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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious that the first two comments are diametrically opposed: "Wow that's pretty fucked" versus "Sadly much vision has been lost somewhere in the last century"

I'm going to tread a line between the two and say that I miss the visionary engineering works of old but that I am not completely heedless of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I do think that the Straits of Gilbraltar should be either bridged or dammed. (I'm assuming damming means bridging.) Too good an economic opportunity to pass up.

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I'm not convinced the economic opportunity is that enormous, or even enough to pay back the costs of a relatively trivial bridge over a long time period, at least until there are some very radical changes to the political and economic stability in North Africa. At the moment vast sums are being spent on trying to prevent North Africans getting into mainland Europe (the Spanish enclaves in Morocco have barbed wire fences and military patrols on either side).

As far as transport links for those fortunate enough not to be fleeing abject poverty and brutal regional conflicts goes, the fast ferry ride is less than 40 minutes between the Spanish mainland and Morocco/Ceuta, flights to major Moroccan cities are very cheap from most European cities and Libyan oil is piped direct to Italy.

The upside of a bridge isn't passenger transport, it's freight. There's an awful lot of trade between Africa and Europe, e.g. for agriculture.

There are a number of large predatory fish like Atlantic bluefin that migrate from the western Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean and a damn would likely disrupt their spawning cycle. That isn't the only trans-atlantic species, and you only have to remove 1 or 2 apex predators to disrupt whole ecosystems. The dam is a terrible idea.

I don't know. Many people repeat this mantra and fear disruption of ecosystems, presumably because they like nature and want to keep it safe.

I also like nature, but in another way: it is a formidable survival machine, and whatever happens to it, be it a comet or the regrettable loss of one fish, it will survive and flourish again, with even more diversity and colors.

No, not with more diversity and colors. The general idea is that when the balance is disturbed a whole range of specialist species will die and only generalist species remain. It can take millennia before specialist species reemerge.

You'll end up with more rats and jellyfish, and less whales and elephants.

But meanwhile these generalist species have specialized, so it is just a regeneration cycle.

Moreover I kind of agree with Taleb on the Black Swan / Antifragile theories: the more we protect something (our kids, world finance, ecosystems) the more fragile they become, and the more dangerously they fail when they fail (because they will fail, it's just a matter of time).

I think this is well understood for startups and projects: fail early, often, learn from mistakes, what do not kill us makes us stronger, etc.

This is obvioulsy the same when growing kids, and I personally take care that my 1.5 daughter is falling enough on the safe floor of our house and eat enough dirt in our courtyard, so she will not be fragile when going to kindergarten, where she will catch viruses anyway.

I think this applies equally well or better on natural environment: if we protect an ecosystem in order to prevent it from disappearing, maybe we are just prevent a new, more solid and more adapted ecosystem to appear there.

I know, this is pure heresy. I think we need more heresy.

But I assume you are not mixing Ebola through your daughters sand? It is not so much about protection as it is about trying to not flat out destroy.

You can come back from a small virus, your family might even become stronger after losing your first daughter as she wasn't strong enough, but when your house is bombed and you all die, your family won't be coming back.

Your "meanwhile" is on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, at a bare minimum, whereas the extinction of specialists can easily happen over the course of a single human lifespan.

It's not thinking critically about the issues in play or how they would affect the lives of millions or billions of people, let alone the animals, plants, and microorganisms involved. It's not heresy, it's just hubris.

How would the loss of one specie of fish affect the "lives of millions or billions of people"? I know the thing with the top predators, but I think nature has many other ways to regulate population of animals, and if some ecosystem relies on one single weak link for its survival, it means this ecosystem is weak and will be replaced anyway. It doesn't mean we should destroy things without consideration of the consequences, but I think that if we always consider the worst case as the most likely we will never do anything interesting anymore.

Do you know that in France many industrial projects are stopped because of such reasoning? For instance, a guy has a factory there, and it's working well, and he wants to expand to the neibouring wasteland, which is conveniently placed. Then some guys come and say that some specie of triton is living there and might be disturbed, and the project is cancelled, and the factory guy must build another factory far away, and it's an headache, and he gets some "compensation" from the local administration, which is just people's tax money. All of this because maybe, just maybe, a triton will be disturbed, which will break the natural cycle, which will create an invasion of cricket, which will kill us all, but just maybe... (All of this come from a stupid misunderstanding of the butterfly effect)

Also, can't we think a bit out of the party line there? I am a nature lover as much as anyone, but I think we currently do not trust its resilience enough, and it is dangerous. Am I allowed to share these thoughts? Am I rude or something? Could there still be some topics that we cannot question? Then why? Maybe these topics are weak too, and will break if we question them. Which means they will break anyway, and will break much harder if we protect them from criticism. That's dangerous.

The triton factory issue here is a strawman. None of us are talking about those types of species. We were talking about apex species in marine ecosystems. When you lose apex species, the species in the middle of the ecosystem start to disappear. Billions of people rely on the ecosystems for food. So, not intentionally killing off these key species is in our own best long term interest.

Sometimes what doesn't kill us, maims us leading to a shorter more painful life.

The hairy part is the millennia between crashing the ecosystem and its renewed flourishing. During that time it might become much harder to sustain seven billion humans.

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