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I'd argue that humanity certainly requires huge tracts of wilderness for its long term survival. So far, we've successfully transformed diverse ecosystems into

I'd argue that humanity certainly requires huge tracts of wilderness for its long term survival. So far, we've successfully transformed diverse ecosystems into vast, but basic, mono-cultural 'deserts'. But - is it sustainable? In the century since the Haber process was introduced, the world has started to buckle at the seams from the results: huge population growth, with accompanying pollution (nitrates, pesticides, algal blooms, etc.) and degradation of biomes. What are the effects on our biochemistry? Plastic pollution is only now being noticed. Pthalates and numerous other estrogen mimickers are silently at work. Antibiotic resistance is increasing. I think it's too early to conclude that we can indeed survive this. The outlook for the rest of this century is not positive... A 'wilderness' is a vast library of alternative biotech. Until humanity understands the effects of its impact on Earth's ecosystems and itself, it would be wise to remember this.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Quite apart from your well made point, just about everyone that "makes it" wants a home in the country with some land, probably some old forest. It's the location for so many leisure activities and holidays. Few want to retire in a city. We conveniently don't notice the decline of soils, of insects or other species. The arrogance that we can just keep on until humanity is in battery hutches everywhere and everything else divided up between agriculture and industry astounds me. Who knows how many miracle drugs and biotech has been lost in those unknown bacteria and species. Even if it turns out to be a process that can continue our collective psyche will lose something it apparently desires or needs. So at what cost?
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Everyone wants the facilities resulting from economies of scales and efficiencies that cities provide, such as entertainment options, access to various labor and product markets, selections of schools, hospitals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. At the same time, everyone wants to their own space to do their own thing and raise their family and a peaceful neighborhood where you don't have to worry about dealing with too many others, especially not too far below your socioeconomic class. This would seem to naturally result in the pattern of rich and poor suburbs clustered around cities with the constant struggle of individual housing vs shared housing, car vs public transport, public parks vs private yards, etc. Only recent factor I see changing is the delay in having children into the 30s means a lot of 20 somethings that aren't looking for suburbs, and if they don't ever have kids then maybe they never will want for suburbs.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Everyone? Plenty only move to a city because they have to, to get work. Then Nothing to do with want in many cases. Perhaps even the majority. There's not the same need for everyone to congregate in one place there was when your factory or shipyard needed 40,000 workers every shift. The internet should have enabled more local and rural enterprises to thrive, except that's not turned out to be the case at all.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      Those who want to go to the city only because they have to work fall under the "want access to labor markets" part of my statement. "Everyone" is an exaggeration of course on my part, but it still seems like a significant portion of the population, especially high earners, want incompatible parts of urban and suburban life. I was commenting on the claim that "few want to retire in the city", which I agree with, but in old age you need access to medical professionals and other facilities that aren't economically feasible in rural populations, so even though people want the rural life, they don't want or can't afford to give up those other conveniences of more urban areas.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  And yet city center locations are incredibly expensive. Though I don't disagree with your general point, just that there are a fair number of people who make it and still want to be in the city. I'd still rather be in the city. It's just too expensive, though, since there's a shortage of housing here (honestly "here" could be most cities with good tech industries) and I value being in the city less than a young person who still goes out a lot - and crucially, doesn't have a kid. If it helps, I'm buying a few acres of grazing land an hour from the city by train - grazing land is basically sterile wasteland for ecological purposes - and planning to reforest it, while working remote. But we need a lot more than a few acres. And we need those places to be livable without a car. I rode a bike from the train station to view the property, but places you can do that without a death wish are far too rare.
worldsayshi 8y ago
My naive impression is that the safest bet for survival would be to improve our technological mastery to a point where we can create near-closed and self sufficient ecosystems for small populations that they can be fully in control of, like deep space habitats. Such habitats should be able to support life inside indefinitely and be able to produce new habitat. And we need to make sure that we can maintain a high level of technological competence even if our population would be severely diminished. Perhaps then can civilization survive almost anything. Not sure if this is a pipe dream.
- monktastic1 8y ago
  Wouldn't the materials needed to build and maintain such environments ultimately have to come from nature?
  - worldsayshi 8y ago
    Sure, but ideally that nature could be outside our biosphere so that we don't depend on it.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > Such habitats should be able to support life inside indefinitely and be able to produce new habitat... We have this already, and it's free. We're just too short sighted as a species to fully appreciate it, so we degrade or even destroy those habitats for short term gains.
dharma1 8y ago
Could not agree more with this. Evolution on Earth has had a very long time to develop super advanced nanotechnology, which we understand and utilise very poorly and are destroying forever - for what? More beef on the plate, palm oil for products no one needs and a bit of money for one generation? Beyond being critical to the survival of deeply linked ecosystems, and ultimately ourselves, it's just really stupid to destroy products of millions of years of R&D before we've even begun to unlock their potential. The amount of energy and computation that has gone into that evolution is super valuable and a couple of generations are trading it for profits lasting a blink of an eye. In general, I find it super strange that multi-generational thinking/optimisation isn't more deeply ingrained in our behaviour as a species.
- galangalalgol 8y ago
  Natural selection is a greedy algorithm. Being forward thinking or altruistic rarely produces more surviving progeny over the short term.
  - dharma1 8y ago
    I guess in the case of humans we have partly outpaced natural selection - nature hasn't had time to optimise for the reality we are creating, it's too slow. Short term impulses which have worked great (until now) still govern our behaviour. It's not altruism to try to avert long term disaster beyond your own life span. It's in your own interest to ensure your progeny survives - even several generations in the future they still carry your genes. But I don't know if inbuilt mechanisms for this exist in evolution. I'd like to think self-inflicted extinction isn't a likely outcome of evolution - but maybe it is once a certain species dominates.
    - yeswecould 8y ago
      All of the things that humans have done, which you are referring to - can be traced back to one thing - cheap energy - in the form of OIL.
      - 8y ago
DennisP 8y ago
The one thing that gives me hope on this, is that lab-grown meat requires about 95% less land, energy, and water. If we can get it cheap enough we could put most of our farms out of business.
- hazz99 8y ago
  I seriously think lab grown meats will save the world, if we can pull it off in a commercially viable fashion.
  - shinryuu 8y ago
    It's fascinating how human beings cling to old habits. It's like we as a species couldn't go vegetarian by choice.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      We could, we just won't. People have been trying to promote that for the past several decades and meat consumption globally has just gone up. The book Clean Meat devotes a chapter to this; historically every culture has consumed more meat when they could afford it. Most people just like it. We almost hunted whales to extinction for their oil. That didn't stop because we persuaded people to quit using oil in their lamps. It stopped because someone invented kerosene. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., and then in thirty years it was gone.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      We evolved as omnivores. We are a predatory species. We can’t go vegetarian as a species because we aren’t a vegetarian species.
      - ab71e5 8y ago
        But we also evolved to have a large cerebral cortex that allows us to make decisions that go against certain impulses because we are able to see the bigger picture. We evolved to conserve energy when possible but we exercise anyway because we know that if we don`t it will be detrimental to our health. And many people are still healthy while on a vegetarian diet so it is possible.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Quite apart from your well made point, just about everyone that "makes it" wants a home in the country with some land, probably some old forest. It's the location for so many leisure activities and holidays. Few want to retire in a city. We conveniently don't notice the decline of soils, of insects or other species. The arrogance that we can just keep on until humanity is in battery hutches everywhere and everything else divided up between agriculture and industry astounds me. Who knows how many miracle drugs and biotech has been lost in those unknown bacteria and species. Even if it turns out to be a process that can continue our collective psyche will lose something it apparently desires or needs. So at what cost?

