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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

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