Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support billions more people, so we don't have to be careful about growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault.

Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws around managing natural resources...

But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn't live on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened. Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care?

Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.

View on HN

Why limit that to survivability? If you like to do something (say, eating sugar and reproducing), do stop doing it right before it kills you, or when you believe it's reasonable to stop because this particular things is not the only thing you care about?

We can perfectly stop destroying our habitat because it would kill us and because it makes no sense to do so. We're just addicted to things that kills us and we should get this addiction under control simply because it's an addiction (compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences). Addictions are bad for you, even when they don't kill you.

> Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.

Biology is a rich and wealthy system of evolved solutions for living on earth.

We could turn everything into people, but we'd lose so much information. Fungal growths on rocks may not seem like a lot to a layperson without appreciation, but such species took more work than the sum total human thought to arise. Killing it off is akin to burning the entire library of congress. Worse, perhaps.

We're too primitive to harness the wealth of information in our biosphere today. In a hundred years, there will be solutions in biology readily available to biochemical problems we're only beginning to characterize.

We hate that we killed the dodo and the woolly mammoth. But more than just erasing animals we learned about in childhood, and more than leaving holes in ecosystems, we destroyed the living and breathing universe solving unique and beautiful ways of dealing with itself. Solutions too complicated for humans to comprehend, and not even close to within our capacity to replicate.

Beautiful comment,thank you.

The closer we look at anything, like fungal growths, the more we realize how little we actually understand. Trying to tease apart the microscopic mechanisms that underlay the behaviors of fungal spores and slime molds is enough to make an atheist reach for God. The world is still very much inexplicable and so exquisite, it puts our efforts as builders to shame. Everything is a rabbit hole stretching back to the creation of the universe, just as humans have inherited life from an unbroken chain of organisms stretching back to the first cell.

We are still evolving, still bringing our frontal cortexes fully online, like teenagers. It is hubris to assume we are anything more than the link between our past forms and our future forms, although we may not survive through this particular transition.

That is an interesting perspective. It seems like the complete 180 degrees of the "singularity" fad that peaked a couple of decades ago, which envisioned humans eventually turning all matter on Earth (including the biosphere) and in the solar system into computing hardware, because that would be information-maximizing.

The problem with that line of thinking is that we're simply not wise enough to know what should be computed. Life computes more life, but humans seem to be able to do no better than cryptocurrency on the average.

The "singularity" is 60's High Modernism come back in sci-fi clothes.

If you ask Charlie Stross, it’s Christian theology in atheist clothes, with Roko’s basilisk playing the role of Satan.

We are not much different of a paperclip-making AI gone rogue

The planet can not support "billions more", it can barely support the billions we have. Maybe on a subsistence level of a basic minimum nutritional value it could theoretically, but not with industrial products, medicine, education, transportation infrastructure, energy, communications equipment and so on.

Cultivated land is 11.6% of the world, and we can improve the agricultural output of land by a large margin just by adding greenhouses. PV could supply each and every person in a well-fed global population of 10 billion roughly a thousand times the current power use of the average American today — less if you limit your PV to just deserts, but still far more than enough for “modern” lifestyles.

The planet can't support the the existing billions let alone more billions. The excuse can't be that we "just need..." all the billions to stop acting like humans and act some other human like race that cares more about the Earth than their own personal needs. We haven't got there in 10s of thousands of years, in fact the more we learn, the more we think we can outsmart the Earth. Our greed is what made us survive and is also our downfall. Even after the eventual near wipeout, we'll be back to the same tricks in a few thousand years. The human race will become a wax/wane cycle. It reminds me of the allegory of the frog and the scorpion....

> The planet can suppor billions more people, ...

Do you mean concurrently, or over the next hundreds of years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com