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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

"...The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!..."

- George Carlin

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I really dislike this sentiment.

Planets can become entirely inhospitable to life. Planets themselves have lifespans. Earth herself has in the past suffered near misses, e.g. 90%+ extinction events. It took billions of years of evolution to produce us, the only species ever to exist with the ability to reason about, prevent or ameliorate large extinction events (such as those caused by asteroid impacts), effect conservation management over evolutionary timescales, and even potentially to revive extinct species or propagate earth's lifeforms beyond the solar system and into a continuing timeline.

It's anti-conservationist and I think immoral to promote the view that anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis is about our fate alone.

You missed the point, the planet can still be there even if all life becomes extinct. We're not trying to save the planet. We're trying to save life.

If you take Carlin's quote in isolation you can interpret what he says purely in terms of the physical planet remaining. But if you listen to the whole act the quote's taken from, it's clear that by "planet" Carlin means "biosphere", and that his stance is anti-conservationist.

https://www.vhemt.org/carlinsaveplanet.htm

His stance isn't anti-conservationist, his stance is that people are stupid.

Lol, exactly

I think most people already understand "saving the planet" to be a figure of speech, a synecdoche where "the planet" means life, humanity, our world's hospitable climate, etc.

If you're cynical and paranoid enough, you might suspect environmentalism is entirely a smug way to discuss culture and exclude people, a sort of verbal dollhouse for gossip.

Comme ci, comme ça.

When it comes to nukes in particular, I get the impression the belief of normal people is it can go all the way to Alderaan. Yes, even though that's wrong by many orders of magnitude.

VN swarms, while currently sci-fi and dismissed by normal people, are a much discussed outcome for ASI, and seem to be taken seriously in such circles.

Everything else, sure — us != planet.

We're dealing with a trade-off between quantity of life and quality of life.

The absolute best thing anybody can do for the environment is to not have kids. That'd save vastly more emissions and resource consumption than buying green-tech-for-the-rich such as EVs and heat pumps.

EVs and heat pumps are good though from an efficiency and air quality perspective.

I really doubt we'll be able to stop 8 billion people from having babies.

You personally may be better off being an engineer and getting paid to help develop mitigation technology.

Right, but not having kids is also a far bigger cost to many people than any amount of money. Hence we prefer other approaches to the problem.

Interestingly, the portion of people who value fighting climate change so high that they'd be beneficial to that end is so vanishingly small on the scale of the entire planet that if they decide to have fewer children then they're probably making things worse by letting themselves get outbred by people who care more about other things (first and foremost, improving living standards).

And no, young people in general do not care that much about the environment compared to much more immediate issues such as poverty. Young affluent people in rich countries do, but then it might also be that we've spent the last decades literally telling them they'll die burning at 40 and they might not have understood that was hyperbole.

We are trying to save ourselves. Life will be just fine. Organisms are already evolving to eat our garbage, deal with heat, etc.

That's not necessarily accurate. How much life do you think exists on Venus or Pluto? Sure it's hypothetically possible that some very very very primitive single celled bacteria just about survive on Venus, but is that really the future you want for this one in a billion paradise we live on?

There is bacteria that survives in lava. I'm not saying that's the future I want.

I'm simply suggesting we stop talking in vague terms, and be honest. We want to preserve our lives not the abstract notion of all life on earth.

I also want to make sure birds still flying. but you are right, our life is a better reason.

And I guess he is particularly thinking about us humans.

That's only if you take the statement literally, which is done sometimes for comedic purposes, like Carlin does. It's obvious that people talking about saving the planet do not care about a lifeless rock, but they want to preserve it in its entirety.

Agree. There's only a picture that comes to my mind to express my perception, from artist Erik Johansson, it is called 'imminent' [1].

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?va=u&t=hj&q=Erik+Johansson+imminent&...

It all depends on the degree to which conservationism and animal welfare are morally important to you. Compared to the survival of the human race, for example.

This question is not a scientific one, there are tradeoffs to make when one moral good conflicts with other moral goods and everyone can have a different legitimate opinion on this question.

There are aspects of this issue that can be framed as a trade-off to be weighed up, but it's important to recognize how inextricably entwined the two things are, the fates of humans and of ecological diversity, and that science has a leading role in showing this.

Biodiverse ecosystems provide immense value in terms of services like water cycling, water and air purification, coastal and inland erosion prevention, they are treasurehouses of potential new foods, medicines, materials, biotechnologies. They are widely recognized as beneficial for human mental health and as important sources of inspiration for the human imagination. On top of that yes, you have many more purely moral consderations. Science can help discover and quantify those things in many ways.

The planetary crust contains life 30 kms down. Even if the surface was sterilized and the oceans boild away, life would return from the life in the crust. It would take a long time to "rediscover" the innovations like chlorophyll, but in the end, life would recover completely.

A different life though.

If it has state and replication, all that seperates it from us, is time and chance.

> life would recover completely

Interesting to consider this scenario since no creatures left could consider such a historically relatively new theory of origins.

This is self-contradictory. If the oceans boiled away it would be because of rising temperatures that caused evaporation, but the temperature would rise everywhere (even 30 kms down), meaning that the crust would also be inhospitable to life due to drying out.

The point that I hear is that conservationists focus on things that people broadly don’t care about. “The planet”, “The environment”, “who cares, I’ve got my Starbucks and my cozy house, and I don’t even like hiking.”

His point is that people don’t care about those things, but they do care about themselves. Focus on how people will be individually impacted.

Conservation biology does focus on the benefits of biodiverse ecosystems to individual humans. In particular it models the way in which reduced species numbers will adversely impact us by degradation of ecosystem services like water cycling, water and air purification, pollination, coastal and inland erosion prevention, carbon storage, and the loss of potential new foods, medicines, materials, and a very wide range of biotechnologies. It's the louder voices in our culture and media with oppositional interests that successfully mischaracterize and drown out what conservationists say.

This is why people often mention "the planet you will leave to your children". The consequences might be too far in the future to be individually impacted, but presumable most people care about their kids future.

Please don't read about the ice ages.

Lol. That's all true. By caring about the planet, we care about ourselves. Planet can survive like another forsaken rock in space - nobody is arguing with that.

Carlin was hilarious, but it doesn't mean he was right about this.

Yep we are just a spec of dust compared to the forces at work in our lives.

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