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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

My perspective is that “protecting this planet’s life” is just more human narcissism (this isn’t a jab at you, it’s a very common mindset).

Short of total sterilization, mass extinction events seem to be really good at creating space for new forms of life to develop. In a way, preventing them in the name of the non-human life here is just picking the incumbent over whatever comes next. How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence? I’m not sure there’s solid argument for why one is more deserving of existence than the other.

I think why this slightly rubs me the wrong way is it feels like an excuse to make us feel good. Non-human life seems by and large indifferent to its long-term fate on this planet. Let’s not pretend we do anything significant for non-human life that isn’t to our direct benefit.

Just my perspective. Not trying to say “no, you’re wrong!” Just, “I disagree.” I’m going to guess there’s an entire named branch of philosophy that explores this.

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> mass extinction events seem to be really good at creating space for new forms of life to develop

To what end? Life on this planet has about a 1 billion year run way left since the sun will start to expand and eventually strip away Earth's atmosphere and finally swallow the planet whole. It's taken 3.7 billion years to get to this point and most of the "interesting" evolution has occurred in only the last 500 million years. So it is true that the next 500 million should be even more diverse.

However unless another intelligent life form develops the point is moot. No matter how smart a dolphin, or raven, or chimp, or octopus is... if it can't escape this rock then it's not much different from a bacteria colony that dies out when it's food source is exhausted.

Evolution is random. For all we know an even more intelligent form of life will develop than us humans but on the other hand it's possible that for the next billion years we are the only fluke in the evolutionary timeline and nothing else will develop.

Finally there's a third option that is within the grasp of humanity which is to say we can branch off Earth's tree of life and take it into space while leaving Earth to develop as it will.

A billion years seems to be a LOT of time for many mass extinction events. I think your argument leans on “interesting” a lot, which has its basis in our narcissism. Again, it only feels important that the life be “interesting” if we’re here to care.

Just to restate: I’m not saying we don’t act selfishly. I sure would. Let’s just not pretend we’re being altruistic.

The vast majority of evolutionary complexity has evolved in the past 500 million years. That's what I meant by "interesting". Things like flowering plants. It has absolutely nothing to do with our branch of the tree of life. So I'm not sure where your accusation of narcissism is coming from.

For all I know a flowering plant will develop a brain and become sentient in the next 200 million years.

I am not the person you responded to, but I generally agree with them.

I guess they prefer to take an extreme Darwinian view. Since complexity is not the goal of life, merely a side-effect, there is no life on this planet that is more advanced than any other. Assuming a single abiogenesis event, all extant life has been evolving for approximately 3.8B years.

We may choose to think of brains, and our human brains in particular, as the bees-knees. Objectively, they are not though. Just one of many successful branches of the tree of life.

> We may choose to think of brains, and our human brains in particular, as the bees-knees. Objectively, they are not though. Just one of many successful branches of the tree of life.

Consider that our brains are the only organ on the planet that is able to understand the concept of life, reason about itself and all other life around it, understand the concept of evolution, and even conceptualize time billion of years into the past and future.

Not all life on this planet has evolved even though it had the potential to do so.

If we attribute "advanced" as evolutionary steps rather than the inaction of simply existing then clearly we are more advanced than a bacteria. However I will concede your point for other multicellular life.

>> Consider that our brains are the only organ on the planet that is able to understand the concept of life, reason about itself and all other life around it, understand the concept of evolution, and even conceptualize time billion of years into the past and future.

Here is where words like "narcissism" tend to land. It isn't personal against yourself, so please don't take offence. It is a philosophical viewpoint that is often stated, but appears to lack evidence. I don't have any counter evidence, but I strongly suspect it to be factually incorrect. And I believe the burden of proof is on those making this claim.

Further, even if we allow the above claim to pertain, this position makes the strong assertion that the very qualities that modern humans are uniquely superior in, are the very things that must be held uniquely special. To some of us, this just seems circular and too convenient.

Is it more likely that humans hold such characteristics to be the epitome of success because there is some objective model of success to which we alone conform (e.g. conceptualisation)? Or because it merely suits us to do so? I believe the latter, though you may disagree.

This type of thing reminds me of when departments "investigate" themselves, and curiously, almost always find no wrong-doing.

