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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the same reasons.

That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too. A single planet simply doesn't have enough resources for a species with a planet wide civilisation and modern/advanced technology. So you're stuck with the choice of either expanding outwards, sticking with extremely basic tech, or having a far lower population.

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You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

> We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event

There's evidence that cyanobacteria did it earlier, on an even more massive scale:

"...biologically induced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere... causing almost all life on Earth to go extinct." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Earth has undergone lots of (short) periods of unsustainable ecosystems. They always crash and annihilate themselves. What is left has no choice but to gradually come into homeostasis, because the instability of too many aggressive species just leads to chaotic behavior and more crashes.

That's not true at all -- there have been countless problems similar to this, it's simply that in time life has rebounded, and that species without an "evolutionarily stable strategy" have died out. Here's just one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

[edit]

A bit more info on ESS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

Isn't sustainability only that the system keeps existing? This is the 6th event, and even if this one is caused by us, Earth has gone through massive changes before.

The system will keep existing even if we erase ourselves (along with a long list of other species), but other life will keep on existing even after we're gone until our solar system ceases.

It's up to us whether we want to keep existing or not.

All the more reason to focus on space travel to expand the our resources!

There are some fun sci-fi explanations for the Fermi Paradox. One of them is that no one likes neighbors that break out of their box, since they tend to ruin everything, like we ruined our planet. So coalitions develop that instantly blast civilizations that try to expand.

That sounds like a bad moralistic fable. Neighbors advanced enough to instantly blast expanding civilizations that don't expand? If they don't expand why the hell would they care about others outside their domain? When compatible planets are so rare that essentially being able to survive in space indefinetly is essentially a logistical prerequisite to expand in the first place. They might compete over such viable luxuries if they find others in range good canidates but a radical antiexpansion ideology and said capabilities is deeply inconsistent.

> Neighbors advanced enough to instantly blast expanding civilizations that don't expand?

Yeah, omg, right? It's like they have a completely different value system. How impossible!

> Intelligence is just a form of fitness

It's not _just_ a form of fitness--intelligence makes us aware of the trajectory that we are on; we know what will happen, and (I know this sounds crazy but hear me out) we could do something about it if we wanted to. So intelligence is important, but it doesn't make up for our utter indifference and willful ignorance.

Heh? Sentient life and the civilisations it creates are part of nature, where would the incompatibility stem from?

If you’re talking about the phenomenon of some species depleting the resources of their environment, harming their population in the long run, that’s not a phenomenon unique to humans.

Well, if by "incompatibility" we mean something that leads to destruction, then why not? Destruction and death are also natural phenomena.

Ecosystems are not exactly stable systems.

You don't need sentience to cause imbalance and breakdown - https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/trophic-ca...

Sentience is like anything else. Just a tool to that makes the species efficient at doing X. When a herd of buffalo gets slightly too efficient at grazing or a a pride of lions gets slightly too efficient at taking down prey things can unravel.

But after the breakdowns and collapses the big mystery is why things reboot.

> That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too.

Exponential growth does not work. In the limit you can only expand in a sphere at the speed of light: O(n^3), so exponential growth is coming to a halt, one way or another, in this universe.

Going to other planets ultimate solves nothing. You either reach homeostasis with your limited resources or you don't, which means you will reach the end of your resources and collapse.

Yeah, the reason to go to space isn't to get a (fictional) free pass from reaching homeostasis, it's to give you a larger number of resources at homeostasis.

A trillion humans is inherently cooler than a billion humans. More art, more science, more bigger projects achievable through collective efforts.

We _are_ nature and have no more control over our destiny than ants do.

This philosophy makes me wonder what concept you think is communicated by the word "control". In a sense you're not wrong, but in that same sense my thermostat has no control over the temperature of my house. If I believed that, I'd look for ways to reinterpret the word "control" to make it a useful concept again.

Human society is often imbued with a desision making powers that don't really exist. Why do we xxxx?! (insert damaging human behaviour here) people say, it makes no sense!

It makes intuitive sense to us that "humans" collectivley can and should make rational desisions, because we feel as thought we can do this individually. The reason we extrapolate this from 1 individual to many is because we don't see ourseleves or our society as a natural chaotic system, we see it as a rational desision making system that's broken and we're wrong.

Well, I'd say society is neither chaotic nor rational. It's trapped by game theory into predictable suboptimal outcomes.

But I think we still have much more control over our destiny than ants do, basically unless you grind down to the level of physical determinism where nothing has control over anything and we're all dancing to the tune of some Lagrangian.

To argue otherwise, I think you'd have to make the case that no individual or small group has ever hatched a successful plan to create social change. I'd point to the Montreal protocol as one of many counterexamples. We've also managed to, so far, not blow ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons, having limited ourselves to only one nuclear war so far.

The word "nature" is meant to specifically exclude humans so the argument "we are nature" is self-defeating

It's not self defeating, it's enlightening. The separation is rooted in post Christian Western philosophy and is false. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are.

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