15 ms·

You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recal

by Grimm1 6y ago

You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me. I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow. Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse. The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.

abraae 6y ago
> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  There’s a conservation goal that’s going around. 30 by 30. Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030. The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
  - ThalesX 6y ago
    Wouldn't some weird interpretation of the Pareto Principle [0] mean that we should be using 20% of the available resources for 80% of our production goals?
- DeusExMachina 6y ago
  Would it? How do you know? You are just projecting what you think on this hypothetical advanced species. They might find, instead, that they don't need or care for any of that and just wipe it out faster.
  - abraae 6y ago
    Yep, that's my interpretation of "advanced". Yours could be one that retreats into hermetic shelters and plays Call of Duty between themselves all day long.
    - DeusExMachina 6y ago
      Mine isn't either of those, or any other variation. The point is that since you are not them, you can't know what they would do. Your "interpretation" is just making them after your self image, thinking that that is what it means to be "advanced".
      - nate_meurer 6y ago
        A more charitable interpretation is that an advanced civilization would be more likely to ensure it's own longevity and durability by engaging in serious, disciplined conservation of resources. Pretty simple observation, really.
        timeslip1523 6y ago
        Why conserve when there are so many resources to acquire? Better to efficiently spend the available resources as quickly as possible to expand to space and start on the exponential growth. Unless your scale of 'conserving resources' involves putting out the stars to save their hydrogen for later use, you're doing it wrong.
        princeb 6y ago
        the classic scifi trope of an advanced extraterrestrial race is one that is able to not merely ensure its existence but also develop and advance itself rapidly through aggressive intergalactic colonization and resource extraction.
- bscphil 6y ago
  I agree, but your comment might be better served by giving reasons why. An advanced species that we can observe is, by definition, a successfully self-reproducing species. That is, a species that didn't die out in an early stage of its (social and technological) evolution. This means you have to ask (1) what steps did they take to avoid extinction, and (2) what social values allowed them to achieve those moves. The biggest threat we face as a species in the foreseeable future is the exhaustion of our natural resources. Ergo, it makes sense to reserve as much as we can for future generations to decide what to do with. Some argue that we should use them as fast as possible in order to blow past some (claimed) barrier to entirely technological reproduction (producing a self-sustaining system on the Moon, for example), but this strikes me as hasty. The difficulties of achieving this might be far more difficult than advocates imagine, and if so we're likely to hit resource exhaustion. That's before you even deal with the values. We don't have a lot of choice over those, but it's worth pointing out that many of our personal scruples are more compatible with collaborative than combative approaches to growth. The real moral challenge is whether the new frontier of growth (wealth acquisition) hits any wall before it destroys the environment.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- refurb 6y ago
  Are you saying humans aren’t a part of the “natural world”?
OrbitRock 6y ago
Yup, to me it’s fascinating. We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures. It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though. We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  That would be great. My fear is that we are more like yeast in a bottle of juice.
  - navaati 6y ago
    I hope at least someone will drink the resulting booze…
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  I think biodiversity within the structure of human occupied areas is very unrealistic and potentially counterproductive. I also think we shouldn’t attempt to constrain growth but instead constrain footprint upon the Earth.
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    I disagree on the first note. The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
    - 6y ago
ehsankia 6y ago
Speaking of ant and slime simulation, this recent video Coding Adventures video was pretty mind blowing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A (Especially part 2 starting around 10m in).
- enchiridion 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! Great channel!
FredPret 6y ago
I couldn’t agree more regarding misanthropy. I would like to note though that if we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded. Combined with the fact that some types of stars are expected to continue radiating energy for trillions of years...
- pfarrell 6y ago
  This discussion reminds me of Isaac Asimov's favorite story, The Last Question https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
  - falcor84 6y ago
    Sorry to nitpick, but is it your favorite story of Asimov's or has he actually said it was his own favorite?
    - tomcam 6y ago
      It was Asimov's favorite
    - pfarrell 6y ago
      I guess to be more precise, it was Asimov’s favorite story among those that he had written. https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-story-the-last-question-read-by-isaac-asimov.html https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-s...
- wildmanx 6y ago
  The sad part is that many of us have to constantly fight against those of "us" who are actively working against those improvements. It's easy to take an outside look and say "well, see, humankind fixed it", but the personal energy and misery that goes into fighting for those fixes is enormous. I wouldn't call it "misanthropy".
- 7e 6y ago
  A substantial amount of Earth's resources would need to be eviscerated to accomplish that goal, the the space colonies are extremely likely to fail anyway, in the end.
gbrown 6y ago
> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.
- ledauphin 6y ago
  I agree that it's _possible_ we're headed for the boom-bust cycle that you're talking about, but unlike microbes that's a hypothesis, not a scientifically verifiable fact, as humans have never (to my knowledge) experienced the sort of planet-wide bust that you're implying.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    One interesting counterexample is the Bronze Age collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI&ab_channel=HistoriaCivilis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI&ab_channel=Histo... I'm not sure if it's technically a counterexample, but it's fascinating. Society seemed to collapse due to a series of causes, more or less unexplained to this day. (We have hypotheses, but it's still something of a mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples)
    - jcrites 6y ago
      Wasn't it hypothesized that the collapse was due to an Ice Age? I thought there was strong geological evidence for that, and the challenges it put on human population, but I don't know enough about history to place the last Ice Age on a timeline relative to the Bronze Age without doing research. Update: Upon some brief research, the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, whereas the Bronze Age Collapse was around 1200 BCE. So totally unrelated.
      - 6y ago
anigbrowl 6y ago
The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy I's not misanthropy to note that we're not so different from other species and that our growth/behavior is in many respects similar to other natural phenomena involving complex systems. Our long term success is correlated with our ability to shift resources away from negative-sum behaviors so as not to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment.
- timeslip1523 6y ago
  Better to increase carrying capacity through innovation.
siculars 6y ago
I don't think it is possible for humans to be optimal vs, say, slime. Slime, presumably, does not have incentive structure that individual humans collude in at their benefit to the detriment of others. For example, why did the US build roads at the expense of rail? The incentive structure of the auto industry.
- BoiledCabbage 6y ago
  And yet, would the rail corridors have looked drastically different, or stopped at different cities? Or would it still have run between the same major metro hubs we have now?

by Grimm1 6y ago

abraae 6y ago

> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.

