9 ms·

Holocene Extinction

119 points by rapind 6y ago

alex_young 6y ago
A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture. There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.
- jungletime 6y ago
  I'm always amazed how good the fruit and vegetables look, but how little flavour they have when bought from super market here, compared to Europe, or actually most parts of the world where vegetables are grown locally and organically. Very sour unripe oranges, bananas, grapes, flavourless green peppers, tasteless tomatoes. Pretty much the norm in Supermarkets.
  - mesarvagya 6y ago
    I believe those vegetable and fruits are GMO i.e. constructed genetically to look good. Moreover quality of soil and its nutrients is not like it was before, making vegetable and fruits less nutritious [1]. In the end, until grown vegetable and fruits are grown in home, we don't have much choice. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
  - ebiester 6y ago
    California is not nearly as bad as the rest of the country. the southeast US has some decent produce, but not much, and not nearly as much as its soil should offer. I am continually flabbergasted that Americans accept this - or rather, they don't. I think so much of meat consumption and fast food consumption can be explained by how bad our fruits and vegetables are.
- raiflip 6y ago
  What about in the case where animals can extract more nutrients from plant food than we can? Cows in particular have specially built stomachs that can extract nutrients from plants than we can. I don't think this would be enough to make eating meat more efficient, but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    It’s true that some animals can digest plants that we can’t digest. But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . It’s not necessary to eat meat for getting nutrients.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      > But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . Vitamin B-12 From https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art-20363663 https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art... “However, if you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, you might be prone to deficiency because plant foods don't contain vitamin B-12. ”
      - Ididntdothis 6y ago
        If you are deficient there you can take supplements.
  - tejohnso 6y ago
    > but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants. It is not necessary to eat meat.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - raiflip 6y ago
- agakshat 6y ago
  Strongly agree with this. Utilisation of water to irrigate animal feed, deforestation of land to support growing that feed, methane expulsions from cows themselves.. it’s crazy to think about the environmental impact of beef, when eating chicken or fish would be far better for the environment (not to mention healthier).
- gdubs 6y ago
  It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear that a sector like chemical production is heavily weighted towards producing fertilizer. And the majority of that is being used to grow animal feed. Or the transportation sector, a lot of which is shipping food all over the world. And land-use change, deforestation, etc, to create grazing land or grow conventional mono crops — again, mostly for animal feed. Basically, in our current system, plant foods are an edge product of an animal agriculture system. To be more sustainable, we probably want the opposite — meat as an edge product of a plant-focused agriculture. The picture in my head is a more decentralized system — regional farms, urban farms, etc. And probably a carbon tax which would make meat a little pricier. It doesn’t have to disappear, but the externalities should be baked into the cost.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  And paper. We kill trees so Trader Joe's can send me a catalog of products I will throw away without reading. And 90% of people will likely do exactly the same. Or so companies like Lob.com can convert API calls into dead trees, instead of looking into ways to do the opposite.
mehrdadn 6y ago
"Fun" statistic: in less than half a century, we've gotten rid of around 60% of Earth’s wildlife. [1] [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018 https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018
- derivativethrow 6y ago
  This is an incorrect interpretation of the report. Or at least, the way it's stated is misleading. We have not "gotten rid of" 60% of wildlife on Earth. What has actually happened is (since the 1970s), the average reduction per species is 60%. Some species lost more than 60%, some (far) less. This is still bad news, but I feel it's important to point out that we haven't (for example), lost 60% of all species on the planet.
CM30 6y ago
This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the same reasons. That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too. A single planet simply doesn't have enough resources for a species with a planet wide civilisation and modern/advanced technology. So you're stuck with the choice of either expanding outwards, sticking with extremely basic tech, or having a far lower population.
- GuiA 6y ago
  Heh? Sentient life and the civilisations it creates are part of nature, where would the incompatibility stem from? If you’re talking about the phenomenon of some species depleting the resources of their environment, harming their population in the long run, that’s not a phenomenon unique to humans.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Well, if by "incompatibility" we mean something that leads to destruction, then why not? Destruction and death are also natural phenomena.
- jarpschop 6y ago
  You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.
  - mc32 6y ago
    This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.
jarpschop 6y ago
