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Comment by imchillyb | Hacker News Reader

So many rules, laws, and systems for all of this to be random. Seems a waste of good code if everything is random.

Is an ecosystem random? What happens when one outside force is added to an ecosystem? There's plenty of examples around the globe of this.

Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species. That doesn't seem random does it?

Randomness should have error correction, as it's random. Doesn't seem to though.

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> Life doesn't 'find a way' and balance. The ecosystem is damaged, and often times destroyed by adding a single non-native species.

Of course it does. "Ecosystem" and "species" and "native" are human terms referring to categories we invented to make sense of things. Life itself is one ongoing, unbroken, slow-burn chemical reaction at planetary scale. It's always in flux, it's always balanced in myriad ways on some timescales, unbalanced in others.

Even without getting reductive to this degree, there's hardly a case an ecosystem was destroyed. Adding non-native species ends up rebalancing things, sometimes transforming them into something dissimilar to what came before - but it's not like life disappears. The ecosystem is there, just different. Though it sure sucks to be one of the life forms depending on the "status quo".

> That doesn't seem random does it?

Yes, it very much is random. If thermodynamics teaches us anything, it's that random looks quite organized if you zoom out enough and smooth over details.

Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span.

That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.

"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.

It’s happened before, life will prevail and eventually thrive again in some other format. I think fully eradicating life from earth will be quite difficult even if we tried. Perhaps when we get swallowed by our sun or some similar event.

Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.

But there are a lot of larger species that are at risk. Maybe I'm just species-ist, but I'm more concerned about things like various bird or mammal species than I am some bacteria.

It’s definitely sad and especially so that humans are causing/contributing to it. It’s mostly because of our timescale being only witness to a decline and what’s lost is tangible and known. What’s unknown is how on an evolutionary timescale the field is being reset for the next round of species to emerge. From that perspective, it’s a bit interesting to think what could happen. Particularly in the mammal world as humans have or will have eradicated most large predators. Prey populations will swell/collapse and cause adaptation. Some current herbivores/omnivores may convert to carnivore due to the availability of resources. A lot will happen. If you freeze time to protect existing species too much, it’s mostly just for sentimental reasons. Some species do a great service to current ecosystems and are vital to human life as we know it, protecting those is a little different IMO (bees come to mind.)

> Climate change, even in the worst case, won't come remotely close to eradicating all life. It won't even eradicate humans (though it'll suck for people living on the coasts or in Florida). Even the very worst imaginable catastrophe wouldn't eliminate the various single-celled organisms and extremophiles.

I have heard intelligent people claim a good few times now, and feel like it's obviously unscientific. It seems faith-based. Sure, life on Earth has proven to be resilient and adaptable, but we've no way to be sure how the planet will develop in the coming thousands and millions of years.

Climates and ecosystems and geology change. Life on Earth has persisted through some wild misadventures and atmospheric changes, but it's a very complex system. Surely it's theoretically feasible that some surprising thing could set us off on a course towards ending up with an atmosphere similar to Venus or Mars one day? How can we know with certainty this won't happen?

To me it seems like "life-ism" rather than species-ism at that point. The idea that "life will go on, no matter what" seems so obviously intuitive to a member of the Life class. I fear it is a misguided - though romantic, and somewhat touching - sentiment.

Co2 has had spikes up to > 5000 ppm in the atmosphere in the past.

Is anything possible? Sure.

Is anything currently proposed as possible likely to sterilize the planet? No.

We could get hit by a mini-moon sized asteroid tomorrow though that liquifies the crust, of course.

Well, this planet's been hit by asteroids including the massive one that made the Chixhulub crater, and life persisted. I think the idea that some life wouldn't survive all but the most catastrophic event (i.e. something liquifying the entire crust) is honestly nuts. Pumping a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere isn't going to destroy life; there's plenty of plants and bacteria that thrive with lots of CO2, even if humans don't.

Sure but you know very well that when people say "the planet" they mean "the ecosystem". It doesn't change what I meant. There's been mass extinctions before, way worse than what will happen with human-made climate change. Life has proven to be very resilient and ecosystems re-emerge.

I think people are attached to the current state of life on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself and the many forms it can embody is amazing, the exact form it currently takes is not that special.

I take it you're also a smoker?

... What? No.

But your life is transient, you might as well pollute yourself.

I can't, I have self preservation instincts.

You could think of it in the sense of "saving money" - if you're a notorious spendthrift, the money hasn't actually disappeared, but it's of no use to you anymore.

Every part of the ecosystem, at any point in history, has co-evolved to be the state it is in - it's an intricate network all balanced to co-exist. If you change any part of the this ecosystem then the rest will have to adapt to the change, but evolutionary timescales are relatively long, and it's not going to settle down to where it was before. Whether you regard a new balance as simply that, or as the old balance being destroyed is just your choice of description.

Using the term "error correction" incorrectly assumes there is some "correct" state to return to, but nature is indeed random and continuously evolving, and there is no privileged "correct" state, just the ever-evolving current state.

If you first saw Earth billion years ago, you wouldn't be able to predict the current state of affairs. Why? Because there would be myriads of possible outcomes, and you'd struggle to pick one, even just imagining all of them would be impossible for a weak human mind. Weak human mind cannot truly grasp the full extent of what happens now despite it can look at it directly.

But among myriads of possible outcomes the would be a lot of outcomes that you would describe as "non random" if you saw them. Maybe any of them will not look as random. If evolution have chosen one of "non-random" outcomes by a dice roll, would it be right to call its pick "non random"?

I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)

Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW

Randomness and probabilities can be incredibly hard to wrap our heads around.

A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.

> A deck only has 52 cards, but you shuffle it properly, it's essentially guaranteed that nobody in human history has ended up with the same order as you just did.

That fact still messes me up every time! Like, I know very well that 52! is a ridiculously huge number. And still, it feels like "but it's just 52 cards, give me an afternoon and I'll do it, how many combinations can there be?"...

52! even has its own website:

https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

I guess properly is important there, in reality certain initial orderings are more common and we use certain techniques for shuffling with our hands making it less random than "properly".

> Randomness should have error correction, as it's random.

Randomness itself doesn't have error correction, but systems that generate or use randomness may have checks to ensure they function correctly. Error correction applies to data or signal integrity, which is a separate concept from pure randomness.

My money is on it just being a playing field for the game of life. A damn good one at that.

Non-native species don't exist when you use long time scales and realize humans are species too.

Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by Chris Thomas is an interesting book on this topic.

Ecosystems eventually adapt to the newcomers. And it's not like the species already part of the ecosystem wouldn't ever evolve to something detrimental to the whole.

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