Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years.

Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.

View on HN

The biodiversity is going down because of habitat loss (global warming, human encroachment). How will cloning help when there won't be a habitat to sustain the clones?

Global warming alone will destroy the vast majority of habitat for existing creatures. The change is faster than evolution can deal with.

In 500 years, all energy may be clean energy. Enough societal change or depopulation can result in the re-establishment of nature biomes. I don’t see this as utopian or wildly unlikely.

In 500 years? It has to be 50 or there won’t be any societies to power in 500 years

As bad as climate change is, it’s not going to wipe out human civilization in 50 years.

But will it be extinct in 500/5000/50,000 years?

There's an incredible arrogance in this thread of man's capabilities over natures. People better check themselves.

I don’t think cloning animals is some kind of godlike technological power. It’s clearly something humans are already capable of doing to some extent.

Projected 500-1000-5000 years into the future, it doesn’t seem arrogant to me to assume we will be able to clone extinct animals en masse.

projecting 5000-50,000 years into the future and failing to see humanity's extremely likely extinction based on current trends is the arrogance.

No, it isn’t, it’s being realistic. Human beings aren’t going extinct because of climate change, nuclear weapons, or anything else. Some people would survive and they would inevitably repopulate.

I think the unbounded optimism / arrogance is that life as is will continue indefinitely, or just get better and better.

That might happen, but climate change is one of very few things that will stop it (others being nuclear war, asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares and other disease)

Let me get this straight: climate change models predict conditions likely to lead to the collapse of civilization and you say "the map is not the territory, no need to be alarmed", but your extrapolation of our cloning capability should totally be respected?

I didn’t say there was no need to be alarmed, I said civilization isn’t going to collapse.

These also aren’t the same things. Cloning is a technology that will likely continue to be more and more possible. It’s not really a question of if, but when. Even then it was just a creative suggestion.

Modeling civilizations responses to climate change is basically science fiction. Yes, bad stuff will happen. No, you can’t predict that society will collapse because of it.

No but if we keep polluting at this rate, in 500 years civilisations will crumble. If food supply chains fail we’ll see a bunch of wars break out and a global chain reaction that will destroy massive amounts of progress.

Most likely we’ll land back at the Middle Ages- it’s happened to pretty much every civilisation to date so it’s unlikely ours will be any different.

If anything given our global scale it will be worse.

Actually, climate change is likely to have “major economic consequences” in ~2038, followed by “globally catastrophic events” in ~2067. After that, the economy and civilization as we know it will presumably no longer exist.

https://mk0insideclimats3pe4.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...

(Page 14)

So, this human civilization is on schedule to collapse in about 50 years.

Of course, science in this matter has improved since 1980, but I like that report because it correctly predicted the current state of things 40 years ago. Also, it was written by the big oil companies. It’s difficult to argue they were being intentionally alarmist or had the science wrong.

Science isn’t fortune telling. It doesn’t predict the future.

I’m sorry, but a PDF from 1980 isn’t exactly a reliable source of information about the future. It’s a little scary how people think this is a real possibility.

Of course science can predict the future. Drop a pen off your desk. Newton correctly predicted what speed it would hit the floor at, and he did it back in 1687.

If not science, what do you suggest people use to predict the future?

Anyway, here’s a more modern source. It was peer reviewed, and is considered up to date and also reliable:

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

I suggest reading it, but if you scroll halfway down, you can type in a county, and it’ll provide more detailed predictions. I suggest checking it against recent news. You’ll find that the areas it predicts will soon be uninhabitable are already showing signs of ecosystem collapse. (Especially the US southwest)

Observations of computer models are not observations of the natural world. They can be helpful, but the map is not the territory.

Again, civilization is not going to collapse in the 2060s because an academic research paper says so.

Human civilization has collapsed before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Like you said, what remains may no longer be as we know it, but then again humanity has gone through so many paradigm shifts (and the shifts are accelerating due to technology) that it would be surprising if civilization was the same 50-100 years from now.

I think you might be correct.