This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Technology really is the only way out.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      With very few exceptions, any affordances technology brings are consumed by humanity's insatiable appetite before they can benefit the environment. If technology figures out how to make $X more energy efficient, we just run more $Xs such that the (trajectory of) energy consumption is constant.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        A big exception is energy. Net electricity usage per capita has leveled out or declined in the developed world since around the year 2000. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
        alex_young 6y ago
        Isn’t just counting the developed world missing the problem though? We also moved all of our manufacturing to the developing world at the same time and they saw a much greater increase. Shipping stuff around the world and moving your pollution to Asia doesn’t do much good when we all share the same atmosphere.
almost_usual 6y ago
The Biomass of mammals on Earth is sobering. Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs (60%) Humans (36%) Wild animals (4%)
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Oh, just wait until you include avians. There are so many chickens. Soooo many.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- backtracking 6y ago
  It shows the ability of humans to preserve and propagate animal species when there is an incentive to do so. No need to worry about cows going extinct.
  - billme 6y ago
    Depends on how you define extinct; for example: how many bovine are there in the wild? Are domestic bovine genetically equivalent to prior wild bovine populations? Etc.
- gibolt 6y ago
  While it is crazy, all of the animals listed are already some of the largest physical beings on the planet. Multiply them to 10000x the size of other animal populations, and this is what the scale will turn to.
SOMMS 6y ago
'Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator"'... </sigh>
jungletime 6y ago
Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too, by terraforming and making the land more productive. There's some evidence that the Amazon mix of fruiting tree and nut species were selected for by humans. "The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou... Since some people us this as political grounds for eugenics and population control. Such as one child policies, like China used to have. I think the proper way need to view ourselves, is as "gardeners" and caretakers. What we destroy in one area, we should rebuild in another, or make better. For example, we could make connected "green corridors" that span the entire country, through which animals can migrate and live in. We have disrupted the migration paths of some species with out cities. But nothing says that we can't make it better by providing routes for these animals around our cities and farms.
- Onanymous 6y ago
  > Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too They can but they (mostly) do not. And the best way to have a beneficial impact on environment in the current situation would be "simply" to reduce its numbers. Unfortunately that's not so easy.
- rbg246 6y ago
  May I kindly ask, why do you feel the need to jump out and defend the human species as also being good in the face of what is described in the article? I am genuinely interested in understanding what motivates this reaction.
  - jungletime 6y ago
    You are here, so obviously you feel "good" enough and worthy to exist. With population control its always the "others" need to be eliminated. No one wants to start with themselves. Its an extremely selfish position really. Its also not very logically viable, since those that feel the world is over populated and kill themselves, will just be selected out of the gene pool. Leaving only those that want to live, procreate and prosper behind.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Many times there is a heavy dose of misanthropy in these environmental discussions. Phrases like "humanity is a virus", etc. I would like to share a different perspective.There is a saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Even if humanity overburdens the planet and goes extinct in the next 100 years, I prefer what we have now, than if we had remained hunter-gatherers or pre-industrial. We have spread out to every corner of the world. With irrigation, farming, heating, air-conditioning, etc, we have transformed the most inhospitable habitats into thriving cities. Members of our species have even set foot on the moon. We have improved the quality of life for members of our species, especially the poorest. If you had to be born as a female child to a random mother, there is no other time in the humanity's existence where you would be better off than now. We invented language that can express the deepest and most profound thoughts to the person standing next to us, and invented writing that can encode it in a form that can be understood millennia later, and invented telecommunication that can transmit it instantly anywhere in the world. Our concept of the "universe" has grown. It is no longer the local grassland or forest. It is no longer a steppe or continent, or even our globe. Our concept of the universe includes solar systems and galaxies and super-clusters, and even the possibilities of a multi-verse. All animals try to control their environment, but we have learned to do so on an unprecedented scale. We learned early how to control the large fauna that could eat us. Most humans walk freely about, safe from large predators. We also, much later, learned how to control the small predators - the bacteria and viruses. We have also learned how to control ourselves. We learned how to control reproduction. We can keep from getting pregnant when we have sex, if we desire, or get pregnant without having sex. We can organize into communities and coordinate and cooperate at a scale and sophistication beyond any other animal. So, if this time is the time that we have ultimately outstripped the earth's capacity to support us (unlike the many, many false alarms in the past), then I say, cheers to humanity: we have lived, we have loved, we have laughed, we have wept, we have left our mark in our corner of the universe. Yes, let us try to develop technology and do things that help ensure humanity can stay like this for much, much longer. But let us not disparage humanity and all we have accomplished.