Feels like the brain might be a little biased when it thinks that the brain is the greatest form of life to ever be created :)

One could philosophize about whether an earth without humans would be better or worse.. but there is no good or bad in the known universe that exists outside of the shared fever dream of human cognition.

In that sense how is one configuration of motile matter any different from its potential successors?

> How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence?

I would wager than as soon as a technological civilization is born, it's morally reprehensible to let it go extinct, since it no longer is at the full whims of evolution. It's complex issue, so many people would wage otherwise, and only a jury might reach a conclusion. The case is moot when said civilization can avert extinction by their own hand, though.

I don't know about two technological civilizations in conflict, like sapiens and neanderthals. Would it be morally acceptable to let them go at each other, even if the fittest extinguishes the other?

> I would wager than as soon as a technological civilization is born, it's morally reprehensible to let it go extinct, since it no longer is at the full whims of evolution.

I see the logic here. But why, though? And technology is everywhere in non-human nature. While I think our technology and civilization is unlike anything else here, it’s still on the spectrum of nature’s exercise of community and technology. Are we really that special?

I think this heads towards the whole “Prime Directive” line of reasoning.

P.S. Eloi > Morlocks, of course. ;)

> I see the logic here.

There’s no logic there. Just a faith in “potential”.

It is arguable one way or the other whether civilizational humans have caused more happiness or more suffering for Earth (all of us lifeforms combined). So the only way to call such a thing “morally reprehensible” is if you assume that Civilization will eventually evolve into some awesome, fantastic, space-faring, all-needs-met, stewards of the near solar system fantasticness.

I'm not sure there's a well defined line for that "birth" -- especially if looked at by a well-advanced civilization. Maybe "technological civilizations" have a tendency to destroy themselves pretty quickly and it becomes wasted energy to intervene too early. So perhaps an external viewer might look at more of a fuzzy demarkation of a few thousand years. Are we there yet?

Given how long it takes for complex life forms to develop, and how other planets known to us don't seem to have any life at all, I think it's reasonable to prefer the existing life to the future potential life, even from a non-anthropocentric perspective.

But why? Why are algae better than rocks and ants better than algae if you take humans out of the equation?

Complexity is interesting.

Why is complexity interesting if there are no humans to observe it?

Closer to us, and we are great.

I think simpler life forms have no chance of surviving long term. Though now that I think about it, you could say caring about that is anthropocentric too. I don't think it's possible to truly be objective because it would require us to escape our own perspectives, but there should at least be some objective measures for this question. Without that, the question is meaningless. Number of species, average lifetime and average happiness seem sufficiently objective to me.

Simpler lifeforms have been one of the most persistent and successful lifeforms on Earth, with a way longer existence than mammals. In fact, some theories postulate they are capable of interplanetary colonization, something we still cannot do!

You're right. I wanted to make a point how it's possible to have an objective comparison between life forms, but I judged simple life forms too quickly. I still think there are some obstacles simple life forms won't be able to overcome, but it's not obvious (to me) which of these have a better chance of surviving long term.

Countless species of life have come, changed, and went over billions of years. But we arrive in the last few hundred thousand years and declare, “stop the cycling!”

I completely see (and share) your reasoning. But I think it’s very anthropocentric.

Well guess what when there's no humans left alive, whether this is anything no longer matters because the value system died with them.

If life blooms on a wet rock but nobody’s around to say, “that’s pretty,” did it matter?

No, because your entire sense of what's "beautiful" or "right" has died along with you and the rest of the human race.

All life is whatever their version of anthropocentric is. Life simply seeks to survive and replicate. We are simply life forms seeking to secure our own survival and spread. Evolution has worked to create us and we will do what evolution wants which again is to survive even if at the expense of all others.

Every form of life on this planet almost by definition is actively fighting to stop the cycle on their part, by replicating DNA, information, the opposite of entropy and death.

There is nothing human-centric about life wanting to continue.

Horseshoe crabs haven't changed in 250 million years. What's your opinion on them "stopping the cycle"?

I don't think a non-anthropocentric perspective is consistent at all. Without humans to observe it, no form of life is inherently more valuable than the other. Simpler life forms are not less interesting than more complex ones. Mass extinction events leave room for the rise of new species, and they seem a natural event in the history of Earth's ecosystems.

We people value our continuing existence, and I share that sentiment! But it's by definition an anthropocentric perspective.