lotsofpulp 8y ago
Everyone wants the facilities resulting from economies of scales and efficiencies that cities provide, such as entertainment options, access to various labor and product markets, selections of schools, hospitals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. At the same time, everyone wants to their own space to do their own thing and raise their family and a peaceful neighborhood where you don't have to worry about dealing with too many others, especially not too far below your socioeconomic class. This would seem to naturally result in the pattern of rich and poor suburbs clustered around cities with the constant struggle of individual housing vs shared housing, car vs public transport, public parks vs private yards, etc. Only recent factor I see changing is the delay in having children into the 30s means a lot of 20 somethings that aren't looking for suburbs, and if they don't ever have kids then maybe they never will want for suburbs.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Everyone? Plenty only move to a city because they have to, to get work. Then Nothing to do with want in many cases. Perhaps even the majority. There's not the same need for everyone to congregate in one place there was when your factory or shipyard needed 40,000 workers every shift. The internet should have enabled more local and rural enterprises to thrive, except that's not turned out to be the case at all.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Those who want to go to the city only because they have to work fall under the "want access to labor markets" part of my statement. "Everyone" is an exaggeration of course on my part, but it still seems like a significant portion of the population, especially high earners, want incompatible parts of urban and suburban life. I was commenting on the claim that "few want to retire in the city", which I agree with, but in old age you need access to medical professionals and other facilities that aren't economically feasible in rural populations, so even though people want the rural life, they don't want or can't afford to give up those other conveniences of more urban areas.
CalRobert 8y ago
And yet city center locations are incredibly expensive. Though I don't disagree with your general point, just that there are a fair number of people who make it and still want to be in the city. I'd still rather be in the city. It's just too expensive, though, since there's a shortage of housing here (honestly "here" could be most cities with good tech industries) and I value being in the city less than a young person who still goes out a lot - and crucially, doesn't have a kid. If it helps, I'm buying a few acres of grazing land an hour from the city by train - grazing land is basically sterile wasteland for ecological purposes - and planning to reforest it, while working remote. But we need a lot more than a few acres. And we need those places to be livable without a car. I rode a bike from the train station to view the property, but places you can do that without a death wish are far too rare.