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  100 years may be optimistic. And I don't think young people or children today deserve an agonizing life watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war. Also you don't need to be a hunter gatherer to not rape the planet.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Misread Holocene as Holodomor. Both extinctions being man made of course. So Holocene is the macro of Holodomor.
Endlessly 6y ago
Struggling to find a word for it, but it’s obvious that humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues. Climate change is the most obvious, but there’s long list of issues like this that if suddenly every human on Earth magically expected to live 1000 to 10,000 years would become more pressing issues. As a semi-futurist, this is the core issue, it’s not that humans don’t see the future, they’re unable to change... the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.
- sherr 6y ago
  > the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future. I think that's overstated. Many only look to their /own/ future, not the species/collective. Maybe the family unit, so humans with children may have a longer term outlook. Also, many people's economic situation makes immediate or short term needs (food, shelter etc.) more pressing. I agree that current trends are disheartening.
  - Endlessly 6y ago
    You’re taking the sum of my comment, extracting a singular phrase, and changing it’s meaning. I clearly define the scope of what “humans” & “future” means via “humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues“ — and cherry picking examples beyond that to me is irrelevant unless there a clear reasoning linking those examples to the topic.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Even if humans did care, that doesn't mean they could organize a meaningful response. COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again. We just have a fundamental coordination problem. A lot of foresight and resources are required, and only a Central Overmind that mind-controls everyone would be a practical way to implement that kind of coordination. When the price of non-coordination is extremely jacked up, like in a crazy future where anyone can cook up an antimatter bomb or an extinction-tier supervirus (or super AI?) at home, it's obvious that the only tenable mode of operation is massive surveillance + censorship (and perhaps hivemind motor control) by a Central Overmind. :D
Medicalidiot 6y ago
I'm optimistic that a few things will help save us from ourselves: lab grown meat, electric cars, and solar power. My undergrad degree is in biology and it was depressing to learn how humans have eviscerated nature. I remember joking with a classmate during my evolution class saying "what way are we going to learn about how humans destroyed nature today?"
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
The problem is that too many of us do things with a marginal utility near 0 which are bad for the environment just to buy food, pay debts and pay landlords. The solution is obvious. Do nothing. Just do nothing (obviously you can read, ride a bike, write poesy and so on...). States should pay people to do nothing rather than destroying the world.
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
Now imagine survivorship bias applied , six times
raiflip 6y ago
My question to people who think this is objectively a bad thing - given the usual line of thought to get that conclusion is that we shouldn't be prejudiced towards valuing humans any more than other living creatures (which makes sense), then why would the replacement of non-human biomass with human biomass necessarily be good or bad? Now I kinda know some sensible answers to this question. For one, genetic diversity in life is critical for survival given diversification means at least a few strands can survive sudden unexpected events. i.e if everything were giant dinosaurs there may have been no life left after the dinosaur extinction. The other answer is that we are pre-built to aesthetically enjoy thriving nature (which is probably meant to drive us towards protecting genetic diversity). However given the human backlash to human trashing the environment, I could easily see us settling on an equilibrium where life is not, at least for the most part, the kind of wild chaotic world that it was before us, but a world where the environment is increasingly managed to some degrees by humans. You see this as nations getting richer stop eating cats, dogs, care more about preserving the environment, raising better treated wildlife, etc. In that case, perhaps humans can help facilitate a new epoch in nature where genetic diversity is not just a biproduct of a random process, but a conscious goal. Granted this would require a much deeper knowledge of nature, humility to know when we can't control everything, and a cultural shift towards being stewards of nature. But given the shifts that have already occurred in human thinking around nature, I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility. Given our increasing energy usage, it's probably the only route in which we don't end up causing environmental catastrophes that either kill us off, or our civilization. That and finding new planets.

