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Comment by TylerLives | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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