Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

I sit on both coin sides of loving technology and loving the natural environment.

We have to decide what we want, and what is important to us. We're only just at the beginning of our civilisation's development. We, the AI, and/or the AI we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and terraform, to bio-engineer species, environments and food however we want.

I suppose until such time that we can do that, we do need to take the natural environment very seriously. I am increasingly concerned about climate change, but also human health. I also care about animals. We're only one of many, and I don't care how more 'evolved' I am than another species.

View on HN

There's a thing that archaeologists do. Sometimes they come across a site that may be valuable but that they can't be sure they will be able to recover things without damaging them. Maybe there are pockets of empty space in the ground whose shape is very important, and they don't have the right kind of imaging technology. What they'll do is just stop and note it for the future, so that in a few decades new tools may become available that will allow us to get the information. To do otherwise would be to risk losing that information permanently.

Nature is not dissimilar. Sure, it's conceivable that one day we might be so technologically advanced that we can easily modify the environment on a whim, recreating extinct species or being able to perfectly model the ecosystem and tweak it. And maybe we will opt to not have an environment and live off of solar energy or something. But we're centuries from that, and we don't know for sure that we'll ever be able to do those things. So, what's the responsible thing to do? Like the archaeologists, we must keep the environment around until we're sure we'll be okay without it.

Personally I would far rather we find a way to live within nature, co-existing within the limits of the natural world. Not because we can't yet recreate it as some Natureland theme park but because it is the right - and sane - thing to do. It doesn't mean accepting a primitive or non-technological life.

We can't guarantee we will ever be able to even know what we lost, let alone recreate what we're losing, or ever properly understand the interaction between species, or understand what discoveries we missed out on. Apart from anything else dramatically more species are undiscovered than discovered. Of those discovered vanishingly few outside the small number of agricultural ones are well understood. Agriculture that aims to remove species variation and variety.

Maybe I read too much into it, but with "I suppose" you make it sound as though you have a grudging acceptance to care only until such time as that magic Deus ex Machina of Jurassic Park and terraforming arrives. Then what? Right back to "fuck the environment we can terraform a new one"? Given human nature, far more likely we damage the natural environment way beyond our ability to either fix or live with and crash civilisation long before then -- damage without any care is a road we are very well travelled along after all. Seems "we" not including me have decided the planet's environment is secondary to profit. ...repeat until the profit or life support capability breaks.

"We're only just at the beginning of our civilisation's development. We, the AI, and/or the AI we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and terraform, to bio-engineer species, environments and food however we want."

That seems wildly optimistic given current trends. What makes you think we'll make it that far, given that we(1), so far, have only managed to continually make things worse over time?

1-And by "we" I actually just mean the oligarchs who profit from environmental destruction...individuals have only marginal agency in this story. But, we keep letting them do it, for some reason.

Oligarchs don't go around cutting forests for fun, they profit from "environmental destruction" because other people need it to live and are ready to give their money in exchange for its results and receive money for performing it.

Communist countries do as much damage as capitalist ones, and even hunter-gatherers did a huge amount of damage, so you are looking for solution at a wrong place.

Which of current trends do you think justify your pessimistic outlook? We are not in a particularly bad state compared to hundred years ago, and recently we didn't cause more extinctions than we caused as hunter-gatherers. With genetic editing we are working to create much more efficient crops, in some places we learned how to use technology to drastically reduce use of pesticides, area, and water in agriculture (see Netherlands and Israel), gene drives that would eliminate main pest species are going to allow us to further reduce usage of pesticides, and we are learning to grow fish and algae in the ocean instead of simply exploiting wild populations. We are even working on restoring long dead species like mammoths, so i'd say there is every reason to be optimistic about the future.

Our by far biggest impact on the environment is due to our eating habits. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and we deforested entire continents to have space for farming, destroying most of the original habitats (Europe used to be covered by forest, now any sufficiently flat piece of land is farmland). Only recently have efficiency increases started overtaking population growth and our appetite, and we have started giving some land back to nature.

Technology is the only viable way out. There isn't enough space to feed everyone with "close to nature" farming methods, instead we have to bioengineer more efficient ways to produce food and create attractive alternatives to meat from farm animals if we want to give nature any space to breathe.

> We, the AI, and/or the AI we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and terraform, to bio-engineer species, environments and food however we want.

You say that as if it was a fact but nothing is corroborating that vision of the future outside of wackadoodle silicon valley. "Tech will save us" is not that far from "Jesus will save us" at that point ...

I think the problem is bigger than that. Until we understand the intricacies of how entire ecosystems sustain themselves, I don't think bio-engineering species will really be helpful. A species won't survive / thrive unless the ecosystem sustains it.

i Would argue we may be at the zenith of our civilization, environmental and ecological collapse seem not just possible but likely in the medium term if you look at the trends in co2 and biodiversity loss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com