119 points by rapind 6y ago

A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture. There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

jungletime 6y ago
I'm always amazed how good the fruit and vegetables look, but how little flavour they have when bought from super market here, compared to Europe, or actually most parts of the world where vegetables are grown locally and organically. Very sour unripe oranges, bananas, grapes, flavourless green peppers, tasteless tomatoes. Pretty much the norm in Supermarkets.
- mesarvagya 6y ago
  I believe those vegetable and fruits are GMO i.e. constructed genetically to look good. Moreover quality of soil and its nutrients is not like it was before, making vegetable and fruits less nutritious [1]. In the end, until grown vegetable and fruits are grown in home, we don't have much choice. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
- ebiester 6y ago
  California is not nearly as bad as the rest of the country. the southeast US has some decent produce, but not much, and not nearly as much as its soil should offer. I am continually flabbergasted that Americans accept this - or rather, they don't. I think so much of meat consumption and fast food consumption can be explained by how bad our fruits and vegetables are.
raiflip 6y ago
What about in the case where animals can extract more nutrients from plant food than we can? Cows in particular have specially built stomachs that can extract nutrients from plants than we can. I don't think this would be enough to make eating meat more efficient, but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  It’s true that some animals can digest plants that we can’t digest. But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . It’s not necessary to eat meat for getting nutrients.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > But there is plenty of evidence that humans can live perfectly well on a plant based diet if they eat the right plants . Vitamin B-12 From https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art-20363663 https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements-vitamin-b12/art... “However, if you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet, you might be prone to deficiency because plant foods don't contain vitamin B-12. ”
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      If you are deficient there you can take supplements.
- tejohnso 6y ago
  > but it may be necessary to eat some meat to get nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get from plants. It is not necessary to eat meat.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - raiflip 6y ago
agakshat 6y ago
Strongly agree with this. Utilisation of water to irrigate animal feed, deforestation of land to support growing that feed, methane expulsions from cows themselves.. it’s crazy to think about the environmental impact of beef, when eating chicken or fish would be far better for the environment (not to mention healthier).
gdubs 6y ago
It’s really only recently coming into focus. Because if you look sector by sector it’s not clear (in terms of emissions). But when you look close it’s clear that a sector like chemical production is heavily weighted towards producing fertilizer. And the majority of that is being used to grow animal feed. Or the transportation sector, a lot of which is shipping food all over the world. And land-use change, deforestation, etc, to create grazing land or grow conventional mono crops — again, mostly for animal feed. Basically, in our current system, plant foods are an edge product of an animal agriculture system. To be more sustainable, we probably want the opposite — meat as an edge product of a plant-focused agriculture. The picture in my head is a more decentralized system — regional farms, urban farms, etc. And probably a carbon tax which would make meat a little pricier. It doesn’t have to disappear, but the externalities should be baked into the cost.
29athrowaway 6y ago
And paper. We kill trees so Trader Joe's can send me a catalog of products I will throw away without reading. And 90% of people will likely do exactly the same. Or so companies like Lob.com can convert API calls into dead trees, instead of looking into ways to do the opposite.

mehrdadn 6y ago

"Fun" statistic: in less than half a century, we've gotten rid of around 60% of Earth’s wildlife. [1] [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018 https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018

derivativethrow 6y ago
This is an incorrect interpretation of the report. Or at least, the way it's stated is misleading. We have not "gotten rid of" 60% of wildlife on Earth. What has actually happened is (since the 1970s), the average reduction per species is 60%. Some species lost more than 60%, some (far) less. This is still bad news, but I feel it's important to point out that we haven't (for example), lost 60% of all species on the planet.

CM30 6y ago

This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the same reasons. That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too. A single planet simply doesn't have enough resources for a species with a planet wide civilisation and modern/advanced technology. So you're stuck with the choice of either expanding outwards, sticking with extremely basic tech, or having a far lower population.

