Ah yes. An empty, denuded world, with unprecedented flourishing for our friends, family, and fellow humans. This type of nostalgia for a wild world full of disease and dangerous predators fails so utterly to motivate me.
We need not spend all day tearfully mourning how Earth once was, yet we also clearly shouldn't tarmac the whole thing and turn it into a Costco.
It is very possible to embrace industrialized existence while acknowledging the importance of, and promoting, biodiversity.
I think extremism is obviously very clearly unhealthy by definition.
I have yet to encounter a single scenario in my entire existence wherein the fully-to-one-side-of-any-spectrum-you-might-imagine "extreme" point of view on how to solve any particular problem has been the best, most useful one (to my problem-solving brain, at least).
We humans tend to do this thing where, when we're presented with evidence that a previously-held position might be wrong or harmful, our opinions massively pendulum-swing the other way and we have a hard time finding clear, nuanced middle ground.
"Turns out sunlight gives you cancer, so stay indoors all the time! Avoid all sun exposure at all costs!," we say for a time. But no, it turns out that even though it is technically always doing harm to your DNA, sunlight is inescapably necessary for life and healthy immunological function.
Life is complicated, and extremes are simply shit for problem-solving.
That doesn't mean that I want Earth to be a hyper industrialized Forge World, but my reasoning is because that would not be a good place for humans to live.
I'm having a hard time responding in a way that meets the Hacker News guidelines. I don't want to attribute to you the implications (slavery, slaughter, environmental destruction, etc), because I have a hard time believing you actually mean that (or perhaps you thought I was only referring to the mineral aspect of the world and not the life that lives in it). I understand that you might object to slavery being implicit in your belief (because you make a special carve out for only humans mattering)- but understand that up until recently, in many cultures many people were not considered human.
The most substantive thing I can suggest is to read Hegel's master slave dialectic, and consider the upshot- that by viewing others as only being instrumental, you inhibit the development of your own consciousness.
As an aside, I also reject your claim that slaves were historically considered subhuman on factual grounds. For most of human history slaves were considered humans and subjugation was justified simply as a matter of having the might and means to do so. In a historical context, the idea of slaves as subhuman is primarily a New Philosophy developed in the Antebellum South.
I think you are correct that this is the predominant view held by humans, but it doesn't mean it is justified. It is hard to dispute it quickly without invoking something like god, which is something I am uncomfortable doing. What I can do is start with something like Descartes's meditation. Without his ability to invoke god, we are left with the paradox of the world being ultimately unknowable. Likewise if you start from the idea that there is a real world. At best, you become committed to the paradox that we are living within our own imaginations somehow embedded in our brains. From any other starting point, at some point in our reasoning we are led to a deep paradox, which seems to be a defining aspect of our consciousness. Ultimately, the world is unknowable and the best we can do is be honest, humble and do our best with what we have.
That leads me to why I reject what we both consider to be the predominant view held by humans. If we trust natural history, we can see that the mammalian anatomy has been conserved for at least 65 million years. Mammals adapted to all kinds of environments, grew large, grew small, etc, but fundamentally, the mammalian anatomy remains the same (even the whales have essentially the same anatomy as any other mammal). As long as the physics of our world remains constant, function is determined by structure. That means that the same functions that underlie our experience underlie other mammals. The only major difference with humans is that we grew out a section of our brain (the neocortex), which gives us greater ability to visualize, synthesize the input from our senses, develop speech, and interrupt other parts of our nervous system (i.e., like using meditation to quiet the mind, dampen the response from the amygdala, etc).
With that understanding, it seems deeply wrong to subjugate other consciousnesses. It seems like instead of having a "tenant owner rights" view of Earth, we should view ourselves as gardeners cultivating the planet out of a sense of beauty and love that coincides with helping ourselves and other creatures.
That is one thing I am deeply committed to. Humans exist as the most exquisite and beautiful branch of life and are the greatest care-givers on this planet. We not only give of our bodies like the other mammals to nurture, and develop groups to care for individuals, we also care so much that we care about truth, and continue to grapple with it even when it seems out of reach.
Your relating of an anthropocentric ethics to support for slavery does not make sense to me. What does the previous horrors of human slavery have to do with our relationship to non-humans?
Because we humans seem to be the only creatures that have ever existed that have even been able to pose the question of what makes Earth "important". That level of consciousness is special and worth protecting and expanding at all costs. It's more special and magically generative than any other creature that we know to exist or previously exist.
Because Earth without us is a dead man walking. The complete extinction of all complex life on this planet is already baked into the future as the sun expands and boils the oceans in 0.5-1 billion years. It seems to me exceedingly unlikely that any other spacefaring civilization will emerge after us if we fail. Even if you think other forms of Earth life are more "important" than us, the continuation of our human civilization is the only chance this other life has at having a longer existence (on other worlds) than this baked in timeline.
The enormous risk we've created against there being a human future. I for one hope for a sustainable flourishing, and find any other avenue not merely uninteresting, but actively malicious & evil. Global gaian awareness is absolutely required, or you are just a primitive wild mammal.
More worryingly, though, we are dependent on the natural world and its diversity. And even things like "the world we have now but with less meat in our diet" or "the world we have now but it's easier to walk, cycle, or take public transportation to work" would be an enormous improvement.
Plastics in every source of water, rapid global warming, acidification of the ocean. There’s not a whole lot of good news about the health of the Earth ecosystem and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does).
Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through worse before. It's the people who are fucked.
It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard of and that will just end up on the list of species to have died, which is quite full of things we human did not cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame it as keeping our own life support system running.
It is a funny punchline. That's why I say it's a great joke. But let's not read too much into that.
Pessimism can be as toxic as unfounded optimisim when it's not strongly rooted in the reality of the situation. And to be clear. 1.5C is baked in at this point [1][2] and I suspect 2C is too but it's failed to obtain enough scientific consensus to get political buy in (for some reason scientific consensus in this space is extremely conservative). To me a realistic evaluation is that any "good news" there is is a drop in the bucket against the tsunami headed our way. Maybe we get lucky with fusion or some other scientific breakthrough. But I've not observed a pattern for humanity getting lucky in that way.
I also don't think it's demotivating to talk about it in real terms. For example, California's 2035 plan for fossil fuel cars is likely too little to late. It's better than nothing but also a lot can happen in 12 years to undermine that plan (it's also a pretty poorly thought out plan but maybe it'll work out well anyway). The US federal government is more lackadaisical about it with a plan to get to net zero by 2050. But you know what you don't hear politicians talking about? Net zero doesn't achieve any climate goals. Because we've been emitting so much CO2 for so long and will continue to do so for decades more, it's a runaway cycle. We would need to get to a substantial net negative to undo the warming that's baked in and to realistically try to avoid 2c. Lots of smart people are working on the problem. I think they've got the best sense of the urgency and import of the work and I don't think pessimism demotivates them as much as insufficient funding and legislative priorities.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129912
> There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-will-li...
> “Individually, in private, I don’t think I know of many climate scientists that think 1.5 C is possible (I could count them on a hand),” Glen Peters, a climate policy expert and research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, said in an email to E&E News.