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Comment by mindfulplay | Hacker News Reader

Why does that matter? Why are humans so special? I 'feel' like octopuses are the better candidate :) putting aside trivial human aspirations....

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When they successfully escape earths orbit, get back to me.

Until then, all odds are stacked against them. They’re going to go extinct in an instant on a cosmic timescale. Unless, of course, humans choose to bring them along and save them from that fate.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it's interesting to me that in our many hundred thousand year history as a species, the "point" of our intelligence (by your measure) wasn't even a suggestion until maybe 120 years ago, and only a dream until maybe 60 years ago. What are the chances?

Perhaps a scholar in 320 AD would also have been surprised by how remarkable it was that the true purpose of human intelligence had only been so recently discovered.

Bingo.

This is the chasm that needs to be crossed. Its not just the immediate advantage your species gets from intelligence. It’s cultivating that to a point where you realize all life on this planet is default extinct. Then getting your species to the point where you even have a _chance_ of changing that default.

Humans are still default extinct. We are on a path to changing that default.

to follow up on the point above, how do you know that leaving earth is the only way to escape extinction? that's only what you can imagine given the technology available, just like someone living in 320 couldn't conceive of space travel.

I agree that the ultimate purpose of any species is to continue to exist. I'm just skeptical because your definition of that is so related to modern science fiction

I mean eventually the sun will lose energy and hell, a planet destroying asteroid could hit at any time.

No we're not, at best we're just changing the timeline. You're still either time bound by the death of the universe best case scenario or resource bound before that happens (if the universe can "end"). Extinction is inevitable at any timescale.

Well the whole point of the game of life is to keep the game going for as long as possible.

One response from the Christian tradition is that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational, moral, and spiritual faculties. Other animals lack these faculties. Furthermore, we are decreed to be stewards over the created order by divine command.

Christianity decrees its followers to be stewards over the created order, but outside of some small groups, there's no major tradition of vegetarianism in Christianity, nor any particular care for ecology and sustainability as is practiced in many other religions.

Because stewardship of the earth got translated into dominion over it and that became the dominant narrative in a dominant branch of Christianity in most of the world (Evangelicalism).

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