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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal?

Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?

It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).

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> What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal?

Something like 90% of Earth's surface is outright deadly to humans: about 71% is covered in water, in which humans cannot survive; then there's deserts (both hot and cold) as well as high mountains, which also don't allow for human habitation without technology.

But it's not just geological features. There's also deadly diseases, lots of predators (humans wiped them out completely in most of their habitats), weather and poisonous plants.

The average urban human wouldn't survive long in nature. Heck, there's a good chance they would catch a serious disease just from drinking contaminated water from a pond or a small brook.

> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?

For hundreds of thousands of years there's only been very few of us. In pre-argicultural times, no more than 10M humans lived on the planet [0], probably even almost going extinct in the wake of the Toba supervolcano event 70000 years ago. Indeed several genetic bottleneck events have been identified (ice age, weird cultural shifts [1]) suggesting that the survival of our species wasn't a sure bet throughout history.

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/internat...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25770088/

I don't know if that's what GP meant. Elves also suffered from the ravages of cold, famine seas etc. It's just that in general they were tolerated and treated infinitely better by the natural world then humans. And almost anything else living, actually. But the truth is, even in Tolkiens world, Nature is hostile to all living things. Arda conspires with time to sap the powers of even the mightiest of the Lords. It kills countless elves. So your interpretation of "nature isn't kind" is clearly wrong.

So, it's more about adaptation than "kindness".

It even goes both ways: most species change their environment to better accommodate their needs (beavers dam rivers, termites build mounds, forests modify the soil and create their own microclimate, etc.).

So it really is a complex system of adaptation to external conditions, modifying inanimate aspects of the environment to meet our needs and interactions with other species.

Human technology and -activity is not unmatched in scale (cyanobacteria are still the champions - completely remodelling Earth's atmosphere), but no other other species had the means to do it so quickly. We seem to strife for a mixture of artificial (houses, streets, technology) and versions of nature that we're fully in control of (from fish tanks and zoos to parks and gardens).

This need to "tame the land" even extends to other parts of the universe, hence the concept of "terraforming", even though adaption even if by artificial means would be much less complicated, quicker and "more natural".

And that's the secret sauce for every species that made it so far.

But Nature also has given us everything we need to survive. Just because it's also deadly doesn't mean it isn't kind. Compare the Earth's hostility to Mars. Despite all its dangers, Nature seems downright cuddly by that measure.

Nature didn't give us anything. Our DNA evolved to take from Nature.

No buffalo walks up to a lion and gives itself up, the lion evolved to take, brutally and with often needless cruelty.

That there's anything there at all to take is the point.

This argument might be missing the distinction between humanity as a species and individual existence. No doubt humanity has thrived, but most individual human lives face significant struggles and hardships. We are here because we've been able to adapt and survive in relation to the rest of nature, but nature doesn't make it easy for us, and everybody dreams of having it easier. We continually fantasize about having greater power to protect ourselves from nature.

Like any other species, at whatever cost.

It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality.

Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone.

Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible.

Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.

Thank you, i never understood how somebody can anthropomorphize the constant conflict in nature around us.

Every tree murders the Savannah below, every Savannah fire is a attempt to get back more land for the grass.

Nothing out there is peaceful, even with all hostile predators removed, the battle of each system component against the others continuous.

Right, the fact that nature works with so many systems in constant conflict is a lot of the beauty of it.

Fires are actually a pretty important part of grass and tree ecology! Cleansing, reproductive fire.

> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?

The majority of humans died. Sometimes almost to the point of extinction. The ones who got lucky or got the right genes survived at least long enough to pass their DNA on to the next generation. Which is the one thing natural selection optimizes for. When you say "we" made it across hundreds of millennia, you're excluding the countless evolutionary dead ends that far outnumber the rest.

Nature isn't kind to us, and we aren't immune to many of its dangers because on average it's not enough to kill us before we can create offspring.

We rely on technology to handle the rest. Like avoiding sickness because even when not deadly it's not pleasant.

Because nature spends 100% of its time trying to kill and eat everything including humans. The only reason we have either the ability or the desire to romanticise nature now is that we've so effectively emancipated ourselves from it.

As someone who's done a bit of survivalism, I'd challenge you to go spend a few weeks in nature, living off the land. By the end, you'll be hoping that you can fix problems from the previous disaster before the next one strikes. Humans adapted quite a bit in order to survive, but a vast majority were killed by mother earth long before their natural deaths.

>>It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech

"Tech" is a fairly undefined word, and we subconsciously draw lines where it makes sense / suits us. I will however postulate that:

1. Yes, humans spent a lot of time without technology; but it sucked and we died and suffered a lot

2. Technology isn't just iPhones - it's fire and clothes and clean water and toilets.

I don't know if this is a self-evident or hugely controversial or even politically incorrect thought, but hoping I'm in safe-enough space to explore it: I wonder how much of very definition of "human/humanity" has to do with tools we use.

"If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?"

Some thrived, but a lot did not. Humans were down to a tiny population at one point.

And low-tech is still tech. Fire, tools, pots, and agriculture are all ways to overcome nature.

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