Still, homo sapiens largely wiped out neanderthal populations many eons ago. They had a similar to larger cranial capacity to cro-magnons and modern humans, they used and created tools, and there's some evidence of cultural artifacts such as jewelry around their sites. The signs point to a culture of intelligent humanoids, now almost completely wiped out (except with possible genetic relics in the human population). This genocide preceded civilization as we know it by millennia...
Placental mammals, crossing over to south america from the isthmus of Panama when it arose, almost completely destroyed marsupials in south america. That's not just an ethnicity, race, or species, it's an entire infraclass. It is likely the case that our primate ancestors did the same for many other classes of beings.
So to turn the clock back, it is hard to know when to stop. Fundamentally it is difficult for me to reason about when it is good for one creature to profit while others perish. I do know, though, that they are in a much more complicated relationship -- that it is impossible to separate one creature from its ecosystem, and that if no particular creature or plant or species is to be sacred above others, then surely it's the integrity and continued vitality of the ecosystem that matters. This is one reason I am an environmentalist: human beings now have immense power over the environment, and as such need to take responsibility for the fact that they can alter it, destroy it, or care for it. We have to become not the Earth's ignorant children, but the it's gardeners.
I always thought that the Romans empire expanded solely out of greed and power lust. One day I was reading about one of their very, very early battles. Turns out the population of Rome and of the neighboring city had expanded to the point where there was only enough resources for one city to survive. Rome won, and in a quest to secure resources and protect the home city from getting sacked, did not stop expanding.
I recommend the book, "The Fates of Nations" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations ). It's dark, but very realistic. The fundamental problem of human affairs is that we are animals born to reproduce, living in a world of limited resources.
The real hope for the human race is not a new moral code. It's thorium and the birth control pill. Only the combination of sufficient energy and controlled population will enable us to share the same planet without clawing each other to death.
In my current thinking, it seems that there must be a new moral code. The powers of individual people, or even small groups, are too great. A million dollar act can cause billions of dollars of damage (e.g. 9/11) causing a many trillion dollar response (our current wars) and we haven't even seen the first real acts of biological terrorism. And what would become of a human population consisting of one group willing to take responsibility for the finiteness of our world, and one group unwilling to do so, intent on expansion, growth, greed and reproduction. There must be some moral code, some mode of thinking, some sociological structure, to deal with this.
(PS: Are you really that keen on thorium? People can still make dirty bombs and I'm not sure about how secure it is in terms of preventing enrichment, and as far as I can tell it's more expensive in terms of amortized cost than uranium reactors, which are more expensive than coal, which in some cases is more expensive than wind and, possibly soon, solar. So plan A for me seems to be using the nuclear reactor that we've already got: the one floating in the sky.)
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Also, thorium isn't enough. It's just one in a long list of limitations in terms of the planet's resources. We fix more nitrogen than all of other life in the planet combined. Human beings have reshaped one third of the Earth's surface. About one billion people on Earth now enjoy an 'american' standard of living, and thusly an american standard of consumption. In 20 years it will be 3 billion. We don't really have room for another factor of three, even just looking at the amount of food that we'll need. At the currently level of technology, for example, it is not even remotely possible for south and south east asia to switch from a largely vegetarian diet to one which consumes half as much meat as the average american.
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I highly recommend the article "A Sober Optimist’s Guide to Sustainability"
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-gu...
"The guiding principle of more: It’s interesting to imagine what it would take to change that principle, even by degree. Because making that change seems so fundamental to what you’re saying we’re going to have to do.
I think this is the most difficult issue. And it’s not one you can tell people about. But you can show them. One of the simulation models we use is a model of the overall interactions between population, resources, pollution, technology, and the environment. We’ll run the model live in class. We’ll say, “Okay, here is the simulation, and some very unpleasant things may happen yet in this century. But everything in the model is uncertain. Let’s assume there’s a whole lot more cheap oil and gas available. The marginal cost doesn’t rise so quickly as we pump more out of the ground.” Then you just slide a lever in the model and instantly see the result.
What happens, of course, is that by relaxing the constraint that’s limiting economic growth by lowering the availability and raising the price of energy, the economy grows even more, for an even longer time, until it hits some other constraint. So if you relax the constraint on the availability of fossil fuels, then you hit another constraint, which might be climate change. And if you go in and you relax that constraint, even magically assuming we can solve the climate problem right now, and for free, the economy grows even further until you hit another constraint, such as soil fertility or fresh water, and you see agricultural productivity fall. Relax that constraint, and you’ll grow until you hit some other one.
