Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolisz | Hacker News Reader

Objective reason: humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space). No other species has done that.

View on HN

> humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space).

I think we have a long way to go to catch up with algae.

brother we could easily eliminate 99% of life on the planet tomorrow or drastically alter the composition of the atmosphere if we wanted to.

That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.

It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life

So you rail against "advanced" as a meaningless concept and then start talking about the "hierarchy of life". How does one rank life on this hierarchy?

Please never change (in thus regard at least)!

I agree with you, it's not obviously clear what "advanced" means in this context if we don't automatically equate it with humanlike.

Also objective:

As far as we know humans are the only species to leave Earth’s gravity well. No other species has been able to do that in 4 billion years.

Humans have not left Earth's gravity well. We've built probes that have, but humans have only gotten as far as orbit.

Did you forget about the Moon landings?

That's pretty close to escaping the Earth's gravity well, but not quite out, since the Moon is definitely still orbiting the Earth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com