3 ms·
Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?
by new2628 7y ago
Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?
- ajuc 7y agoIt eliminated one bottleneck (regular mass starvations) and allowed us to get to the next one faster (global warming). Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.
- jpttsn 7y agoThanos, is that you?
- antepodius 7y agoMay as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route. There's more people living better lives, so things are better. There are new problems caused by our previous success that we solve next.
- ajuc 7y agoGrading the state of the Earth is subjective, what's good for plants or bacteria may be bad for mammals or fungi, and there's a few mass extinctions every million years anyway. If you don't care about homo sapiens, then global warming isn't really "bad" - the ecosystems will adapt.
- oska 7y ago> May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route. No, that most certainly doesn't follow. It's entirely usual and normal for an amount of something in a system to be fine but then an excess of the same thing to be not fine. This is a very common situation in medicine, for example.
- robotastronaut 7y agoIt's also a common situation in the rest of population and community ecology. For instance, removing wolves as a predator here in Michigan has caused an explosion in the deer population. That, in turn, changed the makeup in undergrowth as they eat more now, which has all kinds of extended effects. Not to mention the propagation of diseases in a more sense population.
- anthonypasq 7y agoWe only care about the state of the system as it relates to humans.
- antepodius 7y agoThat's certainly not true for a sizeable number of environmentalists. Have you never heard the 'humanity is a virus on the planet' take?
- colechristensen 7y agoYou really have to define and defend what you mean by better to get a meaningful answer.
- thrower123 7y agoWorse. We are able to produce more calories on less land than would otherwise be required. If you check out some photographs of the countryside of the East Coast of the US, particularly, from the turn of the century, and then look at those places today, considerable reforestation has occurred.