and a global chain reaction that will destroy massive amounts of progress.
Most likely we’ll land back at the Middle Ages- it’s happened to pretty much every civilisation to date so it’s unlikely ours will be any different.
If anything given our global scale it will be worse.
Even then, if you cloned a small number of identical animals (100,000 pigs cloned from 100 originals) they would become biologically diverse in a fairly small amount of time.
I think you might be underestimating the sheer amount of genetic diversity required to have a healthy base population. 100'000 pigs cloned from 100 originals would be susceptible to any number of pathogens. And because pathogens evolve so much faster than theirs hosts, chances are high that we will struggle very, very hard to keep them alive. Sex and horizontal gene exchange make it clear that life on earth cares very much for genetic diversity. And you can be sure that's not because it is woke.
Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck a few hundred thousand years ago. It's still pretty much obvious in our genetic record; two random chimpanzee tribes have more genetic diversity between them than humanity as a whole.
It takes a lot more knowledge then what we currently have for such a project to be reasonable. Maybe another hundred years until we are familiar enough with the metabolic pathways and all the idiosyncrasies that are present.
But only if there's enough complexity left to study...
It was just an example. Obviously we would want more than 100 original pigs. The point is that biological diversity is a natural consequence of the evolutionary process.
That's one way to get biodiversity, but you can also generate more diverse populations in the lab and plant them in the field. You can also seek out natural reservoirs of variation in the form of wild or land race cultivars, and introduce favorable traits into your elite commercial cultivar. I work in this field. This is where our food supply is going, where it has to go if we are to feed ourselves in a century, when changing conditions mean the crops being planted today will not achieve the same yields in the future.
And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.
> incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years
This is better than nothing. But species don't exist in a vacuum. Re-introducing an extinct species to a biome could be as jarring to its neighbors as its original elimination was. The most conservative path would be to cauterize the would and let the system heal, even if it takes a few million years.
For an absurd example, consider the effect of introducing a large number of saber-toothed tigers to their original habitats.
Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense. Humans and other organisms have been changing the environment since the beginning of life.
I think you're confusing ecosystem (which word itself implies process) with equilibrium. It's quite fair to say that there was an actual ecosystem at least until the establishment of writing, at which point state information became transmissible across time and space beyond the capacity of individual organisms or eusocial colonies.
While you are correct that evolution would sooner or later take over, whether with assistance via cloning or blind luck if humans were to go extinct, you do need to consider the possibility that under some circumstances systems can collapse rather than bouncing back over a relatively short timeframe. Life would eventually re-establish itself, just as life persists in extremely arid desert conditions, but there's no guarantee it will do si n a timely fashion, and by timely here I mean on a timescale short enough for a human civilization to flourish in parallel with it.
I am just saying that the idea of returning to a natural equilibrium is nonsensical. We really just mean a form of nature that has a balance we find agreeable to human beings. Nothing more, nothing less. No human is okay with an equilibrium if it’s filled with killer wasps and sentient bears.
> Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense
There isn't a stable state, but there are multiple equilibria. We can quantify the robustness of an ecosystem, its resilience to exogenous shocks. That makes certain states "better" than others.
That resilience is low and decreasing. "Healing" means helping it increase. Re-introducing extinct species may or may not build a more robust and more productive biosphere.
Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.
So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there.
Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.
Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support billions more people, so we don't have to be careful about growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault.
Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws around managing natural resources...
But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn't live on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened. Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care?
Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.
Why limit that to survivability? If you like to do something (say, eating sugar and reproducing), do stop doing it right before it kills you, or when you believe it's reasonable to stop because this particular things is not the only thing you care about?
We can perfectly stop destroying our habitat because it would kill us and because it makes no sense to do so. We're just addicted to things that kills us and we should get this addiction under control simply because it's an addiction (compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences). Addictions are bad for you, even when they don't kill you.
> Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.
Biology is a rich and wealthy system of evolved solutions for living on earth.
We could turn everything into people, but we'd lose so much information. Fungal growths on rocks may not seem like a lot to a layperson without appreciation, but such species took more work than the sum total human thought to arise. Killing it off is akin to burning the entire library of congress. Worse, perhaps.
We're too primitive to harness the wealth of information in our biosphere today. In a hundred years, there will be solutions in biology readily available to biochemical problems we're only beginning to characterize.
We hate that we killed the dodo and the woolly mammoth. But more than just erasing animals we learned about in childhood, and more than leaving holes in ecosystems, we destroyed the living and breathing universe solving unique and beautiful ways of dealing with itself. Solutions too complicated for humans to comprehend, and not even close to within our capacity to replicate.
The closer we look at anything, like fungal growths, the more we realize how little we actually understand. Trying to tease apart the microscopic mechanisms that underlay the behaviors of fungal spores and slime molds is enough to make an atheist reach for God. The world is still very much inexplicable and so exquisite, it puts our efforts as builders to shame. Everything is a rabbit hole stretching back to the creation of the universe, just as humans have inherited life from an unbroken chain of organisms stretching back to the first cell.
We are still evolving, still bringing our frontal cortexes fully online, like teenagers. It is hubris to assume we are anything more than the link between our past forms and our future forms, although we may not survive through this particular transition.
That is an interesting perspective. It seems like the complete 180 degrees of the "singularity" fad that peaked a couple of decades ago, which envisioned humans eventually turning all matter on Earth (including the biosphere) and in the solar system into computing hardware, because that would be information-maximizing.
The problem with that line of thinking is that we're simply not wise enough to know what should be computed. Life computes more life, but humans seem to be able to do no better than cryptocurrency on the average.
The planet can not support "billions more", it can barely support the billions we have. Maybe on a subsistence level of a basic minimum nutritional value it could theoretically, but not with industrial products, medicine, education, transportation infrastructure, energy, communications equipment and so on.
Cultivated land is 11.6% of the world, and we can improve the agricultural output of land by a large margin just by adding greenhouses. PV could supply each and every person in a well-fed global population of 10 billion roughly a thousand times the current power use of the average American today — less if you limit your PV to just deserts, but still far more than enough for “modern” lifestyles.
The planet can't support the the existing billions let alone more billions. The excuse can't be that we "just need..." all the billions to stop acting like humans and act some other human like race that cares more about the Earth than their own personal needs. We haven't got there in 10s of thousands of years, in fact the more we learn, the more we think we can outsmart the Earth. Our greed is what made us survive and is also our downfall. Even after the eventual near wipeout, we'll be back to the same tricks in a few thousand years. The human race will become a wax/wane cycle. It reminds me of the allegory of the frog and the scorpion....
I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.