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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." - Agent Smith, The Matrix

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Agent Smith is wrong. Every organism does this — that's how life works. Population crashes are common among many species, rabbits to rats. Trees produce a million seeds. Grasses expand into areas that juuuust barely support them. The "natural equilibrium" is not at all steady.

And let's remember that Agent Smith is itself attempting to take over the world.

I don’t think other organisms have the capacity to destroy the planet and make it uninhabitable. That attribute is uniquely human.

There's some evidence that around 2B years ago microbes decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere so much by overpopulation that 99% of the biosphere died.

I guess you mean The Great Oxygen Extinction Event (2.4-2.0 Ga).

In that case, it's presumed it was indeed a massive extinction (but no data to quantify any % over, due to no microbial fossils preserved).

... But for a different reason. It wasn't due to decrease in oxygen levels; contrary to that. At that time, oxygen was being first ever introduced into the atmosphere. This has left a unique geological trace we observe everywhere across the planet: the white sedimentary + red rust striped 2 Ga rocks.

The "microbes" were the first photosynthesisers. The oxygen was a toxic byproduct. Resistance to it had to be learned by evolution, and that learning took ~1e8 years. Many of life didn't manage to and went extinct.

Yes, I think you're right, I should've written increased. Thanks for the correction :).

"And you exist only because of us" - Neo

I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics.

Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.

Somewhere, some overlord in a galaxy far, far away is looking at us through a faster-than-light telescope and going "Yeppers. They are about to hit critical mass. Either a population crash is imminent or they start colonizing their solar system. Schedule a diplomatic mission for their corner of their galaxy to invite them to the intergalactic council should they survive this completely normal, though adolescently awkward, stage of development."

The eternal optimist in me hopes their spies on Earth tell them that humans are entering a third industrial revolution which has a chance of making future growth sustainable, or at least much more so.

Somewhere outside the ancestor simulation we’re in our descendants are about to learn what life and decisions were like during the near-extinction event that nearly prevented their creation.

This is why I think reproduction is unethical. We have the capacity to understand the implications of birthing new sentient lifeforms, knowing the harm it will cause to the planet and the other species we share it with.

Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight.

No one is thinking of the planet.

I teach my kids that reproduction is a good thing. I hope they pass it on.

Well I’m a celibate monk like my father, and grandfather before me.

This was the first thing that came to my mind!!

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