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Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

And I guess he is particularly thinking about us humans.

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.

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