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Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger idea here that hanson maybe doesn't do a good job of highlighting, using your example, is that if you look at the historical examples (ice cores, old rocks, etc) of big shifts in the world climate, it's going to happen regardless of humans.

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This sounds awfully handwavy. The fact that the climate changes over millennea doesn't do anything to justify climate destruction. For a small scale experiment, try cutting down all of the trees in your neighbor's yard and justifying it with "Well all trees fall down eventually".

In your example, the likely outcome depending on the jurisdiction would be some kind of fine (neglecting some kind of physical confrontation). Just because something negative would happen to me (maybe more parties as well if one includes the trees, the neighbor, anyone/thing else that tries to be involved in such), doesn't really change the longer scale. We kill plenty of things in our daily lives without a second thought with every breath we take, to favor some killing over others is arbitrary. Some will manage to survive in some form (maybe even unrecognizable to humans today) is such an end state where all trees are gone, most who are dogmatic about others trying to do so, will not.

Many eukaryote's from billions of years ago died out, and some went on to become humans. If one could imagine that those eukaryote's that died out then could ponder the future, no doubt plenty would have sought to be comforted by some kind of pause in their development for some kind of eukaryote safety net to avoid such far future couplings in the form of humans.

> If one could imagine that those eukaryote's that died out then could ponder the future, no doubt plenty would have sought to be comforted by some kind of pause in their development for some kind of eukaryote safety net to avoid such far future couplings in the form of humans.

That's the kind of short term thinking that gets eukaryotes in trouble. The heat death of the universe in 1.7e106 years means none of that ultimately matters, right?

> The heat death of the universe in 1.7e106 years means none of that ultimately matters, right?

Makes no sense for an actor that can perceive such a theory among many others that they cannot currently test, to weight that higher for any other (esp ones that they can test today despite others telling them not to, who are without any feasible means at scale to stop such).

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