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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

We exist because our ancestors fucked up our nice nitrogen only atmosphere by polluting with deadly reactive oxygen.

Damn cyanobacteria thinking unsustainably and killing the planet for everyone else...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

Nature is opportunistic and, to some degree, utterly immoral. The "pollution" of cyanobacteria creating an Oxygen rich atmosphere or of lignin rich trees littering the world with their branches, trunks, and stumps that wouldn't be biodegradable for tens of millions of years, all of that pales in comparison to the raw brutality of the food chain. Organisms murder one another in cold blood to steal the nutrients of their bodies. It doesn't get more opportunistic and selfish than that, but that's nature. It's only since mankind got the upper hand on nature that it's been possible to view nature in any other light than primarily harsh and uncaring (like a supernova or volcano). Humanities tendencies towards selfishness and opportunism are perfectly natural, asking us to be different is actually asking humans to be unnatural.

Which I think is justified, but we should make clear what is being asked and not painting humans as being something their not (i.e. uniquely exploitive, violent, selfish, etc.)

Exactly, nature does what works.

The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.

I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not, but I'd just like to point out that while not perfect we have 1) intelligence as individuals and 2) political mechanisms as a species that would enable a change of course (if one is possible to begin with) whereas the cyanobacteria lacked both of those things.

I don't think fleitz was being sarcastic per se - certainly I didn't read it as suggesting human evolution was a 'bad thing'.

Rather pointing out that (at the time) oxygen in the atmosphere was hostile to more complex forms of life. As we know, oxygen is a pretty unpleasant element in its raw state - but we managed to work around that particular problem.

it was sarcasm.

It's the satirization of the idea that 'mother nature' is some kind of right thinking steward of life on this planet that you commonly find amongst people who call fossil fuels meth.

Similar to the way one might satirize traditional marriage by pointing out that tradition advocates a lot of things that traditional marriage people would find abhorrent, if you take a view of tradition that extends past the start of the industrial revolution.

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