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I might be alone here on HN to think humans are just an intelligent virus that is gradually destroying a very beautiful harmonious life structure called the pla

I might be alone here on HN to think humans are just an intelligent virus that is gradually destroying a very beautiful harmonious life structure called the planet earth. Our only redemption might be devising some system of protecting the planet from a future catastrophic meteoric collision.

cortic 8y ago
i struggle to find a definition of virus that applies to us and not also every other species on the planet.. consume, multiply, destroy.. all species are trying their best to do these things, sure we are better at it, but we're also the only species that might be capable of refraining from these natural urges.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > but we're also the only species that might be capable of refraining from these natural urges. We might be able to but there is relatively little evidence of that actually being the case. Theoretically we are perfectly cable of reasoning over 100's of years of time but in practice our life-span is the only thing that we seem to care about.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    Probably because we are still animals and are driven primarily by the same impulses as other animals. It takes intent, awareness and conscious effort to rise above these impulses, and it provides little to no benefit to the individual. Or in other words, it's an instance of the tragedy of the commons, where the "commons" is the future of our species and the planet.
moonchrome 8y ago
>a very beautiful harmonious life structure called the planet earth Harmonious ? There have been multiple extinction events in the history, things go out of balance all the time.
- mekpro 8y ago
  Not in the same rate after an advancement of mankind.
  - joesb 8y ago
    I'm not so sure. How many species went extinct in the first couple years right after the asteroids impact?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Or in the greatest pollution event ever - when plants filled this atmosphere with oxygen. The poor obligate anaerobic organisms never stood a chance, they were massively exterminated.
Confusion 8y ago
That lovely harmonious structure where lions kill cubs because they want to impregnate the mother, where bugs literally stab-rape others to procreate and where animals regularly die of hunger because the predator-prey cycle is at a predator low? It seems great if you're only looking at the nice parts.
- salimmadjd 8y ago
  That's part of the ecosystem. The lion kills the cubs because he wants his DNA to survive. The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger. Our ultimate differentiating evolutionary trait is our intelligence. Which has enabled us to adopt, but this trait has become an unchecked strength. We do not have the ability to control ourselves nor the nature is able to contain us. We're an out of control virus about to destroy its host.
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    > The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger. I don't know about lions, but their cousins the lynx absolutely do kill off so many hares that they die of hunger. The hare population then rebounds, followed by a rebound in the lynx population. It's one of the most famous cycles in ecology. I would not be at all surprised to learn that a similar predator/prey population cycle holds true for lions. https://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/en/services/lynx/lynx-snowshoe-hare-cycle https://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/en/services/lynx/lynx-snowshoe-har... If you're interested in the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    This is the argument put forward by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael. Either way, it depends on your reality tunnel. None of this has any inherent meaning other than the meaning we attach to it. Life and the lack of life is equally "harmonious".
  - 8y ago
Kalium 8y ago
Picture a peaceful forest. Tall trees, underbrush, sun-dappled leaves, the smell of loam on the gentle breeze. A rustle in the distance. You feel at peace, and harmony surrounds you. This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. Animals stalk prey as plants wage chemical warfare against plants and animals alike. Creatures pretend to be other creatures, and plants pretend to be insects in order to attract them for selfish reasons. "Harmonious" is not a word everyone would use to describe nature red in tooth and claw.
- salimmadjd 8y ago
  >This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. That's part of the harmony. Harmony ends when one of these organism takes over, it destroys the entire ecology and in the process it ultimately destroys itself.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts? Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detrinent of others. Trees are tall and shady in order to reduce the sunlight in the environment and starve nearby plants to death at absurd individual expense: it takes a lot of nutrients to make those trunks that serve no purpose other than spite. Beavers construct big dams to turn meadows into swampland, often clearing out the local plant life. I know from personal experience that operating a large farm in a wooded area is a constant battle of construction and destruction against the beavers. Yeah, humans are better at altering the environment than most everything else, but altering the environment at the expense of other life is hardly unnatural.
    - Turing_Machine 8y ago
      > Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detriment of others. Definite case in point: photosynthesizing organisms (green plants, algae, etc.) We know that the Earth had a large-scale anaerobic ecosystem before the advent of photosynthesis. While anaerobic organisms still exist, they're only found in very narrow niches. >99% of them were wiped out, root and branch, apparently killed off by rising oxygen levels (oxygen is a poison to them).
chki 8y ago
I think your view doesn't make sense to me because of that old question: How can there be anything "beautiful" or harmonious" without humans being around and observing those beautiful or harmonious structures in nature? In a cold vast universe without sentient life, is there really a difference between a tree and a rock on mars if there is nobody to judge? Edit: To add to that: Starting from the aforementioned viewpoint I think that saving the planet and preserving the environment is really important.. for us humans! There is no inherent value in having 100 species or 1000 species in a forest, it's simply important because if 900 species die, there might be changes in the ecosystem that affect us in the long run. Or the forest might be less beautiful/harmonious. I have a hard time to see any inherent value in nature, because again: what difference is there between a rose and some dark asteroid?
- kranner 8y ago
  Even if that were true, that there is no sentient/intelligent life other than us to recognise beauty and harmony, it still wouldn't give us the right to destroy it. At least until we have the knowledge and ability to recreate all of what we have destroyed. Maybe not even then.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    This is religion. Either the universe doesn't give a damn about your esthetics, or it does. I'd be curious as why you think it does? (Full disclosure - I believe it does, but I'm also a believer in an organized religion.)
  - chki 8y ago
    But why wouldn't it give us the "right" to destroy it? Is there a "right and wrong" without any sentient life making an ethical choice?
- k_sze 8y ago
  How do you even know that we’re the only species with a sense of esthetics and able to appreciate beauty and harmony? I wouldn’t be surprised if elephants, dolphins, other primates, and certain species of birds have some intellectual capacity for it.
quadcore 8y ago
Speaking of which. My little theory is that human is innovation without evolution. It's useful long term: to save the planet from an asteroid.

