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Comment by worksonmine | Hacker News Reader

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

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 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.

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