5 ms·

I mostly agree with what you said but I'd like to point out a glitch in your argument about halfway through: where you say "because it has, for millions ... of

by Elrac 7y ago

I mostly agree with what you said but I'd like to point out a glitch in your argument about halfway through: where you say "because it has, for millions ... of years." I'd say that's not valid, because what happened for millions of years is a far cry from what modern agriculture is (mostly) accomplishing: (a) actually establishing food security, and (b) for a freakishly large number of one particular species. When you say "every single one of your ancestors got enough to eat" you fall victim to survivor bias; we know that many, many of our ancestors' siblings didn't get enough to eat. In fact, humanity nearly died out on one or two occasions, though I'm not sure it was for lack of nutrition. I also feel that natural, historic ecologic agriculture isn't readily analogous to a model of agriculture that would be feasible today. Consider that part of the historic model was a pyramid of natural predation, i.e. animals that lived off the land and each other, fertilizing the "agriculture" both with their droppings and often their corpses, with humanity skimming off parts of that food chain. Again, I don't think a faithful replication of that model could effectively nourish anything near the world's current population of humans. I could be wrong, but I suspect that a model of agriculture strongly similar to "historic ecological food production" might only work for a significantly smaller human population.

carapace 7y ago
> I'd say that's not valid, because what happened for millions of years is a far cry from what modern agriculture is (mostly) accomplishing: (a) actually establishing food security, and (b) for a freakishly large number of one particular species. What I mean in the most general sense is that the natural systems that have evolved have a record of durability of ~4500000Ky whereas agriculture in general is ~12Ky and modern agriculture is ~0.2Ky, and the current system seems to be crashing. I don't think we can count modern agriculture as successful at food security yet. On the other hand we have good reasons to believe that "eco-mimetic" food production will prove more durable. > I could be wrong, but I suspect that a model of agriculture strongly similar to "historic ecological food production" might only work for a significantly smaller human population. I suspect you're right, and that the ideal population of an "M-type planet" might be no more than a few hundred thousand people. However, leave out "historical" and I think we have options for "ecological food production" handling the ~12B expected peak concurrent population. I think something like arcologies combined with Christopher Alexander's "City Country Fingers" could be the skeleton of a workable path from the status quo to some sort of high-density ecological civilization. (Along with e.g. E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth idea.) Personally I suspect that we evolved to be Nature's waldoes† and we are supposed to "super charge" the ecosystem, but that's getting into sci-fi stuff. Arcologies and Pattern Language are sci-fi enough for now, eh? † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)

by Elrac 7y ago

carapace 7y ago

> I'd say that's not valid, because what happened for millions of years is a far cry from what modern agriculture is (mostly) accomplishing: (a) actually establishing food security, and (b) for a freakishly large number of one particular species. What I mean in the most general sense is that the natural systems that have evolved have a record of durability of ~4500000Ky whereas agriculture in general is ~12Ky and modern agriculture is ~0.2Ky, and the current system seems to be crashing. I don't think we can count modern agriculture as successful at food security yet. On the other hand we have good reasons to believe that "eco-mimetic" food production will prove more durable. > I could be wrong, but I suspect that a model of agriculture strongly similar to "historic ecological food production" might only work for a significantly smaller human population. I suspect you're right, and that the ideal population of an "M-type planet" might be no more than a few hundred thousand people. However, leave out "historical" and I think we have options for "ecological food production" handling the ~12B expected peak concurrent population. I think something like arcologies combined with Christopher Alexander's "City Country Fingers" could be the skeleton of a workable path from the status quo to some sort of high-density ecological civilization. (Along with e.g. E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth idea.) Personally I suspect that we evolved to be Nature's waldoes† and we are supposed to "super charge" the ecosystem, but that's getting into sci-fi stuff. Arcologies and Pattern Language are sci-fi enough for now, eh? † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)