I wonder what makes so many people - even here on HN - so furiously jam their fingers in their ears and go "Lalalala" whenever you get realistic about the impact of our predatory ecosystem exploitation or about the consequences of population migration because of climate change.

It is so strange.

With genetic engineering you can introduce favorable traits or increase diversity in monocrops to buffer against changing environments. This is already done to some extent and will be done for pretty much all food we consume in the future, as our climate changes faster than planted crops can adapt to produce yields under these changes.

How does making identical copies of an animal increases biodiversity?

I meant cloning dead or extinct animals.

Even then, if you cloned a small number of identical animals (100,000 pigs cloned from 100 originals) they would become biologically diverse in a fairly small amount of time.

I think you might be underestimating the sheer amount of genetic diversity required to have a healthy base population. 100'000 pigs cloned from 100 originals would be susceptible to any number of pathogens. And because pathogens evolve so much faster than theirs hosts, chances are high that we will struggle very, very hard to keep them alive. Sex and horizontal gene exchange make it clear that life on earth cares very much for genetic diversity. And you can be sure that's not because it is woke.

Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck a few hundred thousand years ago. It's still pretty much obvious in our genetic record; two random chimpanzee tribes have more genetic diversity between them than humanity as a whole.

It takes a lot more knowledge then what we currently have for such a project to be reasonable. Maybe another hundred years until we are familiar enough with the metabolic pathways and all the idiosyncrasies that are present.

But only if there's enough complexity left to study...

It was just an example. Obviously we would want more than 100 original pigs. The point is that biological diversity is a natural consequence of the evolutionary process.

Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every problem.

And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.

Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.

On a biological timeline, it’s almost completely irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in small tribal groups. I think we’ll be fine.

Besides that, most people in cities already live in a biodiversity wasteland.

So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there.

Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.

No, that isn’t what I wrote. Try again.

> incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years

This is better than nothing. But species don't exist in a vacuum. Re-introducing an extinct species to a biome could be as jarring to its neighbors as its original elimination was. The most conservative path would be to cauterize the would and let the system heal, even if it takes a few million years.

For an absurd example, consider the effect of introducing a large number of saber-toothed tigers to their original habitats.

Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense. Humans and other organisms have been changing the environment since the beginning of life.

Life is a process, not a state.

> Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem is nonsense

There isn't a stable state, but there are multiple equilibria. We can quantify the robustness of an ecosystem, its resilience to exogenous shocks. That makes certain states "better" than others.

That resilience is low and decreasing. "Healing" means helping it increase. Re-introducing extinct species may or may not build a more robust and more productive biosphere.

I think you're confusing ecosystem (which word itself implies process) with equilibrium. It's quite fair to say that there was an actual ecosystem at least until the establishment of writing, at which point state information became transmissible across time and space beyond the capacity of individual organisms or eusocial colonies.

While you are correct that evolution would sooner or later take over, whether with assistance via cloning or blind luck if humans were to go extinct, you do need to consider the possibility that under some circumstances systems can collapse rather than bouncing back over a relatively short timeframe. Life would eventually re-establish itself, just as life persists in extremely arid desert conditions, but there's no guarantee it will do si n a timely fashion, and by timely here I mean on a timescale short enough for a human civilization to flourish in parallel with it.

I am just saying that the idea of returning to a natural equilibrium is nonsensical. We really just mean a form of nature that has a balance we find agreeable to human beings. Nothing more, nothing less. No human is okay with an equilibrium if it’s filled with killer wasps and sentient bears.

Better to try to solve the problem, even if the solution is not perfect, rather than putting our heads in the sand.

That's one way to get biodiversity, but you can also generate more diverse populations in the lab and plant them in the field. You can also seek out natural reservoirs of variation in the form of wild or land race cultivars, and introduce favorable traits into your elite commercial cultivar. I work in this field. This is where our food supply is going, where it has to go if we are to feed ourselves in a century, when changing conditions mean the crops being planted today will not achieve the same yields in the future.

You would need to clone thousands species to restore the current links.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com