A Biography of E.O. Wilson, the Scientist Who Foresaw Our Troubles
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
( randomly, i thought of that while thinking like someone who wrote a parallel (and parallelizing) garbage collector before )
Also to touch just a tiny bit on just how messy this question can get with fungi:
If you take certain species of fungi, put them in some soil they're really not adapted for, they will literally increase the rates of horizontal gene transfer and start borrowing genes from soil bacteria there in order to quickly evolve themselves and better adapt to that soil
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5095653/
Certain parasitic plants may act similarly:
This is often cited, but the jury's out on whether it applies to us.
As far as we can guess, none of those 99% of species could control fire, much less band together to push aside an asteroid or develop a vaccine.
We, too, might go extinct. We might even go extinct because we can control fire or do space things or biology things.
But as far as we know, compared to 99% of all species, we're a special case.
Whales making fart jokes would make the entire enterprise worth it.
I think not having language is a limitation on the upper bounds of animal intelligence, and providing voices through technology will enhance animal cognition beyond what they could achieve naturally.
Humans providing education and training could make their lives more meaningful and nuanced by giving them the jump start of participating in our culture. Besides, imagine cooperative orca tribes assisting in human endeavors, like seasteading and ocean rescue?
Who knows, if orcas are smart enough, they could be the first nonhuman writers or scientists?
You make it sound like human-caused extinction is "part of the natural process" - it is not.
"The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates.[4][9][10][11][12][13]"
"human population size and/or specific human activities, not climate change, caused rapidly rising global mammal extinction rates during the past 126,000 years. Around 96% of all mammalian extinctions over this time period are attributable to human impacts"
Only from a human perspective are humans something other than natural. This seems to conflict with the vague sort of anti-humanism that is in vogue among many environmentalists. If you want to look at humanity from a perspective that isn't human then "the Holocene extinction" is perfectly natural.
I don't think that's actually true. Any alien observing the planet over the last 4 billion years would recognize us as an anomaly.
Polluted cities, sucking in value from all around, at the cost of countless species have often been compared to cancer. The aliens might see things similarly, with their large dispassionate eye and tall perspective.
An anomaly, sure, but they could very well view us as a natural anomaly. We're talking about fiction now and there's plenty of fiction that runs along these lines (aliens view humans as humans view other animals).
> Polluted cities, sucking in value from all around, at the cost of countless species have often been compared to cancer.
Not a great sign when your worldview is exactly the same as the villain in The Matrix...
And Smith was a great villain because we could all see where he was coming from.
No it's not. Anomaly refers to something deviating from some trend or norm. Unnatural means something different.
That assertion is a little bit too confident. Philosophically speaking, can you explain what is different about us creating pollution vs. a tree creating oxygen? Are you saying viruses and cancer are an anomaly or unnatural?
Philosophically speaking, us creating pollution is bad vs a tree creating oxygen because we are killing species at a rate 1000x the background rate. That's objectively bad, extremely fucking bad.
Any philosophy that doesn't recognize mass destruction of life for the sake of temporary individual profit as bad and not normal is _severely_ deficient, to the point of being utterly useless or even harmful.
Let's not play with words, "unnatural" in this context generally refers to "human induced", ie "under human control", ie "we could do something about it, if we fixed politics".
Then at this point some will object that if we haven't fixed it yet, it's because we really can't, because our current politics is actually natural, so we should not even try (showing that the anti-environmentalists can also make use of the natural vs unnatural rhetoric).
"Nature" just like its oposite "human volition" are nothing but concepts that has to be assumed or those discussions make no sense.
> Then at this point some will object that if we haven't fixed it yet, it's because we really can't, because our current politics is actually natural, so we should not even try (showing that the anti-environmentalists can also make use of the natural vs unnatural rhetoric).
No one (in this thread) said "we should not even try". The question is how we frame environmentalism. The kind of anti-humanism that is associated with modern environmentalism is not the way to go.
This lecture sums up his work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8