Pretty quickly people discover for themselves that as long as everybody in the world wants more—as long as everyone in the world wants to be as rich as we are, and we all want to be richer than we are today, there’s no solution.
What makes it particularly hard is that this is a conversation that’s not permissible in our society. Even the English language doesn’t allow it! There are words for not having enough—shortage—but there’s no word for excess demand. There’s no such word as a “longage” of demand."
Am I understanding you are advocating a limit on the human population? How would you suggest actually achieving that?
I don't have any answers I really believe in as yet. One incomplete idea I have been toying with is that much of human population growth is driven by the 'biological clock,' one's reproductive age ends relatively soon, and so if (a woman) wants to have children she needs to do so relatively early in life. Were lives longer and were the reproductive years extended, perhaps there would not be such a drive to reproduce so quickly; in a similar if distinct way to how reducing infant mortality reduces birthrates.
Reducing the age of reproduction is nearly as important as reducing the number of children, in terms of limiting the rate of exponential expansion. I don't know any collection of strategies that seem complete, however.
Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them. I hope that technology will improve, but it's by no means certain that solar power's EROEI will ever match the 5X of nuclear power, or the 10X of fossil fuels.
Energy is by far the most limiting constraint. With sufficient energy, you can alleviate other constraints. For instance, if you have enough energy you can desalinize ocean water and use it to irrigate crops to feed large amounts of people. You can always convert energy into other resources, such as food or steel. But if you don't have energy, you get Max Max.
Finally, the real problem is not necessarily hitting a constraint. If the U.S. reaches a point where we cannot continue to grow our resource usage intensity, that's not a catastrophe. The disaster is when you hit a constraint, but your population keeps growing, because then each person will face a declining standard of living. The other disaster is when you max out a resource and then it grows more scarce, as again, you'll face decline.
This was true 20 years ago, but now it's closer to 1% than 100% (and as that happens the cost per watt has gone down from $50 to $1 and below), though I don't have the direct reference on hand. But I think it's cited in this presentation (http://khoslaventures.com/presentations/Google-4-22-09.ppt) or this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euXfy9c3Vuw&feature=chann...)
There was absolutely nothing (short of complete isolation until the development of modern medicine) which would have prevented the Indians from dying out. Even if the Europeans did nothing but bring candy, puppydogs and fireworks in trade for furs, the puppydogs would have carried diseases deadly to American Indians.
Or in simplest terms, Old World germs were way nastier. (Contrast: African settlement.)
Eurasians/Africans evolved an immune system capable of fighting infectious diseases because for thousands of years they lived in close quarters with domesticated animals and other people.
American Indians had few domesticated animals (only Llamas and Alpacas, I think), minimal over overcrowding and hence had few infectious disease. This caused them to be tall and healthy by contemporary Eurasian standards, but also made them prone to illness.
For much the same reason, I got food poisoning twice in two weeks in Egypt but my (Asian) Indian girlfriend came away unscathed.
It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. By that logic you'd have to keep waving your wand until we were all back on the Savannah tossing spears at antelopes.
Or the Nazis?
If they had won WW2 I'm sure some people in Germany today would be calling the Holocaust "an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress" and would tell us all about the backwardness of Jewish culture, I'm sure while also being "sympathetic to the plight" of those victims too.
That doesn't mean that one group of people have the right to wipe out another culture to benefit their own, no matter what the consequences are.
I'm really shocked by some of the comments here.
And how does that scenario compare to the invasion of the United States in the 1500s?
It wasnt invaded to save the population of Europe.
American pharmaceutical companies have this medicine, and they are operating in one of the most profitable industries that have ever existed.
Africans have no goods that are as valuable to them as medicine. Should African countries invade America to get this medicine?
But the oil example actually did happen in real life. You're the ruler of Japan in 1941. The U.S. has just cut off your oil supply. You have months left before your population faces severe hunger and deprivation. Do you invade Indonesia to take their oil? I think if I was ruler I would. How about you?
These questions echo the age-old maxim of Thucydides that "The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must" but that doesnt mean that the actions on either side are just.
There are fundamental questions to be answered here about the legitimacy of the nation-state, and what right one group has to natural resources over another simply because of their location on Earth, when the results of this unfairness are the strengthing of one group and the weakening of another.