cortic 8y ago

i struggle to find a definition of virus that applies to us and not also every other species on the planet.. consume, multiply, destroy.. all species are trying their best to do these things, sure we are better at it, but we're also the only species that might be capable of refraining from these natural urges.

jacquesm 8y ago
> but we're also the only species that might be capable of refraining from these natural urges. We might be able to but there is relatively little evidence of that actually being the case. Theoretically we are perfectly cable of reasoning over 100's of years of time but in practice our life-span is the only thing that we seem to care about.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  Probably because we are still animals and are driven primarily by the same impulses as other animals. It takes intent, awareness and conscious effort to rise above these impulses, and it provides little to no benefit to the individual. Or in other words, it's an instance of the tragedy of the commons, where the "commons" is the future of our species and the planet.

moonchrome 8y ago

>a very beautiful harmonious life structure called the planet earth Harmonious ? There have been multiple extinction events in the history, things go out of balance all the time.

mekpro 8y ago
Not in the same rate after an advancement of mankind.
- joesb 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. How many species went extinct in the first couple years right after the asteroids impact?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Or in the greatest pollution event ever - when plants filled this atmosphere with oxygen. The poor obligate anaerobic organisms never stood a chance, they were massively exterminated.

Confusion 8y ago

That lovely harmonious structure where lions kill cubs because they want to impregnate the mother, where bugs literally stab-rape others to procreate and where animals regularly die of hunger because the predator-prey cycle is at a predator low? It seems great if you're only looking at the nice parts.

