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Comment by nuc1e0n | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I consider myself pretty open minded but the idea that trees are releasing chemicals to seed clouds with is more amazing than I could've envisaged.

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Same it’s absolutely beautiful.

Makes you realise how amazing the natural world (everything pre-industrial times) is.

I’d absolutely love to go back 300 years and smell the forests and dive over pristine reefs.

Anyway this has given me more motivation than ever to restart my guerrilla gardening efforts, planting trees in abandoned farmland in my locale.

Beavers building dams is the amazing natural world.

Humans building dams is a sin against the natural world.

We live in Mordor and have the ring.

Some of the most unreligious people I know are also the most bought-into the idea of a nature/humans dichotomy.

What if you told them that indigenous people pre-colonization sometimes built dams, dikes and aqueducts, and made use of irrigation?

Indigenous people pre-colonization had in many cases pretty advanced civilizations going on, with decent-sized cities etc.

A lot of those same people seem to treat indigenous people as outside of being touched by the "original sin" that the rest of us are.

The original sin of farming, or hierarchy, or city dwelling. Problem is that the dividing line between our hunter-gatherer ancestors and civilization are murky and spread out over millennia, and across the planet in varying degrees.

If beavers got as good as we did, they’d be wrong too.

If beavers did what we’ve done, we’d exterminate them because it would be an inconvenience for us heh

It's almost like scale is a quality of its own.

Dropping a snowball on you might tick you off.

Dropping an avalanche on you, and you probably won't have much to say.

Very correct.

A world with co2 emissions from fire stick farming is a whole different game to what we’ve done in the last 100 years.

Except your injecting all this into the conversation right ? I never said it’s “wrong” for anyone to build a dam. I’m saying I’d like to see a world without mega dams, is that ok ?

I blasphemed against modernity…

> I’d absolutely love to go back 300 years

It'd be fun if you could time travel and do it for a few days. I really doubt you'd want to live in that time forever.

unrelated to the broader tree discussion, but i find this comment incredibly indicative of the type of forum this is. only with engineers do you have to state your point and enumerate through all edge cases around how your idea can be interpreted even though GP PROBABLY didn't mean go back and live there until the end of his life. But even so, that's a derailment of the entire discussion anyway. You always have a person that needs to point out something inane like that which ends up causing a tangent discussion. On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just ignore it and move on, but a lot of meetings & real conversations end up this way. there has to be a name for this because I want to call it something and then coach people out of it

This is so true.

+1 on coaching people out of it. Very well put

> On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just ignore it and move on

Yet we're on a forum, and you're not taking your own advice?

> On a forum, it's fine, you have threads, you can just ignore it and move on,

I should note that ^ -- but it also proves my point. Digressions have gravity. And now this digression has created a complete fork of the original intended post.

Well that's how conversations go, coach. One thought leads to another, sometime tangentially.

Don't worry, I'm done here now.

HN comments are often a web or at least some thick threads of tangents. On most forums tangents are downvoted and labeled offtopic in capitals.

In HN comments on the other hand those side tracks are mostly encouraged, I think that is a good thing.

A word for this might be "pedantic".

(You were asking for a name, but I am trying to be pedantic here.)

Let’s wait 20 years and re-assess.

For context I live in US city that everyone knows, and the talk of the town is “when will our tap water will become brackish, and for how long?”

Fun times ahead. Not sure the appeal of the industrial time will stand.

Edit : the when is a matter of days / weeks. Not years. ( salt of the gulf goes up the river )

Have you ever seen The Truman show ? Your comment reminds me of that movie.

I said that I want to visit. Not stay forever.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what it is but people seem to always have to point this same thing out. Actually seems like it’s a more common thing to say nowadays. It comes across as insecurity to me.

“You wouldn’t want to go back to simpler times they are just awful, run along now…”

I grew up around my great grandparents and grandparents. I never heard them say anything horrible about the past. I heard a lot of beautiful things though.

> I never heard them say anything horrible about the past.

Survivorship bias.

Well I don’t think so, some people lived through terrible things. Half my family lost their entire life’s worth due to WW2 and had to leave Europe. Another relative was in one of the worst battles in known history in Asia and had life long problems from that. He would never get on a plane again and was terrified of them.

But they were happy.

So I disagree.

You think that survivors are not an indication of survivorship bias. That’s too naive for words, congrats.

If you think the only way to judge the past is by the accounts of dead people then you might need to get your head read? Have a nice life.

300?

You mean closer to 30,000 years right?

Humans have been shaping the world with fire for a long time.

No 300 would be fine. I’m ok with fire stick farming, it makes forests beautiful, visit North Western Austalia during the dry season if you want to see a truly beautiful landscape shaped by indigenous fire stick farming.

I wonder if this is industrializable as cloud seeding tech?

I mean… Why not just industrialize the planting of trees for that? The damn things are practically free…

Yeah. Thanks for sanity.

I react the same to “we should build drone to pollinate our food if bees are sick.”

Poorly re-inventing the wheels is silly.

I mean human pollinators already outperform bees so if we only care for productivity there's room to grow

we need to get better at it, a lot of reforestation projects fail to successfully establish a new population of trees

There are a lot of places that need rain that don’t have the climate to support a forest. Further, if this effect scales with quantity you can seed areas experiencing droughts.

Essentially the same reason we’ve been researching cloud seeding to date.

Are you french and is envisage an English word?

It is, in fact

Envisage is English

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