By that yardstick, it would even be difficult to rationalize a preference of life over rocks. Yeah, we should embrace anthropocentrism and perhaps dedicate some care on not going too far with it.

Yes, taken to an extreme it means life is not preferable to rocks. But because I'm human, I prefer life to rocks.

But I think the point here is that we wouldn't be "doing good" necessarily by preventing a mass extinction; we would be definitely doing good to ourselves (no small thing) but for Earth's ecosystem? Debatable. Especially since we would possibly be preventing the spread of new species, since mass extinction events seem to have been so far useful tools in evolution's toolset.

> I’m not sure there’s solid argument for why one is more deserving of existence than the other.

Maybe we're helping to build a universe, and we can do more in that regard than single-celled organisms, cockroaches, etc.?

https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/06/metanarratives_... (self-cite)

I love this line of thinking. It gets me excited about Sci-fi. But I think we may already have the technology to seed life elsewhere.

We won’t do it though because it’s unsatisfying to our narcissism. Imagine trying to sell the world on a trillion dollar project where we shoot loads of bio-goo out into the cosmos in thousands of directions, knowing it’ll take eons to maybe have an effect that’ll then take billions of years to produce a result we will never appreciate.

I think if we do any sort of proliferation of life, it’ll be of us, by us, for us.

> Imagine trying to sell the world on a trillion dollar project where we shoot loads of bio-goo out into the cosmos in thousands of directions,

It's funny to imagine that this might be not how life on Earth started.

If the universe causes an asteroid to hit earth and make all life extinct or let's new life flourish, us saving the earth from said asteroid is also an outgrowth of the universe.

We are not separate from nature and protecting the earth is only natural for a multicellular intelligent species like ourselves.

For sure! And if a meteor is heading our way, I’ll be on the top of that hill with my Louisville Slugger.

I just think we shouldn’t pretend that we’re being altruistic.

I think the argument is not that mankind preventing a mass extinction event is unnatural, but rather that mass extinction events seem both natural and necessary for the rise of new life forms, and as such are "neutral" rather than bad events (except from the perspective of mankind, which would be rendered extinct). So it can be argued that you are not necessarily making a "favor" to Earth's ecosystem.

Personally, who cares? I think I and probably most of humanity if given a choice between the survival of the human species and the birth of some philosophical new species that may never even exist, we choose humanity every time. Going even further if given the choice of humanity over any other existing species we choose humanity. I see no issue with this choice either, we are a part of nature and Darwinism built us to want to survive and spread.

This is really a non issue to start with - once space settlement really gets going, we will spawn many more spacies, as the various groups go farther apart and evolve/modify themselves and all the life they took with them.

It could even result in funny situations where one of them encounters a clearly alien beings with totally different physiology, culture, appearance and language - only ot find they are just another branch of life originating from Earth. :-)

This statement reminds me of the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great read if you like SF and have not read it.

Thanksy I'll check it out!

Other places where you can see this concept is the Orions Arm hard SF universe or the old Imperium Galactica RTS. :)

> This is really a non issue to start with - once space settlement really gets going, we will spawn many more spacies, as the various groups go farther apart and evolve/modify themselves and all the life they took with them.

I'm unconvinced. We are firmly in the realm of thought experiments, of course, but I think all this would do is produce changes within local maxima, the reason being that even while adapting to new living conditions, evolution only has so much to "work with" from within the local maximum given by the existing human body.

In contrast, a mass extinction event looks closer to pushing a big reset button, radically shaking up existing lifeforms and giving other struggling species their chance at the limelight. Maybe even species that right now are microbes or invertebrates, but that -- should mankind, mammals and birds go extinct -- would evolve into dominant lifeforms, filling the vacated niches in the ecosystem.

Maybe the species which by our continuing existence we are potentially preventing from becoming dominant is the species that would have successfully colonized the solar system and beyond, instead of us. Not a variation of humans under new conditions, but a radically new species unrelated to us.

> Personally, who cares? I think I and probably most of humanity if given a choice between the survival of the human species and the birth of some philosophical new species

Well, whoever claims to care about doing "good" to Earth's ecosystem (as opposed to admitting it's only about mankind's survival) must necessarily care about this kind of arguments.

It's not a "philosophical new species", I can point to one species you really care about and which owes its existence to a mass extinction event (or maybe more than one): yours.