salimmadjd 8y ago
That's part of the ecosystem. The lion kills the cubs because he wants his DNA to survive. The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger. Our ultimate differentiating evolutionary trait is our intelligence. Which has enabled us to adopt, but this trait has become an unchecked strength. We do not have the ability to control ourselves nor the nature is able to contain us. We're an out of control virus about to destroy its host.
- Turing_Machine 8y ago
  > The lion kills and hunts to eat, but the lion doesn't kill the entire living creatures in Serengeti or elsewhere to later die himself from hunger. I don't know about lions, but their cousins the lynx absolutely do kill off so many hares that they die of hunger. The hare population then rebounds, followed by a rebound in the lynx population. It's one of the most famous cycles in ecology. I would not be at all surprised to learn that a similar predator/prey population cycle holds true for lions. https://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/en/services/lynx/lynx-snowshoe-hare-cycle https://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/en/services/lynx/lynx-snowshoe-har... If you're interested in the math: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  This is the argument put forward by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael. Either way, it depends on your reality tunnel. None of this has any inherent meaning other than the meaning we attach to it. Life and the lack of life is equally "harmonious".
- 8y ago

Kalium 8y ago

Picture a peaceful forest. Tall trees, underbrush, sun-dappled leaves, the smell of loam on the gentle breeze. A rustle in the distance. You feel at peace, and harmony surrounds you. This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. Animals stalk prey as plants wage chemical warfare against plants and animals alike. Creatures pretend to be other creatures, and plants pretend to be insects in order to attract them for selfish reasons. "Harmonious" is not a word everyone would use to describe nature red in tooth and claw.

salimmadjd 8y ago
>This peaceful scene is an endless orgy of violence, death, and deceit as living things work constantly against one another. That's part of the harmony. Harmony ends when one of these organism takes over, it destroys the entire ecology and in the process it ultimately destroys itself.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts? Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detrinent of others. Trees are tall and shady in order to reduce the sunlight in the environment and starve nearby plants to death at absurd individual expense: it takes a lot of nutrients to make those trunks that serve no purpose other than spite. Beavers construct big dams to turn meadows into swampland, often clearing out the local plant life. I know from personal experience that operating a large farm in a wooded area is a constant battle of construction and destruction against the beavers. Yeah, humans are better at altering the environment than most everything else, but altering the environment at the expense of other life is hardly unnatural.
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    > Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detriment of others. Definite case in point: photosynthesizing organisms (green plants, algae, etc.) We know that the Earth had a large-scale anaerobic ecosystem before the advent of photosynthesis. While anaerobic organisms still exist, they're only found in very narrow niches. >99% of them were wiped out, root and branch, apparently killed off by rising oxygen levels (oxygen is a poison to them).

chki 8y ago

I think your view doesn't make sense to me because of that old question: How can there be anything "beautiful" or harmonious" without humans being around and observing those beautiful or harmonious structures in nature? In a cold vast universe without sentient life, is there really a difference between a tree and a rock on mars if there is nobody to judge? Edit: To add to that: Starting from the aforementioned viewpoint I think that saving the planet and preserving the environment is really important.. for us humans! There is no inherent value in having 100 species or 1000 species in a forest, it's simply important because if 900 species die, there might be changes in the ecosystem that affect us in the long run. Or the forest might be less beautiful/harmonious. I have a hard time to see any inherent value in nature, because again: what difference is there between a rose and some dark asteroid?

kranner 8y ago
Even if that were true, that there is no sentient/intelligent life other than us to recognise beauty and harmony, it still wouldn't give us the right to destroy it. At least until we have the knowledge and ability to recreate all of what we have destroyed. Maybe not even then.
- JackFr 8y ago
  This is religion. Either the universe doesn't give a damn about your esthetics, or it does. I'd be curious as why you think it does? (Full disclosure - I believe it does, but I'm also a believer in an organized religion.)
- chki 8y ago
  But why wouldn't it give us the "right" to destroy it? Is there a "right and wrong" without any sentient life making an ethical choice?
k_sze 8y ago
How do you even know that we’re the only species with a sense of esthetics and able to appreciate beauty and harmony? I wouldn’t be surprised if elephants, dolphins, other primates, and certain species of birds have some intellectual capacity for it.

quadcore 8y ago

Speaking of which. My little theory is that human is innovation without evolution. It's useful long term: to save the planet from an asteroid.