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Comment by nahuel0x | Hacker News Reader

Now take in account the ecosystems destroyed and the picture is very different. We must leave behind the humans-only perspective.

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What are you talking about? Humans have already irrevocably altered the natural ecosystem over the past 100k years. We have: killed off all the megafauna, domesticated thousands of plants, drastically changed the landscape through agriculture, literally changed the courses of rivers, diverted water all over the planet, etc. And that was all before the modern era.

Sure, this sounds reasonable, but it's really not when you look at the magnitudes of our impact over time. It's clear that the actions of the last 50-100 years or so are in extreme excess of what can be stabilised by the global weather and ecological systems. We've gone from about two thirds remaining natural wilderness in the world in the early 1900s to one third remaining today. The continued survival of most species, including ours, is very much in danger if we don't reverse a lot of this.

Human-only perspective? That is assuming we can thrive if not not without an ecosystem.

That assumes that population growth is somehow the primary cause of climate change and space expansion. The issue is lack of caring and technology, not population.

Return to monke.

We should always value humans over other species, and if you disagree you're an enemy of our species.

You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter

What does that mean concretely?

Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?

More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet will collapse."

Which is exactly how someone caring only about human lives would reason.

> What does that mean concretely?

E.g. you value your spouse more than you value a random other human. It doesn't mean you don't value the other human.

You can assign a value to both that says we should not harm these things.

We should always value our family and friends over others, or else you are an enemy of family and friends. Also race, religious and ethnic group...

What's your point?

We don’t, however, have any idea how to keep humans alive after killing of all the other species. We appear to be totally reliant on some part of the natural world continuing to work, and we don’t know what part of it is required. Prudence suggests we be cautious about how much of it we decide to kill off.

Valuing humans over other species at all costs leads to humans collapsing our environment and thus harming humans.

Only if you apply the idea in a stupid and shortsighted way.

I advocate for doing it smartly.

It's a bit exhausting to have to point out something so obvious.

Well then you come back around to valuing nature imo

What if we found a living Neanderthal village. They’re taking up space that an equivalent human village could, should we get rid of them?

I mean, I'd say Neanderthals are humans. I'm 2.x% Neanderthal myself, according to my DNA vendor.

If we're talking about other sentient and moral species, those are admittedly hard questions.

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