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> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem. At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can conf
by JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
- s3graham 6y agoI feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.
- lpolovets 6y agoThe human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agothere must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!
- wizzwizz4 6y agoIt's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.
- not_kurt_godel 6y ago> it'll still be running some code. This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
- toss1 6y agoYup, with one addition >> It'll still be running some code... until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
- wizzwizz4 6y agoThere's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)
- toss1 6y agoIndeed! Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms. One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).
- api 6y agoIt is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us. As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves. Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.
- Gene_Parmesan 6y agoBingo, this is exactly what I was going to say. The Earth sure is fault-tolerant, we just might not enjoy what PIDs get the kill signal to repair the system.
- api 6y agoHomo Sapiens would almost surely survive as a species. Humans are like cockroaches. It might be horribly nasty though, and definitely not something we should invite. I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?
- ganafagol 6y agoIf that's Elon's position then he must have a huge load of cognitive dissonance if he still thinks prioritizing colonization of Mars is a worthwile contribution.
- croon 6y agoI'm rarely one to defend Elon, but that isn't cognitive dissonance, it's trying to have a plan B in face of reality. He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark. Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.
- ganafagol 6y agoFault tolerance is a concept relative to a desired functional behavior. Relative to "everything should stay as-is", nature is not fault tolerant at all. But relative to "_something_ will keep existing and evolving" it is very fault tolerant. But that may not be the way we'd like.
- davexunit 6y agoThis is backwards. Nature is incredibly fault tolerant, it's our systems that are disconnected from nature that are incredibly fragile.
- Mc_Big_G 6y agoNature will be fine. It's us that won't be. Let's stop pretending that it's the same thing.