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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

No, more like instead of pushing the thing further and further every day, scale down, go back to the basic, respect nature, do sustainable things like we've been doing for literal millions of years.

I don't want to live in a future in which all we have left is your 6x6cm of Google chicken and your 2x6 Amazon bacon stripe

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"Going back to the basic" _also_ means a drastically decreased life expectancy, dying of avoidable sicknesses and generally a dull, short and miserable life. You can't retain all the benefits of modern society and only "go back" on all the drawbacks. But this is no either/or situation, a future as you describe it is avoidable, and lab-grown meat does not automatically lead to Google Chicken or Amazon Bacon.

> "Going back to the basic" _also_ means a drastically decreased life expectancy, dying of avoidable sicknesses and generally a dull, short and miserable life.

By having a bit less of mass scale animal abusing factories ? I fail to see the correlation

Your original comment implied much more.

I can't believe in let's say 200 years from now humans will still consume animals - if our species survives that is. I'm sure this will be looked upon as very barbaric to breed real animals and eat them.

If we survive 200 years from now we will either not really know what happened during this time because most people will be illiterate or we will be growing food by using the vast amounts of almost free energy we have figured out how to produce. I don't really see any other situations happening.

Is it barbaric when coyotes kill and eat a deer (often while still alive)? or when a lion eats an antelope?

No, because the argument only applies to animals with moral faculties, and the luxury of choosing what to eat.

> do sustainable things like we've been doing for literal millions of years.

Problem is, there was never that many of us. Hell, for most of human history there was less than 1/8 of us now.

The future is going to be somewhat cyberpunk because generations before us already made some choices that we have to live with now.

> Problem is, there was never that many of us.

Never has been as many obese people nor food waste. We can and should eat less anyways

We're clearly not producing for sustenance, but for profit

Hunger is not a production problem but a distribution problem. It isn't profitable to sell things to people with no money so rather than do that we discard it, turn it into something else or whatever it takes to keep the prices up in the producing countries. Do you have a fix for capitalism and the profit motive? If not, obese 'rich' people and starving 'poor' people is what we get.

> We can and should eat less anyways

Yeah, but 20% less, not a quarter of what we do now, because we obviously wouldn't survive on that.

> Never has been as many obese people nor food waste. We can and should eat less anyways

The food waste is because food's extremely cheap. The fix is to make it expensive.

It is not possible for us to “go back to the way things were” at the scale at which we consume meat and animal products today. Even if it were possible, I highly doubt it would be any more sustainable or environmentally friendly, and none of the arguments you’re making seem consistent with environmental vegetarianism.

Consider that without modern efficiency gains there would be significantly fewer people alive today, and that you might not be in the “extra” portion that we do have now. Is that a fair trade off? If we dropped all further advancements in the name of tradition I’d say that’s equivalent to giving up as a species.

What do "respect nature" mean? Nature is wild, brutal and full of grey areas and it doesn't care what we do tbh.

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