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Comment by jarpschop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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!

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