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Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

If you are looking for ways to help, here are a few:

1. Rewild/plant natives where you can, such as your yard or if allowed, easements or verges, ideally from pollinator-safe plant nurseries or places which care for very local species

2. Advocate for wild spaces, wildlife corridors and wildlife bridges and underpasses, particularly on migration routes for small species (guarding frog movements for three weeks a year is pretty neat)

3. Volunteer with local wetlands/trails associations/reserves for whatever their ecologists decide needs doing.

4. Reduce your carbon footprint, and then offset the rest. We are working on helping people do this (and take action on climate change in other ways) at https://projectwren.com

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> wildlife bridges

These are a great idea, but they're going to be very rare because the designs of them are at incredible cost.

A far more pragmatic design is to lay culverts crossways under highways at regular intervals. The culverts can be varying size, even up to 10 feet in diameter. Culverts are mass produced, cheap, and trivial since the highway roadbed is already built up from the land level. Just dig a trench, drop in the culvert, fill in, and pave over.

Make them a part of normal highway construction, and add them whenever repaving maintenance is being done.

No, they aren't as good as bridges. But they're far better than non-existent bridges.

5 - Not have kids. This is the most important one.

Maybe less extreme, have one child.

Two children is also below the replacement rate, as are most developed nations. Thus it’s unlikely for this be critical compared to basic conservation techniques.

Personally, I am not planning on having kids either way.

It’s not that simple. If you are a high quality specimen with good genetics and high intelligence, you should have more children than normal replacement rate, and with a similar mate.

If you are not a fit specimen you should consider having none, or at most one with a high quality mate with dominant genes.

Did you ever consider what that idea meant in practice?

People have actively done a great deal of selective breeding of various animals and plant species and the results aren’t a strict improvement over the original wild animals. Agriculture has become about maintaining plants and animals which can’t compete with wild plants on their own.

DNA doesn’t come with an easy score card nor are children clones. Someone with a significant positive mutation should objectively score very highly on such metrics, but good luck find out about that. Further, disease resistance for unknown diseases is incredibly important making genetic diversity critical not just maximizing some specific ideal template. Pushed to the limit, a significant risk from widespread genetic engineering is extinction.

PS: Even just the biological version of this based on physical attractiveness has significant downsides such as excessively large breasts.

Just take anybody who'd qualify for military service. This isn't about some hyperspecific slice of the population.

At least in the US only about 25% of the population qualifies for military services. But, I doubt that’s a 1:1 match for what you’re looking for.

No that's pretty much the ideal selection. Non-fat people who aren't too far below average IQ. They should have more kids. With better high school phys ed we could bump up the fraction quite a bit.

Really just anybody who can hold down a marriage. This won't hurt disease resistance.

If changing X you could bump up the fraction then your selecting for background not DNA.

People with asthma, vision problems, and ADHD etc can still serve. The current criteria are mostly about effective soldiers after minimal training not some test of genetic fitness.

The current military criteria selects for genetic fitness very strongly when it comes to intelligence. Its other criteria keep out people with basic health problems, but I think being in decent shape is a decent filter for conscientious behavior, just not a precise one.

The problem is people unfit to have kids are shooting seed at alarming rates, and if we don’t take better measures to encourage optimal reproduction we will be overrun with their kin.

Data doesn’t really support that idea. Billionaires for example have significantly more kids than average. At the reverse in poor communities healthy intelligent men statistically have more children than average.

It’s a political talking point that the poor and uneducated have more children but things are never that simple and that’s not genetic fitness. Poor countries for example don’t really translate to genetic factors. Further, poor mothers don’t mean poor fathers.

At the extreme end, people with severe mental or physical disorders are vastly less likely to have children.

No, the most important one is to overweight working on these problems directly through technology to create leveragable, economically incentivized solutions. Instead of removing 2 lives from the picture, reduce the impact of all current and future lives by some meaningful margin.

As an example to illustrate this - if you create software solution that reduces the need for air travel by a very small percentage, you'll have more impact on carbon emissions over its amortized lifetime than most humans who have ever lived, particularly if you make personal sacrifices to ensure its widespread use and availability.

Agreeing to not have kids feels like some sort of gut instinct appeal. Not entirely sure from where it stems - maybe guilt for climate change and mass extinctions?

The people who would look to do better for the planet would just maybe have children who would do the same. It’s not assured, of course, but such a parent certainly loads the deck in favor if they’re otherwise good, supportive and informative parents.

Wish society did more to give people reasons to care about and for one another.

Yep, smart people concerned about nature should not reproduce, this way people interested in destroying nature could have four kids instead two (and people trying to save nature could have even less influence in the vote).

5. Change the built-in incentive structures of modern capitalism.

I try to 1-4 as much as possible and more. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money. But it's really hard not to get discouraged about how futile it all seems in the face of the unflinching exploitative momentum of modern civilization.

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