Comment by myshpa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myshpa | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed.

We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture).

Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species?

We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution).

If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).

The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes.

I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#quaternary-megafauna-exti...

100.000 years ago ... 20 mil. tonnes of carbon

10.000 years ago ... 15 mil. tonnes of carbon

100 years ago ... 10 mil. tonnes of carbon

now ... 3 mil. tonnes of carbon

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/04/Decline-of-wild-m...

First 5 mil. tonnes took 90.000 year. Next 5 mil. 9.900 years. Next 7 mil. 100 years. 3 mil. remain, most of the megafauna is already gone.

If we continue this trend, in 30 years there'll be only mice, mosquitos, and medusas. And farm animals, of course.

We have to switch to plant-based diets. Now. There is no other way. No time to wait for technological breakthroughs.

I'm good enough with the farm animals Why should I switch to plant based?

I'm not them and I'm not telling you what to do, but meat typically takes ~10x the resources to feed one human compared with plant based food.

Whether you think this means we should eat plants or we should have 10% as many humans is an open question.

Reminds me of George Carlin, "The earth will be fine..."

I love that talk. It's just so ... unnecessary & preventable

In what sense will the earth be fine?

Is it the sense that people care about or is it a rhetorical trick to make people feel good about not caring?

Something will survive, but maybe not mankind.

The while save the planet thing isn't about the planet but about us.

If we change the environment, nature will adapt and live will continue but maybe not in a way we can survive.

So it's unlikely that we kill live on earth just the live as we know it

The important part is the rest of the sentence:

“… but the humans won’t.”

You are advocating contradictory points.

If we return land to wildlife, that entails shrinking the human population by a hgue margin.

The supposed benefit is what, new medicine and regenrative dna? But why would we need that? Shrinking human population and human longevity are incompatible goals.

It entails improving the efficiency of food production.

Switching to LED lighting put more light in my house while lowering electricity consumption. Similarly switching to more efficient daily sources of protein (plants, shrimp, etc) can give more people more food, while yielding some of the land back to wildlife.

To say nothing of inefficiencies due to weird local policies, like growing almonds and alfalfa in arid parts of California, etc.

Land surface ... 71% habitable land, rest glaciers & barren land

Habitable land ... 50% agriculture, 37% forests, 1% urban and built-up land

Agriculture ... 77% meat and dairy, 23% crops

We would need just 25% of agriculture land we're using to feed the world on vegan diet, no shrinking necessary.

But on the meat diet? We'll shrink for sure, just you wait. We'll diminish and go to the west.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Build more zoos then. That’s the only realistic solution.

More nature reserves.

E. O. Wilson proposed that half of the Earth's surface should be designated a human-free natural reserve to preserve biodiversity.

https://www.half-earthproject.org/

Half of land surface?

> otherwise we'll lose them

So what? What value are these species? What are they for? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainly evolve, but a new civilization? That's much less certain.

I think your point is somewhat fair, and I agree that advancing medicine is not a great sole reason to keep around our fellow organics. There are a few ways to respond to this, including such notions as having intrinsic respect for nature, and appreciation for what natural selection has wrought. But for one and most simply with regard to your anthropocentric viewpoint, the ecosystems that these species constitute are actually critical to keeping civilization going in a practical economic sense.

The theoretical human civilization that can withstand a global ecosystem collapse and exist on a paved over earth is perhaps possible with the right technology but also it is 1. very dreary and 2. much more expensive and difficult to maintain than just putting in some effort to prevent ecosystem collapse now.

Fisheries management is a good microcosm for the cost of ecosystem collapse. If we manage a fish population correctly, we can continue to harvest fish from it and get resources out of it indefinitely. If we do not manage it well and let the population go extinct, we lose that pool of resources permanently and need to replace it with another equivalent source of food which may be very expensive in comparison. Perhaps the local human civilization which relied on the fish will be unable to adjust and will also fall.

Thank you for your good faith reply. I agree with everything you wrote, but don't see how saving importantly regarded mammals such as polar bears, elephants, whales and dolphins (etc.) fits into the picture. If these animals and others no longer have vast tracts of wilderness to roam on an anthropocentric earth, what's the downside?

Extirpation of keystone species causes the rest of the food chain to become disrupted, resulting in proliferation of some species and extinction of others. The consequences for humans are zoonotic diseases and loss of natural food sources.

This is basically bioforming, and I'm sure it's more complicated than "removing keystone species == always bad". For instance, sperm whales compete significantly with humans for tuna fish, making up about 50% of the fish eaten. As our demand for tuna grows, wouldn't exterminating sperm whales help us meet that demand?

