4 ms·

Yup, all fair enough and stuff I can agree with. I was trying to remind the parent poster that 'saving the planet' is a metaphor at best - ordinarily it should

by tekacs 10y ago

Yup, all fair enough and stuff I can agree with. I was trying to remind the parent poster that 'saving the planet' is a metaphor at best - ordinarily it should always involve saving humans. An accidental reversal of the situation as you describe is quite different from the parent's even joking suggestion (as in Dan Brown's 'Inferno' :P) that it would be good to introduce a disease to stop humans from doing more damage. Aside from the basic moral problems with that approach (genocide?), it would not be surprising if any such disease became striated in its spread along wealth or other social lines, or simply borders and it could stall our progress in finding useful solutions to the problems we've already created. From a utilitarian perspective, we can turn the problem around and look at, as you suggest, 'a disease which may reverse the situation'. In consistency with my above perspective, I'm all for doing every bit we can to stop such a disease if it crops up - even at a detriment to the biosphere. Now whether we'll be able to or not is a question we don't yet have an answer to, perhaps. :) (that said, saving the planet for future humans would be a worthwhile endeavour, if we were any good at looking even a moderate distance ahead - whether we can usefully predict the medium-term effects of almost anything at all is highly debatable however, as suggested by the sibling poster commenting on plastics)

dredmorbius 10y ago
I don't find the distinction you and Carlin make to be productive. Carlin is flat wrong that humans cannot impact that planet, though the question's still open if we can have positive impacts. In at least one case (ozone) we've avoided catastrophe. The general question I've been focusing on is one of whether or not the Enlightenment and Technological experiments can be continued. If so, there's almost certainly a tremendous trade between standard of living and number of inhabitants possible. Reading I'm doing presently (Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History) suggests that energy requirements of about 2 tons of oil equivalent per person per year are required. I'm thinking that's going to have to come from entirely renewable sources. Those fluxes and conversions are distinctly limited. Joel Cohen seems to be the author who's done the most detailed analyses of carrying capacity that I've run across (I've found multiple references to his work, I've yet to read it). E.g., http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ACohen%2C+Joel+E.&fq=&dblist=638&start=11&qt=next_page https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ACohen%2C+Joel+E.&fq=&...
- tekacs 10y ago
  (I originally included far more thoughts on the topic here, but this is getting dangerously far from my areas of deep knowledge and I shouldn't allow scope creep to have me argue on things beyond my original point). I'm only trying to argue that arguing that we need to save the planet without taking into account the human context is like arguing that we need to save a distant star. Saving the planet is precisely valuable in most cases due to the second order effect of saving humanity or the biosphere. This was all in response to the various ideas of 'saving the planet' which involve voluntarily gutting humanity, such as the original post I responded to here.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    For most people, "save the planet" == "save the environment in which current human civilisation can and does thrive". Not for all though, definitely: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collapse-the-new-political-map/ http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collaps... http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/New-Political-Map.jpg http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/New-Political-Map.jpg
    - tekacs 10y ago
      Once again you're talking in generalities citing that 'most people' think a certain way... ...and I'm responding to the tone of the original parent poster /right here/. That is - the parent poster who suggested just such a human-hostile, planet- (or possibly biosphere-except-humans-) positive approach. The parent proposes that it might be worth keeping the world in great shape for tomorrow, at the cost of today's humanity. That /may/ be the case, but such measures seem to make relatively little sense when we have such a poor track record of predicting outcomes over macroscopic time periods and predicting higher order effects of our actions. Instead we might be better off just making humanity our first order concern and trying to help humanity itself. Certainly an approach where the first order effect is to harm humanity (a plague, say) should require an incredibly high standard before we consider it, don't you think?
      - 10y ago

by tekacs 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago

I don't find the distinction you and Carlin make to be productive. Carlin is flat wrong that humans cannot impact that planet, though the question's still open if we can have positive impacts. In at least one case (ozone) we've avoided catastrophe. The general question I've been focusing on is one of whether or not the Enlightenment and Technological experiments can be continued. If so, there's almost certainly a tremendous trade between standard of living and number of inhabitants possible. Reading I'm doing presently (Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History) suggests that energy requirements of about 2 tons of oil equivalent per person per year are required. I'm thinking that's going to have to come from entirely renewable sources. Those fluxes and conversions are distinctly limited. Joel Cohen seems to be the author who's done the most detailed analyses of carrying capacity that I've run across (I've found multiple references to his work, I've yet to read it). E.g., http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long http://science.sciencemag.org/content/269/5222/341.long https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ACohen%2C+Joel+E.&fq=&dblist=638&start=11&qt=next_page https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ACohen%2C+Joel+E.&fq=&...

tekacs 10y ago
(I originally included far more thoughts on the topic here, but this is getting dangerously far from my areas of deep knowledge and I shouldn't allow scope creep to have me argue on things beyond my original point). I'm only trying to argue that arguing that we need to save the planet without taking into account the human context is like arguing that we need to save a distant star. Saving the planet is precisely valuable in most cases due to the second order effect of saving humanity or the biosphere. This was all in response to the various ideas of 'saving the planet' which involve voluntarily gutting humanity, such as the original post I responded to here.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  For most people, "save the planet" == "save the environment in which current human civilisation can and does thrive". Not for all though, definitely: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collapse-the-new-political-map/ http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collaps... http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/New-Political-Map.jpg http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/New-Political-Map.jpg
  - tekacs 10y ago
    Once again you're talking in generalities citing that 'most people' think a certain way... ...and I'm responding to the tone of the original parent poster /right here/. That is - the parent poster who suggested just such a human-hostile, planet- (or possibly biosphere-except-humans-) positive approach. The parent proposes that it might be worth keeping the world in great shape for tomorrow, at the cost of today's humanity. That /may/ be the case, but such measures seem to make relatively little sense when we have such a poor track record of predicting outcomes over macroscopic time periods and predicting higher order effects of our actions. Instead we might be better off just making humanity our first order concern and trying to help humanity itself. Certainly an approach where the first order effect is to harm humanity (a plague, say) should require an incredibly high standard before we consider it, don't you think?
    - 10y ago