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Comment by imapeopleperson | Hacker News Reader

That’s a beautiful discovery and makes me sad to think what global damage industrialization must have caused.

I wish so dearly there was a way to let earth reproduce her fruits that didn’t involve destroying humanity.

The one comment in the other thread [0] speculates the Newfoundland banks could have had things similar to this, except they wouldn't today, because industrial trawling would have destroyed them [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29923951

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_trawling

If it makes you feel better, we're ahead of schedule on population decline, especially due to covid baby bust. It's quite plausible humanity will find balance with nature with a much smaller population in the long term.

busts are usually followed by booms. Current projections expect the population size to level out around 10.9 billion eventually.

This winter Brussels Airlines made 3,000 unnecessary flights just to maintain their airport spots.

We certainly have a lot of efficiency gains to make first with regards to our consumption before looking at the sheer number of people we have to feed

It wont be long till a long read will be published that will summarise all the empty flights that have taken place just to maintain the rights. I’ve never heard of Brussel airlines at all so I’m sure this is just a part of the tip of the iceberg. I truly hope the airline industry stops being the sweetheart of politics and finally gets the pummelling that they’ve long deserved. The race to the bottom has been long done and to think it’s ok to fly to Spain from Amsterdam for 30 euros is just a slap in the face for anyone that has a semblance of interest in the climate.

It certainly is just the tip. The parent company of Brussels Airlines, Lufthansa, operated a total of around 18,000 empty or near-empty flights this winter.

I totally agree. And it's important to remember that, at least in the US, the airline industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries

Capitalism has priced out having large families!

We went from a western world where one salary could support a partner and 3 children, to a world where to two full-time salaries are barely enough for one child.

And where one salary is being soaked up on child-care fees much of the time...

Communism has collapsed, yet capitalism seems to be defeating itself.

Maybe the threat of a viable alternatibe was keeping things in check?

>We went from a western world where one salary could support a partner and 3 children, to a world where to two full-time salaries are barely enough for one child.

This is an exceptional time in history that required most of the world to be in a broken state (WW2/post-colonialism) while the people you describe benefited from this arrangement. Now that this arrangement is going away, reality is setting in.

That's not true at all. Large families have been common throughout the history of humanity for a number of reasons. Lack of birth control, economic output of children, ensuring at least one child survives to take care of the parents in old age were common reasons.

Women in the 1800s had an average of ~3.5 children that lived past 5 (about 4.5 children total, but child mortality was much higher in the 1800s). We're presently hovering a little under 2. The 1950s did have a spike up to ~2.5, but was still lower than the 1800s.

Small families are an oddity in human history. "Support" also meant something very different back then too, though. People still might be able to support 3.5 children on a single salary if they were also willing to live by 1800s standards.

>People still might be able to support 3.5 children on a single salary if they were also willing to live by 1800s standards.

People are currently able to. There are populations in the US where some demographics do have higher averages and definitely there are individual families where people do have 4 children. It's not common, but not too rare either and they aren't "affluent". Many are the opposite of affluent.

Moving to a small community and living off the land is still possible. A simpler life, with a magnitude scale reduction in the number of possession. Burn wood for heat and eat potatoes and sauerkraut in winter. All those small communities in remote places would love to have you.

When people are hungry, you cannot tell them "there's no food", or "we cannot harvest this resource now because it would be unsustainable". They need food now, so they will eat fish before they reach reproductive age, kill the O-horizon layer in the soil, kill all the pollinators, pump all the groundwater, burn all the fossil fuels... because if you do it you will be rewarded with food in the short term.

But then the people that depended on those unsustainable feeding capacity increases will have a hard time finding food.

The earth doesn't care, only humans care. Earth without humans would be pointless, so you have to take humans as they are, the good and the bad both.

But please remember things are way better now than they used to be, pre-industrialization was not the utopia many think.

I don’t think it would be any more or less pointless than it is now. If heat death is inevitable, nothing really “matters”.

That said, the planet’s ecological health was indisputably better before the industrial revolution.

Things sucked for humans in a lot of ways, but almost every other species was in a much better place.

Surely not the place for this topic, but anyway.

> If heat death is inevitable, nothing really “matters”.

I never understand how, for people who say this, whether things go on forever the same (or slow down in trillions of years, or something else,) affects whether things matter here and now. How would anything be any different if things were going to go on forever the same?

What kind of ideal universe would you like for it to seem like "things really matter"?

It seems similar to (what seem to me mistaken) ideas of life being meaningless if it's not eternal, or if there's no god, or if the universe is so huge etc.. I don't see how anything of those things would change the here and now, or the significance of things.

For clarity, I’m speaking to something mattering in the grand philosophical scheme of things—-not to whether anyone’s life has meaning, is worth living, etc. When confronted with a question of what matters to the earth (something that is 4.5 billion years old), you start looking at things on a cosmic scale.

For whatever it’s worth, I enjoy my life, and I don’t really care if it “matters”. It’s a lot more fun to just follow the thread than worry how my short time here fits into time scales orders of magnitude longer than my lifespan.

Earth without humans would be pointless? I disagree. Seems astonishingly arrogant to assume all else is nothing without humans. What about before the evolution of humans? One could argue that every step leading up to the first human was required for humans to appear in the first place.

What about love? Do you think a chimp mother loves it's chimp child? Do you think that is pointless too?

I think the point they are trying to make is that chimps will also fight and murder and steal in order to survive. It's natural for certain life to take over other life.

However in the end us humans have the ability to study these situations over long periods of time, and we know how harmful biodiversity loss can be to our own species as well as to others. These are values we cant assume isn't as deeply held within the animal/plant/fungi kingdoms

> Earth without humans would be pointless?

Yeah, please forgive my sarcasm first, then imagine we'd somehow send a probe to an exoplanet and discover it to be full of life. But it only has equivalents of giraffes, carp, magpies, ants and so on, but not a single being that could be considered human-like that might be able to, say, invent the automobile or something like that. Sure we'd want our money back for that pointless probe?

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