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Comment by altmanaltman | Hacker News Reader

The planet has not been through anything, it doesn't experience things or has memories. It literally cannot care if we survive or go extinct. This is why environmentalism focusig on "mother earth" or "the earth is suffering" is so annoying. Focus on humans and what we will face in the future, what our kids will face. Environmentalism should be a humanism and focus on them instead of having broad goals like fixing the whole planet.

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The planet / Mother Earth is just a way to talk about connected ecosystems of this big rock we live on. Yes the rock is not alive, but life is important, even if your only concern is as a proxy for our own support systems. How much value you place on different lives - your own, other people, whales, monkeys, deer, bugs… you are free to value them differently, but I’d hope you would not gleefully accept that we should just tolerate the wholesale destruction of habits on earth simply because it does not appear to affect human survival on the surface.

In case you have not noticed, we are currently in the sixth great extinction of this planet, which is driven by human activity. I consider it beyond tragic and existential to know that many of the wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back. Humans can live with air conditioning or under ground, but that doesn’t help other animals. You can still view this under a human lens if you wish, but for many of us, those other kinds of life are worth something, and bundling up that value by saying “we must protect the Earth” seems quite natural and defendable to me.

Why do you consider it tragic that many wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back? Coming back for whom? Who decided that its a wonder? If there are no humans, there are no wonders of the world.

We are extremely lucky we are born in this planet. But to think it is the only one with intelligent life is laughable. It literally doesn't matter to anyone than other humans what wonders of the world remain or are lost. It is egostictical to imagine a planet in only your own view of what it should be. Maybe Mars is the ideal planet, barren and no life. Why can't that be the case? You're looking at this from a completely humanistic view and arguing that we should not see the world from a humanistic view which is a contradiction imom

> If there are no humans, there are no wonders of the world.

I don't agree with this at all. I can't even figure out what your position is though - you follow up suggesting I'm the one being egotistical? That's deeply ironic... it feels like you may have missed the point I was making. I don't support going around the universe and blowing up barren planets like Mars either, although I would be in favor of bringing new life to barren worlds. I can easily conceive there are other kinds of intelligent life, both on our planet and off of it; and whether or not humans will ever even meet or know of those species, it is still tragic for them to die off.

> I would be in favor of bringing new life to barren worlds

> you follow up suggesting I'm the one being egotistical?

You're literally playing God, and you think that's not egotistical?

And again, why is it tragic if you don't even know? How can it be tragic? It's a hypothetical.

What an insanely selfish take.

This attitude of humanity first is exactly what got us here and what will wipe us off the planet.

Selfish in what sense? Like how every other animal is?

Yes I am humanity first. That is not selfish to me (in the sense we use the word). It is not humanity at all costs but it is always humanity first obviously. If you disagree you should go live with animals for a few days and see how they interact. The only thing is that you can't tell a chimp he's being selfish while they rip your arm off. Nor would he care.

That argument can lead to the assumption that it's ok if we completely wiped out life on earth as long as humanity survives by leaving for the stars.

The earth is the only place in the universe right now where humans can survive at our current technology level, and we are destroying that ecosystem at an alarming rate. We depend on the entire planets ecosystem for our survival, and even if technology somehow could let us survive ecological collapse, a humanist approach to the environment is tantamount to burning the boat we are sailing on to keep warm.

The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.

Environmentalism is this way on purpose. It's a lot easier to get people riled up about the plight of majestic creatures than about some abstract metric. Also, the movement has strong anti-capitalism / "degrowth" roots, and you need this kind of stuff to stay in the headlines. Movements that don't take controversial positions and don't attract radical activists tend to fade from view.

If you want an example from our field: AI doomers and AI maximalists get a lot more air time on the mainstream media and on HN than those who think it's a normal technology with some benefits and some downsides.

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