Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's not one example, there's plenty. If you want another, Aborigines hunted down everything larger than a kangaroo to extinction.

Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.

There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.

>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.

Having to kill your own children is disaster.

>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources

Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.

Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.

And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.




So the ideal is no one ever dies (most good!) while everyone makes more people (more good!). I guess eventually we'll figure out how to eat rocks. It's not sustainable. Earth is an island that has finite resources. We're covering it in crops to feed humanity, but in the process of doing so are making the planet less hospitable. Should we act now to prevent what we know will happen if we continue pretending like expansion is the only way?


There might be no ideal, but it's very much preferable that everyone has a good run and nobody has to kill their kids or die of pneumonia at 20 or some such.

How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.


I think I can agree there's a happy middle ground somewhere between "paleolithic misery" and "late stage capitalism climate change induced neolithic misery". Both are extremes of misery of a sort. There's still plenty of suffering now... More if you consider the difference in population between the paleolithic and now.

A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: