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Comment by aethertap | Hacker News Reader

There is a long list of things about our technological civilization that would have benefited from applying the precautionary principle a little more. We're in damage control mode right now for a large number of environmental catastrophes, our agricultural techniques of the last half-century or so have depleted and desertified a large amount of prime arable land, we're rapidly shooting ourselves in the foot by abusing antibiotics, and we have some huge problems with war, poverty, and other kinds of social strife. In my opinion, we should be learning to think deeply through consequences instead of looking at our track record and saying "let's do more of that." We don't need to be absolutely sure, but given our history I think we could probably strive to be /more/ sure before we make irreversible changes.

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I see where you'd coming from, but it's easy to see the costs now that we're so utterly used to the benefits. Use of filthy, polluting energy sources was a necessary stepping stone for the industrial revolution. There was no way to go directly from Newcomen's engine to ITER. Sure, the process left us with some problems to solve, but compared to the alternative, they're good problems to have. If we'd applied the precautionary principle, knowing what we know now, we'd never have had an industrial revolution, nor a green revolution, and we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

(upvoted) It's hard to predict the alternate present from a notional past. I agree that the things we did were necessary stepping stones on the path to technology that likely could not have been avoided. We might have done it more slowly and with more limited scale and still made it to where we are now (over a longer time span), and I have no idea if that would have had better results or not. The real question for me is, now that we do have this perspective, can we make our future decisions better than our past decisions? We're now at a point where the global system has far less excess capacity to absorb our blunders. In resilience speak[1], it seems to me like we're in the late conservation phase, which typically precedes rapid release (collapse) and reorganization. We have evidence of this in the critical slowing down[2] of adaptive responses from a variety of present-day systems ranging from corals to economies. From my perspective, provoking a system in that condition feels a lot like playing with a doomsday footgun.

I don't think that killing off mosquitoes will be the final insult that causes cataclysmic ecosystem collapse; that seems pretty far-fetched. However, I don't know that, and I do think we should strive to have strong evidence for the costs and benefits of any irreversible change we make to our world at this point.

1. http://www.resalliance.org/adaptive-cycle

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-war...

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