Right, but humans are here now. We are not going to willingly endure a mass extinction event for another species to thrive in our place.

I don't disagree. I'm all for our species surviving. But let's not delude ourselves, like the initial comment did, that we are doing this for the good of the planet. It's for us. This is valid, sure. But it's not the good of the ecosystem or any such thing.

>I'm not sure there’s solid argument for why one is more deserving of existence than the other.

I think an existence bias is defensible. Take it as an axiom that suffering is bad and flourishing is good. I think its clear that the suffering of something that exists is worse than the lack of flourishing of something that doesn't exist but could. Value is something that conscious creatures do, and so value depends on existence. The states of something that can prefer its own states should be valued over the states of something that can't. Existing fish matter more than rocks and potential fish. So the organisms that exist, at least the sentient ones, should take preference.

Humans are really good at causing mass extinctions - just look at how we've literally decimated the planet's biodiversity since the dawn of man!

That's a lot of new space for new lifeforms to specialize in.

But to our narcissistic displeasure, the biosphere acts on a very different time scale.

But points to us for a world record pace speedrun on the downturn side of it. It’ll eventually bloom again once we’re done here.

The biggest brain fart of humanity is our tendency towards monoculture (for scale). Nature is very obviously showing us how to sustain an ecosystem and yet in our incredible hubris we’re like “nah, we got this”. We just want to swim upstream for the hell of it.

I think one of our greatest flaws (and possibly main reason we are here today) is that we’re so self-centered.

Why do we monoculture if it will kill us long-term? Because it benefits us short-term. (And hey, maybe that gives us runway to solve the long-term problem).

Nature doesn't try and do anything. Nature is constantly trying to murder everything around it. The most lethal diseases to man are natural, and often common skin bacteria which everyone carries.

There's a viral form of cancer which is wiping out the Tasmanian Devil right now, just because.

Nature and evolution has no plan and no morality, it has survivors and a balanced ecosystem is a cold war stalemate.

Nature is teaching us how to survive by trying to constantly murder us and everything else if you prefer. So we can gain knowledge by seeing what works for other surviving species around us.

Most of what humans call human reasoning is actually motivated reasoning. Excuses if you will.

Total sterilisation is a guaranteed outcome on a long enough time line.

There are a bunch of weak arguments here.

> How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence?

This statement is just appealing to emotion and is commonly used in arguments against abortion or attempts to thought police. There is nothing provable or disprovable in your argument and this question is used to just try and bait people into an emotional response.

> Non-human life seems by and large indifferent to its long-term fate on this planet.

I would argue that self preservation is an innate characteristics of every plant and animal on this earth. Isn't a desire to live the basis for self preservation? Isn't it natural for a plant or animal to stop something from killing them if it impedes in their ability to survive? At a basic level plants compete for sunlight at the expense of other plants. If there was an cognitive leap in a plant or animal wouldn't it be natural for anything to protect their greater habitat? If that's narcissistic than I guess it's the most natural narcissism I can think of.

> This statement is just appealing to emotion and is commonly used in arguments against abortion or attempts to thought police

Your statement itself seems like a fallacy to me.

It makes sense to me that the comment you're replying to is emotional, because it's not meant to be a "proof" but an opinion, and it's valid to have emotional opinions; moreover, it was a reply to a comment which was in itself an emotional appeal!

Self-preservation is not innately good (or bad). Mass extinction events seem to have been good at giving rise to species that are now self-preserving; maybe a new mass extinction would give rise to even "better" species.

As a human, I'd rather we didn't go extinct. I'd rather mankind prospered and even spread out to more planets. But I'm ok with anthropocentric appeals to emotion :)

I think he's right. The person isn't offering an opinion they are asking "how would you feel". They want the other person to form an opinion biased by an emotion

I see what your saying in regard to me trying to appeal to emotion by using a topic like abortion. However, my intent in the example was/is that emotions are high in these topics and are used to give some opinions more attention than they deserve.

In this case I feel like the main point of the parent commenter was not a well formed opinion and as such the commenter was trying to appeal to emotion. I'm not trying to say they can't say something like what they said here. This is a perfect place to have a discussion.

> Self-preservation is not innately good (or bad)

I agree with you. The parent comment that I was responding to does not agree with this statement. That's clear when they say "what rubs me the wrong way", and referring to work done in the name of human preservation as narcissism.

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