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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

What's terrifying to me is that the more our science moves forward, the more we're realizing that we've fucked up the Earth in ways we had no clue about. It's likely going to get worse and worse as time goes on, and it's reaching a scope where undoing the damage is more and more unlikely.

It'll be interesting to read follow up studies about the impacts this has on the ecosystems. It's freaky how interconnected oceans are.

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The fucking up is still accelerating, with fracking and the rise of China with its effect on pollution and resource consumption just being two examples. What's so striking is the fact that despite being a generation that is blessed with having access to all the world's information we are still not enlightened, meaning we are still not able to strive for global optima rather than our own short-term benefit. One would think that as a civilization we should have advanced more.

There are 3 things our descendant would have a facepalm for. They could carrot the ice over the last thousand year and notice a short time when all the oil we dug up from underground would form a thick deposit all around the globe in various forms. They might even happen to know we had a different word for economy and ecology. Worse, it may reach their ears our most common way of expressing this concern was to like campaigns on facebook. We should build a big facepalm statue in memory for our children.

Half the oil that enters the sea comes form natural sources. It is consumed by organisms able to metabolize hydrocarbons.

Source: http://www.whoi.edu/oilinocean/page.do?pid=51880

Thus, I don't think anyone would expect the world to be covered in oil.

The paradox of too much information / choice. You become desensitized and thus as a populous just resort to self-preservation. That echoes from the sources of pollution all the way to the consumers. Either culture needs to change and make it a priority, or businesses need to be disrupted by better choices so the old guard can die.

I've said it before, and most people just shrug it off, but our best chances for the long term survival of our species and planet are to get humans off the planet, whether Mars or asteroids or giant space cruise liners, and turn the earth into a wildlife preserve. Give the planet a much needed human-extinction event by leaving on our own.

From a human habitability point of view, Mars is fucked worse than the worst thing we could possibly do to Earth (short of accidentally blowing it into an asteroid cloud.) It doesn't even have (enough) water or (the right kind of) atmosphere or gravity! It's a rock in space. Terraforming Mars, or any planet we can currently reach without faster-than-light flight, would require an immense leap in technology, including technologies we're currently not even studying. We'd have to build a whole new planet from basically scratch.

On the other hand, we could go quite a long way towards fixing the perfectly good planet we already live on with technologies we already have. Hell, I suspect we could get 90 % of the way there with a century of strict population control and putting the same effort into reducing pollution and emissions we currently put into developing more profitable technologies. We're mostly not dumping our waste in the oceans and the atmosphere because we have no other choice, but because it's cheap and convenient and because humanity as a whole has other priorities than the preservation of the planet.

We fucked up our own survival,and future generations will hate us for that.

Earth will go on for billions of years after we are gone.

Do you find some kind of solace in your (unfounded) assumption that the earth will outlive humanity?

The best place to find common ground for us on environmental issues is to look at the human. We are doing this to ourselves, our environment.

Two reasons for this view:

* Invoke a sense of urgency in the fact that it is our own situation that is at stake, not some abstract external good that only hippies ought to care for.

* Because the value of human life is a moral pillar we all share, while I can't find any reason to value existing species over new species, or newly emerging moss species over species that might go extinct.

> Do you find some kind of solace in your (unfounded) assumption that the earth will outlive humanity?

I'm struggling to come up with an even remotely likely scenario where that wouldn't be the case....getting sucked into a black hole would be one I suppose.

If we achieve interstellar travel, we will spread to other planets. I see no reason to assume that none of our future colonies could outlive this planet.

Hmmmm....which is more likely, hard to say.

Not sure if you based it on this, but it's a very famous argument made by George Carlin [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

> Earth will go on for billions of years after we are gone.

I used to use this phrase too, but now I think there is a lot of overestimation in such understatements. It basically says that you are thinking in time scales much bigger than centuries: You think in billions of years.

Besides that I'm not sure anymore if this is really true from a factual point.

I mean - where are we after we burned all fossil and nuclear resources? This would be a very new situation for humanity but also for the rest of the living system on this planet. What happens with all the CO2, what happens with all the plutinium?

In a relatively short timespan of 2-3 years almost half the bees in my country died. Nobody saw that coming, nobody want/cant do something about it. Thinking that further, what would happen to our biosphere if pollination would stop working withing a short period of time? All living life is reciprocally developed in a long running evolutionary process.

So, I think this phrase is used a little too careless, we simply don't no how Earth react on fundamental changes that are happen quickly.

I'm waiting to hear how interesting effects carbon nanotubes and Buckyballs will have on our environment. When all kind of products are going to contain those.

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