worldsayshi 8y ago

My naive impression is that the safest bet for survival would be to improve our technological mastery to a point where we can create near-closed and self sufficient ecosystems for small populations that they can be fully in control of, like deep space habitats. Such habitats should be able to support life inside indefinitely and be able to produce new habitat. And we need to make sure that we can maintain a high level of technological competence even if our population would be severely diminished. Perhaps then can civilization survive almost anything. Not sure if this is a pipe dream.

monktastic1 8y ago
Wouldn't the materials needed to build and maintain such environments ultimately have to come from nature?
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  Sure, but ideally that nature could be outside our biosphere so that we don't depend on it.
gerbilly 8y ago
> Such habitats should be able to support life inside indefinitely and be able to produce new habitat... We have this already, and it's free. We're just too short sighted as a species to fully appreciate it, so we degrade or even destroy those habitats for short term gains.

dharma1 8y ago

Could not agree more with this. Evolution on Earth has had a very long time to develop super advanced nanotechnology, which we understand and utilise very poorly and are destroying forever - for what? More beef on the plate, palm oil for products no one needs and a bit of money for one generation? Beyond being critical to the survival of deeply linked ecosystems, and ultimately ourselves, it's just really stupid to destroy products of millions of years of R&D before we've even begun to unlock their potential. The amount of energy and computation that has gone into that evolution is super valuable and a couple of generations are trading it for profits lasting a blink of an eye. In general, I find it super strange that multi-generational thinking/optimisation isn't more deeply ingrained in our behaviour as a species.

galangalalgol 8y ago
Natural selection is a greedy algorithm. Being forward thinking or altruistic rarely produces more surviving progeny over the short term.
- dharma1 8y ago
  I guess in the case of humans we have partly outpaced natural selection - nature hasn't had time to optimise for the reality we are creating, it's too slow. Short term impulses which have worked great (until now) still govern our behaviour. It's not altruism to try to avert long term disaster beyond your own life span. It's in your own interest to ensure your progeny survives - even several generations in the future they still carry your genes. But I don't know if inbuilt mechanisms for this exist in evolution. I'd like to think self-inflicted extinction isn't a likely outcome of evolution - but maybe it is once a certain species dominates.
  - yeswecould 8y ago
    All of the things that humans have done, which you are referring to - can be traced back to one thing - cheap energy - in the form of OIL.
    - 8y ago

DennisP 8y ago

The one thing that gives me hope on this, is that lab-grown meat requires about 95% less land, energy, and water. If we can get it cheap enough we could put most of our farms out of business.

hazz99 8y ago
I seriously think lab grown meats will save the world, if we can pull it off in a commercially viable fashion.
- shinryuu 8y ago
  It's fascinating how human beings cling to old habits. It's like we as a species couldn't go vegetarian by choice.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    We could, we just won't. People have been trying to promote that for the past several decades and meat consumption globally has just gone up. The book Clean Meat devotes a chapter to this; historically every culture has consumed more meat when they could afford it. Most people just like it. We almost hunted whales to extinction for their oil. That didn't stop because we persuaded people to quit using oil in their lamps. It stopped because someone invented kerosene. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., and then in thirty years it was gone.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    We evolved as omnivores. We are a predatory species. We can’t go vegetarian as a species because we aren’t a vegetarian species.
    - ab71e5 8y ago
      But we also evolved to have a large cerebral cortex that allows us to make decisions that go against certain impulses because we are able to see the bigger picture. We evolved to conserve energy when possible but we exercise anyway because we know that if we don`t it will be detrimental to our health. And many people are still healthy while on a vegetarian diet so it is possible.