Ad tuna ... it's worse than you think. I have to quote to a very good article:

"The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year. While they claim this is to smooth supply on a year-to-year basis, conservationists believe they are acting in the expectation that in the event of the fish’s extinction in the wild, prices will skyrocket. Frozen in great stacks at –60oC by the same company who made my childhood cassette player, the bodies would be sold for astronomical prices.

It has a name, this uniquely vile game: it is called extinction speculation. It’s practised by those who collect Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders and rhino horn; men and women with hearts that sing along only to the song of money. There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar."[0]

The tuna is not on brink of collapse because it competes with sperm whales for food. They were here together, perfectly fine, for ... i don't know ... millions of years? It's near die off because we eat them and work tirelessly towards their extinction.

Also ... if you want to know more what happens to the ecosystem when some key species die off (it collapses), I highly recommend the movie Seaspiracy [1]

[0] https://granta.com/tuna/ [1] https://www.seaspiracy.org/

Also, wouldn't extermination of primates prevent crossover of viruses? A world without other primates would have been a world without HIV. A world without other mammals would be (or would have been) a world without COVID, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Marburg, Rabies, hantavirus, bubonic plague...

Hmm. I'm taking the fanatical blue aliens' position from the second Doc Future e-book.

An absolutely crazy point of view. What is to stop this point of view to extending to people who are no longer “useful” to you? Do you just annihilate them?

Moral equality?

Some would say that non-human animals also have moral value.

Some would, but I'm sure this is something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Slaves used to be sub-human. Women were property. Eventually, if we as a civilization survive long enough, our current treatment of animals will be universally felt to be immoral.

It's even worse than that.

It isn't as if slavery doesn't exist anymore. It is not as if women aren't considered property in some parts of the world. Racism. Etc.

Basically humans are a part of the ecosystem whether we realize it or not, so destroying the natural world to make room for power plants and landfills threatens our survival by threatening our water, oxygen, and food with pollution like microplastics, PFAS, overfishing, etc.

♫ They paved paradise... put up a parking lot ♫

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3g9_dnjaFY

In all seriousness, Isaac Asimov defended this approach (at least he explored in his books in a non-negative light): let's just live in Caves of Steel.

I think this reply says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934162

In short, I think from a humility standpoint that's probably not the best solution. I think there's value in preserving animal life, and also they really help balance Earth's environment which we don't understand well enough nor have adequate industries to replace yet, I believe. If we're going to live in Caves of Steel anyway, why not reserve say 50% of land for wild reserves? Do you want to have paradise and however many billion people you can fit in a planetary steel maze, or do you want just one single planetary steel maze with twice as many individuals? I think the answer is the former, pretty clearly.

Also, in the long term we do have other planets we can build planetary scale steel mazes unimpeded, like Mercury -- I'm sure we'll be able to within a few centuries if we don't destroy our ourselves and our environmental sustainability (I'll be rooting for humanity meanwhile).

> What are they for?

The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.

Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.

This HAS to be trolling!

Believe it or not, I'm actually looking for a good faith refutation that doesn't rely on sentiment.

Value is sentiment; you cannot refute a value statement without relying on it.

Value is more than one thing, arguably. You kind of have to go back to first philosophical principles to unpick this. Which I guess is my point - if one's goal is the expansion and longevity of human civilization (which I think is reasonable) then it's not clear at all where the rest of organic life (which we compete with) fits into this picture. If the best reason to preserve it is "it's pretty to look at" and "maybe we'll get some medical advances" then let's just admit that. I'm only suggesting that this is something about which reasonable people can (and have) disagree.

> the rest of organic life (which we compete with)

Here is the issue: it is more than mere competition. We co-exist in a delicate balance with the rest of life, or at least we used to. Now we threaten to destroy them, and the planet on which we depend, exactly because of this implicit belief that we compete with them instead of relying on them.

I think we need to engineer this balance. The ones we need we keep; the ones we don't, we don't. This is basically bioforming.

I agree, and we should probably understand it before we change it. It was already engineered by natural selection long before we gained the capability to alter it. Now we are in the process of destroying it by accident as a byproduct of thoughtless growth. If we want to survive we should understand it and then carefully cultivate it for maximum performance.

I agree that we shouldn't destroy value, especially by accident. My original point was that having this conversation in engineering terms is the only sensible way to have it.

> If the best reason to preserve it

The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.

Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.

Why is the expansion of human civilization desirable?

Why does preservation of human civilization depend on exterminating wild nature?

What the hell, man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com