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Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

The best way to unleash it in our system without doing harm to the ecosystem is to be patient. There is energy content in the plastic and over 100-200 million years the chance is extremely high Earth’s ecosystem will adapt to the abundance of plastic.

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The issue has never been whether the ecosystem will adapt. It has been how well we will.

If plastic in the ocean kills/renders toxic all the fish, that will be an issue for us. The ecosystem? It will be fine.

The idea that ecosystems are self balacning and always bounce back is discredited science. It’s still a popular idea in mainstream discussion, though.

Is it really discredited? What are your sources? I tend to believe (with no actual evidence, since there is none), that the ecosystem will adapt to whatever damage we do to it using the tried-and-tested method of natural selection.

Most mainstream conversations about this are entirely anthropocentric and assume we have to be part of that equation. They always assume we're the top of the food chain. But whereas most of us will never be eaten by a tiger, pretty much all of us will be eaten by bacteria one day. Microbial life has been around for far longer, and is far more abundant than we can ever hope to be. I don't think much we can do will fundamentally alter that balance.

We tend to imagine that the ecosystem that will bounce back is the current one, or something much like the current one.

Of course it's possible that the current ecosystem could be completely destabilized and die off, to be replaced by something radically different. It's happened many times in Earth's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

I would generally consider the current ecosphere being replaced by something totally different as a variant of "The ecosphere recovering" as long as the successor has as much complexity as the predecessor - and exactly what the GP is talking about.

But of course there are far worse things than that sort of disaster. Earth turned into a snowball several times but geologic processes producing CO2 managed to fix the problem. The Sun is continuously getting brighter so that wouldn't be a problem nowadays. But eventually, in a billion years, the increasing brightness of the sun will cause the oceans to evaporate and complex life on Earth will probably never recover.

It's a hyperbolic example, but I doubt life on Earth would adapt to being engulfed by the sun, for one

Sure, but that's not the debate.

Is there a term to distinguish this idea of damage to human habitat vs damage to actual ecosystem? Also how could we know whether something was going to be damaging to the ecosystem in a fundamental/longterm way as opposed to simply changing the balance within it?

> The ecosystem? It will be fine.

It will be greatly impoverished, so not really 'fine'. Its possible that in several 10s of million of years the sheer level of diversity of the ecosystem may have rebounded. But not a given

The preference for diversity is just a human bias. Nature doesn't care.

This is just old fashioned nihilism. The Earth could be vaporized tomorrow and "nature" wouldn't "care", but I think we can all agree that it would be bad by any standard meaningful to us. 'Human bias' is the only way we have of judging anything as good or bad.

And the word "fine" is a human word. If you're saying an ecosystem containing one kind of alga is in any way as fine as an ecosystem comprising billions of organisms and interdependencies, then what can I say.

You're right, 'nature' doesn't care if life on Earth ends. Most humans do.

Exactly... And nature itself is a construct of humans. We're certainly anthropocentric in our ways, but that is only problematic if we view ourselves as separate from our environment somehow.

Unfortunately, many do.

> And nature itself is a construct of humans.

What does this even mean?

> over 100-200 million years

Wow that is patient!

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