GuiA 6y ago
Heh? Sentient life and the civilisations it creates are part of nature, where would the incompatibility stem from? If you’re talking about the phenomenon of some species depleting the resources of their environment, harming their population in the long run, that’s not a phenomenon unique to humans.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Well, if by "incompatibility" we mean something that leads to destruction, then why not? Destruction and death are also natural phenomena.
jarpschop 6y ago
You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.
- mc32 6y ago
  This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

jarpschop 6y ago

This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!

mc32 6y ago
Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Technology really is the only way out.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    With very few exceptions, any affordances technology brings are consumed by humanity's insatiable appetite before they can benefit the environment. If technology figures out how to make $X more energy efficient, we just run more $Xs such that the (trajectory of) energy consumption is constant.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      A big exception is energy. Net electricity usage per capita has leveled out or declined in the developed world since around the year 2000. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
      - alex_young 6y ago
        Isn’t just counting the developed world missing the problem though? We also moved all of our manufacturing to the developing world at the same time and they saw a much greater increase. Shipping stuff around the world and moving your pollution to Asia doesn’t do much good when we all share the same atmosphere.

almost_usual 6y ago

The Biomass of mammals on Earth is sobering. Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs (60%) Humans (36%) Wild animals (4%)

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Oh, just wait until you include avians. There are so many chickens. Soooo many.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
backtracking 6y ago
It shows the ability of humans to preserve and propagate animal species when there is an incentive to do so. No need to worry about cows going extinct.
- billme 6y ago
  Depends on how you define extinct; for example: how many bovine are there in the wild? Are domestic bovine genetically equivalent to prior wild bovine populations? Etc.
gibolt 6y ago
While it is crazy, all of the animals listed are already some of the largest physical beings on the planet. Multiply them to 10000x the size of other animal populations, and this is what the scale will turn to.

SOMMS 6y ago

'Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator"'... </sigh>

jungletime 6y ago

Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too, by terraforming and making the land more productive. There's some evidence that the Amazon mix of fruiting tree and nut species were selected for by humans. "The Supposedly Pristine, Untouched Amazon Rainforest Was Actually Shaped By Humans" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untouched-amazonian-rainforest-was-actually-shaped-humans-180962378/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou... Since some people us this as political grounds for eugenics and population control. Such as one child policies, like China used to have. I think the proper way need to view ourselves, is as "gardeners" and caretakers. What we destroy in one area, we should rebuild in another, or make better. For example, we could make connected "green corridors" that span the entire country, through which animals can migrate and live in. We have disrupted the migration paths of some species with out cities. But nothing says that we can't make it better by providing routes for these animals around our cities and farms.

Onanymous 6y ago
> Humans can have a beneficial impact on the environment too They can but they (mostly) do not. And the best way to have a beneficial impact on environment in the current situation would be "simply" to reduce its numbers. Unfortunately that's not so easy.
rbg246 6y ago
May I kindly ask, why do you feel the need to jump out and defend the human species as also being good in the face of what is described in the article? I am genuinely interested in understanding what motivates this reaction.
- jungletime 6y ago
  You are here, so obviously you feel "good" enough and worthy to exist. With population control its always the "others" need to be eliminated. No one wants to start with themselves. Its an extremely selfish position really. Its also not very logically viable, since those that feel the world is over populated and kill themselves, will just be selected out of the gene pool. Leaving only those that want to live, procreate and prosper behind.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Many times there is a heavy dose of misanthropy in these environmental discussions. Phrases like "humanity is a virus", etc. I would like to share a different perspective.There is a saying, "It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Even if humanity overburdens the planet and goes extinct in the next 100 years, I prefer what we have now, than if we had remained hunter-gatherers or pre-industrial. We have spread out to every corner of the world. With irrigation, farming, heating, air-conditioning, etc, we have transformed the most inhospitable habitats into thriving cities. Members of our species have even set foot on the moon. We have improved the quality of life for members of our species, especially the poorest. If you had to be born as a female child to a random mother, there is no other time in the humanity's existence where you would be better off than now. We invented language that can express the deepest and most profound thoughts to the person standing next to us, and invented writing that can encode it in a form that can be understood millennia later, and invented telecommunication that can transmit it instantly anywhere in the world. Our concept of the "universe" has grown. It is no longer the local grassland or forest. It is no longer a steppe or continent, or even our globe. Our concept of the universe includes solar systems and galaxies and super-clusters, and even the possibilities of a multi-verse. All animals try to control their environment, but we have learned to do so on an unprecedented scale. We learned early how to control the large fauna that could eat us. Most humans walk freely about, safe from large predators. We also, much later, learned how to control the small predators - the bacteria and viruses. We have also learned how to control ourselves. We learned how to control reproduction. We can keep from getting pregnant when we have sex, if we desire, or get pregnant without having sex. We can organize into communities and coordinate and cooperate at a scale and sophistication beyond any other animal. So, if this time is the time that we have ultimately outstripped the earth's capacity to support us (unlike the many, many false alarms in the past), then I say, cheers to humanity: we have lived, we have loved, we have laughed, we have wept, we have left our mark in our corner of the universe. Yes, let us try to develop technology and do things that help ensure humanity can stay like this for much, much longer. But let us not disparage humanity and all we have accomplished.

