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Comment by mbernstein | Hacker News Reader

Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.

Or perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.

I care and I'm part of Nature.

The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.

"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.

> Nature will be better off once it happens.

As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.

The world has been much more inhospitable than it is today and I'm sure it will recover. The problem I see with us is how we destroy everything in our path on an industrial scale. As long as the wheels keep spinning we extract everything we can, see water use for data centers as the latest example.

Other species co-exist in the eco-system, we destroy it.

I see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability.

I don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature is not going to survive either once you broaden the time horizon a bit.

I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. Yes the planet is doomed sooner or later. But I'm talking about nature as in trees, animals, etc. The natural eco-system. And it existed and evolved and adapted naturally long before humans and will continue long after we're gone.

In philosophy there is a debate regarding the meaning of the word nature and if humans should be considered a part of it, and I see the points, but that's a different discussion.

My point is the whole "nature existed and will continue to exist" thing is honestly trite. Nature created us, we're just another output in the universal system. There's no real point behind the whole statement that nature will exist without us, and it contributes nothing to any discussion besides unnecessary smugness.

Of course there's reason to discuss if endless parking lots and industrial complexes are necessary. Claiming they're part of nature is like claiming HIV is a natural part of the human body. It exists yes but maybe we're better off without it?

I see humanity as it exists today as a cancer on the planet and it's not out of smugness. The pursuit of infinite growth is ruining everything that's beautiful around us.

We can discuss the semantics of the word nature all you want but it is just shifting the focus from the actual problem, which is how we destroy everything we touch. Which is also what I'm assuming GP means.

There's a difference between discussing our impact on the environment vs. the silly "lol nature will outlive us" stuff, which contributes nothing.

It's the takeaway from the story in OP and the poem with the same title, so I'd say it's very much on-topic. Your only contribution is "acktually, humans are nature too and once the universe collapses everything is doomed" and shut down any other discussion as "silly".

> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.

I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)

  And not one will know of the war, not one
  Will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
  If mankind perished utterly;

  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
  Would scarcely know that we were gone.

It's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.

Oh! I didn't even think it could be a spambot. You may be right :(

I'm not a spambot - it just felt sort of poignant for today. Ultimately, doesn't bother me that it got downvoted. Created some discussion, I got maybe mistaken for a bot - so all good ;).

Fair, but even though I don't comment often, my account is almost 15 years old. So I'd hope that at least pushes back against the spammer aspect - but ultimately, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's also common for spammers to hijack old accounts.

Thanks. Glad at least a few people understood. I pulled out my copy of Martian Chronicles today (which I'm fortunate to have signed by Bradbury) when I saw this pop up on the main page.

By the strangest of coincidences, I was just re-reading The Martian Chronicles (randomly picking stories) this week, after re-buying it because I lost my copy. So this story and the poem were on my mind.

Awesome that your copy was signed by Bradbury! I only saw him in person once in 1997, from far away, when visited Buenos Aires for a book fair. I would have loved to get his autograph, but it was too crowded.

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