Hacker News Reader

Comment by loriverkutya | Hacker News Reader

It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again, luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next time evolution comes up with something psychologically better suited for long term survival then our own species since we are so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as some kind of higher being who is independent from the consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time to start over, I’m sad that we failing to realise we don’t.

View on HN

What we have to worry about in the mean time is environmental changes leading to crop failures. The earth will be fine, whether we are able to continually feed ourselves in this society is an open question that we are actively trying to solve. But it's an uphill battle when even liberal minded people have villianized GMOs. GMOs are the tools we need to use to ensure our world is not like what was pictured in Interstellar. Inaction means famine.

That is the point I always see when someone is promoting "save the Earth", Earth will be fine. It is humans who will have it tough while some bugs or bacteria will not even notice when those pesky people died out.

It's not save the Earth. It's save me and my descendants.

It just doesn't have the same ring to it...

If you just mean that the earth will continue to exist, or that some manner of organism will live on it, then yeah that seems like a safe bet. But a lot of people think it would be a bad thing if we drove elephants to extinction, or destroyed the Great Barrier Reef (and not for any prudential reasons tied to human interests, either), and that's what they mean when they urge us to "Save the Earth."

Extinct elephants and destroyed reefs are small steps towards the total annihilation of humanity. It'd be much easier on personal level for everyone to justify not using plastic and voting for people who prioritize sustainability over short-term profit if green movement campaigned for saving our grand children from living in hell, than saving a floaty rock from an ephemeral threat.

I am fine with GMO and other genetic technology in principle. But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of deploying more and more herbicides. Unfortunately that's what it has been about mostly in the past.

Not sure I agree with that. There have been several GMOs that improve yields, or improve nutrition ("golden rice").

Yes, but OP's point is that GMO has been mostly used to enable chemical use. I am inclined to agree with them, without data.

BT corn, roundup ready corn and beans, and other herbicide tolerant strains of common field crops are very, very prevalent and enable the use of not just more glyphosate to compensate for resistance in the weeds, but also accompanying chemicals for the same reasons.

There is more to this narrative than meets the eye. Before roundup ready crops we used far worse herbicides and pesticides that are much more prevalent in runoff and in the local ecology, like atrazine, metribuzin, and alachlor. So while they use more pounds per acre in some cases, it's usually stuff that is far less harmful to the environment.

BT corn is brilliant. Bt has been used in organic farming for 50 years and doesn't harm people or animals or pollinators. Having the corn produce it directly rather than having to spray excess amounts of it regularly over your crops is a boon. You use far less since it's concentrated at the site where it matters: in the tissue the insect bites into.

We have to take these measures. If we didn't treat with pesticides and herbicides, we go back to biblical plague levels of insect blight and are unable to feed our population. It happens even in backyard gardens. I've seen cabbage loopers turn my tomato plant into swiss cheese in a matter of days.

Oh, I 100% agree with you. There is no going back, without massive famine and death. Glyphosate causing cancer is, I would bet, going to be mostly ignored due to the unbelievable human suffering that would occur if it was banned.

Again, though, the point of OP was not that more is used, or better chemical are used, it was that GMO has, in terms of row crops, been mostly organized around chemical use. That stands true, in my opinion, regardless of whether the chemicals are more or less harmful.

> But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of deploying more and more herbicides.

If you want to deal with herbicide use (or pesticides more generally), target that, not GMOs. Because targeting GMOs means that while the existing major established uses with a sold revenue model can find ways to take the hit — so the big herbicide producing chemical/GMO giants are only modestly inconvenienced, and their tweaks and refinements to their existing products barely affected — all the startups doing development of GMOs for yield and nutrition traits which are more speculative, higher risk, and not as politically connected are screwed.

Crops can't grow in barren soil however hardy they are. Soil is dying at an amazing rate right now, it's a living ecosystem that gets renewed and changes constantly, with all the bacteria, fungus, worms, dead organic matter, minerals, air and water cycling around. Many farming methods that we use at the moment don't prioritise it, and long term they destroy the productivity of the soil. GMOs might be part of the solution but they aren't all of it.

With GMOs you would have a wider variety of profitable crops to rotate in your fields to rebuild soil conditions between harvests of certain crops. This sort of practice is already done in some areas where this farming is permissive, like with corn and soybean. No till practices and other soil rebuilding efforts are also finding their way into larger and larger operations.

If the 6th extinction we are in takes humans with it, I doubt that new intelligent species that pop up as a result of evolution on earth will behave any differently. One powerful difference that could change that: our fossil records. We can look to dinosaurs and see that with a little bit of bad luck we could be wiped out, but it's not a strong enough message. Our remains will show future species that collectively, individuals have the power to completely destroy the earth, and that might be a strong enough lesson to prevent this from happening again.

I'm afraid that evolution favors a species that can quickly and efficiently exploit resources. Honestly, I'm afraid that our problems are such that they're at the genetic and species level, and therefore unsolvable. I am honestly afraid that we are literally unable, as a species, to fix these things, because it's what we are.

And I believe that will be the case for whatever comes after us as well.

Evolution better get to work fast. We only have around 500 million years until the sun's increasing luminosity leaves Earth uninhabitable.

The extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs was "just" 66 million years ago.

Hopefully humanity will have developed enough space exploration technology to get off this rock by then.

Half a billion years is probably enough time to figure out how to jump start a star.

It would be except the longevity of any human civilization will probably stop that from happening.

All sources I've seen say we have much longer than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Four%2....

How do you come to the idea that evolution would ever come up with something more psychologically suited for long-term survival?

Nothing is going to optimize for long-term survival. Any species that is not using all its capacity to extract resources and reproduce is going to be out-competed by everything else. A sensible long-term approach for regenerative resource consumption is not something that nature will ever select for. It will optimize for eat-as-much-as-you-can-without-having-to-vomit and reproduce-the-shit-out-of-the-free-energy-available-in-the-environment.

I'm sad about us failing too. Humans are a fascinating species, and I think we have a lot of 'redeeming' qualities, ike our incredible ability to cooperate and our empathy. It's a shame that we're a dead-end.

Humans wont care about the environment until humans live forever and their actions now will impact their own lives later.

A ridiculously anthropocentric statement. Humans are part of a very long lineage of life increasing in complexity without achieving immortality.

Compare: "Mitochondria wont care about non-mitochondria (i.e. their environment) until mitochondria are individually immortal..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com