CalRobert 6y ago
100 years may be optimistic. And I don't think young people or children today deserve an agonizing life watching their loved ones, their own children, perhaps, starving to death or dying in a water war. Also you don't need to be a hunter gatherer to not rape the planet.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Misread Holocene as Holodomor. Both extinctions being man made of course. So Holocene is the macro of Holodomor.

Endlessly 6y ago

Struggling to find a word for it, but it’s obvious that humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues. Climate change is the most obvious, but there’s long list of issues like this that if suddenly every human on Earth magically expected to live 1000 to 10,000 years would become more pressing issues. As a semi-futurist, this is the core issue, it’s not that humans don’t see the future, they’re unable to change... the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

sherr 6y ago
> the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future. I think that's overstated. Many only look to their /own/ future, not the species/collective. Maybe the family unit, so humans with children may have a longer term outlook. Also, many people's economic situation makes immediate or short term needs (food, shelter etc.) more pressing. I agree that current trends are disheartening.
- Endlessly 6y ago
  You’re taking the sum of my comment, extracting a singular phrase, and changing it’s meaning. I clearly define the scope of what “humans” & “future” means via “humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues“ — and cherry picking examples beyond that to me is irrelevant unless there a clear reasoning linking those examples to the topic.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Even if humans did care, that doesn't mean they could organize a meaningful response. COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again. We just have a fundamental coordination problem. A lot of foresight and resources are required, and only a Central Overmind that mind-controls everyone would be a practical way to implement that kind of coordination. When the price of non-coordination is extremely jacked up, like in a crazy future where anyone can cook up an antimatter bomb or an extinction-tier supervirus (or super AI?) at home, it's obvious that the only tenable mode of operation is massive surveillance + censorship (and perhaps hivemind motor control) by a Central Overmind. :D

Medicalidiot 6y ago

I'm optimistic that a few things will help save us from ourselves: lab grown meat, electric cars, and solar power. My undergrad degree is in biology and it was depressing to learn how humans have eviscerated nature. I remember joking with a classmate during my evolution class saying "what way are we going to learn about how humans destroyed nature today?"

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago

The problem is that too many of us do things with a marginal utility near 0 which are bad for the environment just to buy food, pay debts and pay landlords. The solution is obvious. Do nothing. Just do nothing (obviously you can read, ride a bike, write poesy and so on...). States should pay people to do nothing rather than destroying the world.

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

Now imagine survivorship bias applied , six times

raiflip 6y ago

My question to people who think this is objectively a bad thing - given the usual line of thought to get that conclusion is that we shouldn't be prejudiced towards valuing humans any more than other living creatures (which makes sense), then why would the replacement of non-human biomass with human biomass necessarily be good or bad? Now I kinda know some sensible answers to this question. For one, genetic diversity in life is critical for survival given diversification means at least a few strands can survive sudden unexpected events. i.e if everything were giant dinosaurs there may have been no life left after the dinosaur extinction. The other answer is that we are pre-built to aesthetically enjoy thriving nature (which is probably meant to drive us towards protecting genetic diversity). However given the human backlash to human trashing the environment, I could easily see us settling on an equilibrium where life is not, at least for the most part, the kind of wild chaotic world that it was before us, but a world where the environment is increasingly managed to some degrees by humans. You see this as nations getting richer stop eating cats, dogs, care more about preserving the environment, raising better treated wildlife, etc. In that case, perhaps humans can help facilitate a new epoch in nature where genetic diversity is not just a biproduct of a random process, but a conscious goal. Granted this would require a much deeper knowledge of nature, humility to know when we can't control everything, and a cultural shift towards being stewards of nature. But given the shifts that have already occurred in human thinking around nature, I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility. Given our increasing energy usage, it's probably the only route in which we don't end up causing environmental catastrophes that either kill us off, or our civilization. That and finding new planets.