The point of these questions is that it is always easy to moralize when you don't have to make personal tradeoffs. And in real life, there are often hard tradeoffs to make. So I'm trying to figure out under what conditions, if any, you would make the choice to invade. So far, you've moralized, but you've still evaded the hard questions. What would you do in any of these scenarios?
Say what you want about America, but it pioneered most of the rights that the entire first world enjoys, and which are spreading throughout the rest to this date. Capitalism, civil liberties, social mobility. None of them were invented here perhaps, but the whole (which is far greater than the sum of its parts) was.
There's a reason you've probably never seen a public hanging or a head on a pike. There's a reason wars victimize fewer and fewer civilians every decade. America's history is certainly not without blemishes, including this one, slavery, a few ill-advised wars, etc. But on the whole it's been an incredible windfall for humanity.
So no, I wouldn't undo the whole thing. Nothing is perfect, and to take the view that we could have made the omelet we enjoy today without cracking a few eggs along the way is naive at best.
It's hard to make any argument that the holocaust was part of a bigger package that benefited humanity, so the two are dissimilar and entirely unrelated.
However we should acknowledge the history, the lies our ancestors placated themselves with and the parallels in the lies we tell ourselves today. An example would be the premise that we are "more" civilised than other people or are in some way better.
As a westerner and an Englishman considering my history I also find it very difficult to get onto a high-horse about much. As an example in the UK there are many that complain about levels of immigration but if you look into the history of the British Empire it is very apt to have a lot of immigration here.
What's even more interesting is that we are still standing on the backs of the third-world. Sure, we've dimmed it down a little bit and abstracted it beautifully but spare a thought for the chap who made your IPhone or VCR and the number of hours they worked. Acknowledge that our life-styles cause a degree of suffering elsewhere in the world.
When we were in tribes killing animals, that was deemed necessary at that point of time, because of all the benefits of animal food and the shelter provided by the animal skin.
Then we moved into killing other humans, to gain control of their resources, because it was either them or us. I think it was correct from their viewpoint what they did.
It's unfair to judge them using our morality, maybe our descendants will judge us in the future for wasting our natural resources, who knows ?!
This seems completely unreasonable to us but the same was true between e.g. people and animals, europeans and native americans, japanese and chinese (see the nanking massacre).
The "evolution of empathy" is probably still an ongoing process for which our descendants will consider us barbarians.
However, I am more inclined to not do anything at all because we survived so far, and there have been existential threats in the past. I'm even more biased by the fact that if we turn back the clock and fix some of these genocides, I wouldn't exist. It's hard to balance the conflicting philosophies :(
There is, of course, no way of knowing, but if American civilizations had thrived instead, and continued to be "peaceful and democratic" as the article put it, it seems somewhat plausible that we wouldn't be running into these "Tragedy of the Commons" problems... or, at least, that we would be making good progress on mitigating them.
I'm pretty sure that's wishful thinking, though. I'm still interested in what sort of cultures and technologies would have come out of that seed.
Everybody knows that the past is the past and can't be undone. But that doesn't mean that we should lie to ourselves about it. What really matters is what we do here and now in the world. If you condone such actions in the past then it is natural that you will condone them in the present and future as well.
Of course some natives were hunter gatherers and they would have to change their lifestyles, so I am sure there would be some battles, but if the hunter gatherers had an option to assimilate, they would not fight to the death either, they would eventually see that there is no way out after losing a couple of battles. So there may be some war but there would not be genocide. As it happened, they only fought to the death because they knew there wasn't another option.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, relations between the Huron and the Iroquois consisted of constant, low-level warfare (which could be brutal, and involved post facto ritual torture).
So in the early-mid 17th century, the French traders were generally allied to the Huron, while the Iroquois were allies of the Dutch, then English. Both sides sought trade monopolies with the Europeans, but the Iroquois, the Mohawk in particular, acquired heavy armaments first. They then used those armaments to slaughter, and in fact, pretty much eliminate the Huron. (I'm glossing over a lot of detail. See Francis Jennings' many books on this period.)
Now the Iroquois weren't tricked into doing it. They did it because they didn't like the Huron and wanted what they had. The Dutch and English supplied guns and "monetary" incentives, but the Iroquois were morally responsible.
I think that pattern is most obvious in the example I'm trying to describe, but it was hardly unique. There's a tendency to romanticize the Natives (coughAvatarcough) but they could be as filled with hatred and lust as any of the Europeans. Not all of them, of course, but neither were the Europeans all alike.