The Culture of Whales
npr.org
npr.org
I made the opposite mistake, read the headline, assumed it was about actual whales, didn't read the article before posting then went off on some tangent about whale watching and tourism.
Turns out it was an article about big spending gamblers in video games.
Naturally enough, I assumed this was going to be about that again until i seen your comment.
If can't keep an habitable planet habitable, how can we turn a rock into an habitat?
Extra-terrestial colonization would be completely different, with entirely self-contained environments owned by defined parties who are incentivized to effectively manage them.
The other point is that extra-terrestial colonization could give us access to vastly more resources, that can be harnessed without putting any strain on natural environments. It could even be possible to return all Earth-based agricultural lands to their natural state, and grow all the food we need in urban vertical farms that receive the energy they need for plant growth from extra-terrestial sources like space-based solar panels.
This really doesn't seem to be true. In particular, things are much worse for most fisheries over the last 25 years.
Whaling protections have been put in place and despite several offenders the situation is better than it was 100-200 years ago.
I know whaling has strong cultural connotations to 19th century, through Moby Dick and such, but that was really just very small scale childs play compared to 20th century stuff.
Fishing has even bleaker situation. From 1950s we have gone from about 20 million tonnes yearly capture production to about 80 million tonnes in 1990s, and stayed at that level since. The sort of devastatingly massive factory ships we operate these days simply did not exist before. I guess the only good thing that can be said is that the total global catch growth has stopped?
There's an associated website: https://www.theoutlawocean.com/
Free-diving with minimal equipment sounds like the best way to earn trust from long-lived non-human people who, I like to think, have a rich oral history. I reckon they have significant generational trauma. One of my daydreams is that we learn to understand some cetacean languages. Know anyone working on that?
"The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they've created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren't they interested in listening to our voices? We're a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren't we exactly what humans are looking for?"
Essentially a woman, Margaret Lovett, literally lived in a watery house with three dolphins for several months.
Apparently things did not end well.
Here's the article I read about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
Perhaps, fifty years later, we might go about things differently.
Living with a dolphin in the same room for 6 days a week, trying to teach it English, letting him release its sexual urges on the researcher, injecting it with lsd and then after the experiment was over he commits suicide by drowning himself which apparently dolphins can do.
An utterly bizarre and twisted story that yet somehow feels wholesome?
The concept of human/animal communication is an interesting field when it doesn't involve abuse.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/scientist...
Me too!
I sometimes think about the devices described in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos that enabled the wearer to talk to dolphins on the planet Maui-Covenant[0].
I am sure this is possible today, using a library of recorded dolphin sounds and perhaps also movements, environmental conditions and apparent stimuli to train a neural net that can infer meaning.
I did find this article from 2011 about a future test of a dolphin communication device [1].
[0] - https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Maui-Covenant [1] - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028115-400-talk-wit...
Good reason to take care for the dolphins now, eh? Science fiction is great for reflecting, and for exploring what might be, to help guide us into the future. And it can just be fun, of course.
Caring for another group can have long-term benefits (but is not the primary reason to do kind things, I feel), a recent example of which is the many Irish people who donated to the Navajo COVID-19 Relief Fund[1]. Blindboy (from Limerick, Ireland) on his podcast remembers his dad telling him the Chocktaw gave money to the Irish during the famine in the 1800s.[2] Curious, I looked and found numerous articles about this, including [3].
[0] https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Maui-Covenant
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/xjgrfa-navajo-amp-hopi-families-c...
[2] first ten minutes of episode 136: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blindboy-podcast/i...
[3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-america...
Source: I’m a former NG photo editor.
On a somewhat related side note I absolutely love how the Ondes Martenot can sometimes sound like whales underwater.
- Over a thousand whales are killed each year despite it being ruled illegal "for profit" 35 years ago.
- The biggest offenders are supposedly Japan, Iceland, and Norway who believe they have rights for different objective reasons.
- Whale oil, blubber, and cartilage is used for various supplement or sometimes the meat is consumed via traditional dishes.
- To kill whales, you use an exploding harpoon that can take a half hour to kill. Sometimes multiple shots are needed.
People are cruel. The bar for how we treat life and choose which animals can die makes no sense whatsoever.
I strongly encourage everyone to consume less meat (because individual actions matter - the market is responsive/elastic and fewer animals will experience torture in the future if you purchase less animal products).
On the other hand, nearly all of the animal cruelty from factory farms stems from people buying meat from them. So if most people eat less meat, then factory farms actually will suffer.
> "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation."
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fZp6Fpowmd5a8Lu2w/...
Directly: https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the...
The mechanism is simple: if the stores are 100% responsive to your demand, your purchase directly affects supply. If they are not 100% perfect, they still have a mechanism through which they buy in bulk. So, roughly speaking, you might have a 1% chance of triggering a batch order for an extra 100 lbs when you purchase 1 lb of meat. And the same goes up the supply chain.
It's great to hear there are still farms that care about animal welfare, but it's a challenge with a race-to-the-bottom where profits are inversely proportional with animal welfare.
Specifically, there is a greater incentive to make consumers think that the animals have good welfare, than to actually implement the better welfare. Unless we have mandatory web-cameras on all factories, you're just going on trust of people (who have all the immense financial incentives to lie).
I hope they continue to grow, that more people become more conscientious, and that regulations improve.
On HN we're interested in the diffs [1]: what's specifically interesting about an article. Generic tangents pull threads away from that into the gravitational field of the nearest large topic, sort of like a spaceship flying too close to a black hole [2]. The generic topics are larger, more familiar, and more repetitive [3]. Familiarity is seductive, but repetition is bad for curiosity [4], and curiosity is what we're trying to optimize for [5]. The generic themes are usually more sensational and inflammatory, too, which is doubly not what we're looking for.
It's super tempting for threads to hop to the most-generic adjacent orbit. Often they make several such hops. By the time a discussion reaches "People are cruel", that's a good example of a black hole. No light is going to come out of such a thread.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. Not saying the generic topics aren't important in society at large. They're usually much more important than most of what's on topic here. But a site like HN needs to stick to what it's for.
Thanks, dang.
Ridiculous that these creatures are still being hunted. Just, why?