OrbitRock 6y ago
There’s a conservation goal that’s going around. 30 by 30. Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030. The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
- ThalesX 6y ago
  Wouldn't some weird interpretation of the Pareto Principle [0] mean that we should be using 20% of the available resources for 80% of our production goals?
DeusExMachina 6y ago
Would it? How do you know? You are just projecting what you think on this hypothetical advanced species. They might find, instead, that they don't need or care for any of that and just wipe it out faster.
- abraae 6y ago
  Yep, that's my interpretation of "advanced". Yours could be one that retreats into hermetic shelters and plays Call of Duty between themselves all day long.
  - DeusExMachina 6y ago
    Mine isn't either of those, or any other variation. The point is that since you are not them, you can't know what they would do. Your "interpretation" is just making them after your self image, thinking that that is what it means to be "advanced".
    - nate_meurer 6y ago
      A more charitable interpretation is that an advanced civilization would be more likely to ensure it's own longevity and durability by engaging in serious, disciplined conservation of resources. Pretty simple observation, really.
      - timeslip1523 6y ago
        Why conserve when there are so many resources to acquire? Better to efficiently spend the available resources as quickly as possible to expand to space and start on the exponential growth. Unless your scale of 'conserving resources' involves putting out the stars to save their hydrogen for later use, you're doing it wrong.
      - princeb 6y ago
        the classic scifi trope of an advanced extraterrestrial race is one that is able to not merely ensure its existence but also develop and advance itself rapidly through aggressive intergalactic colonization and resource extraction.
bscphil 6y ago
I agree, but your comment might be better served by giving reasons why. An advanced species that we can observe is, by definition, a successfully self-reproducing species. That is, a species that didn't die out in an early stage of its (social and technological) evolution. This means you have to ask (1) what steps did they take to avoid extinction, and (2) what social values allowed them to achieve those moves. The biggest threat we face as a species in the foreseeable future is the exhaustion of our natural resources. Ergo, it makes sense to reserve as much as we can for future generations to decide what to do with. Some argue that we should use them as fast as possible in order to blow past some (claimed) barrier to entirely technological reproduction (producing a self-sustaining system on the Moon, for example), but this strikes me as hasty. The difficulties of achieving this might be far more difficult than advocates imagine, and if so we're likely to hit resource exhaustion. That's before you even deal with the values. We don't have a lot of choice over those, but it's worth pointing out that many of our personal scruples are more compatible with collaborative than combative approaches to growth. The real moral challenge is whether the new frontier of growth (wealth acquisition) hits any wall before it destroys the environment.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
refurb 6y ago
Are you saying humans aren’t a part of the “natural world”?

OrbitRock 6y ago

Yup, to me it’s fascinating. We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves, all manner of multicellular architectures. It’s certainly a bad thing that we are growing in a sort of zero-sum manner against many original ecosystems though. We need to learn to restrain our own growth (a tough one that we’re in the process of trying to beat into all of our heads it seems), and also we need to learn how to maximize the potential for biodiversity to exist within the structure of human occupied areas as well. (A good book on this last subject is “Win-win Ecology”).

pantalaimon 6y ago
That would be great. My fear is that we are more like yeast in a bottle of juice.
- navaati 6y ago
  I hope at least someone will drink the resulting booze…
Robotbeat 6y ago
I think biodiversity within the structure of human occupied areas is very unrealistic and potentially counterproductive. I also think we shouldn’t attempt to constrain growth but instead constrain footprint upon the Earth.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  I disagree on the first note. The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint is actually very important. Extraordinary amounts of biodiversity are contained in these areas and we need to study how to reconcile our land use with the needs of that biodiversity. We shouldn’t ignore it out of a fear that people will get the wrong idea.
  - 6y ago

ehsankia 6y ago

Speaking of ant and slime simulation, this recent video Coding Adventures video was pretty mind blowing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A (Especially part 2 starting around 10m in).

enchiridion 6y ago
Thanks for sharing! Great channel!

FredPret 6y ago

I couldn’t agree more regarding misanthropy. I would like to note though that if we start mining and settling space, our growth would in fact be essentially unbounded. Combined with the fact that some types of stars are expected to continue radiating energy for trillions of years...

pfarrell 6y ago
This discussion reminds me of Isaac Asimov's favorite story, The Last Question https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- falcor84 6y ago
  Sorry to nitpick, but is it your favorite story of Asimov's or has he actually said it was his own favorite?
  - tomcam 6y ago
    It was Asimov's favorite
  - pfarrell 6y ago
    I guess to be more precise, it was Asimov’s favorite story among those that he had written. https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-story-the-last-question-read-by-isaac-asimov.html https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/isaac-asimovs-favorite-s...
wildmanx 6y ago
The sad part is that many of us have to constantly fight against those of "us" who are actively working against those improvements. It's easy to take an outside look and say "well, see, humankind fixed it", but the personal energy and misery that goes into fighting for those fixes is enormous. I wouldn't call it "misanthropy".
7e 6y ago
A substantial amount of Earth's resources would need to be eviscerated to accomplish that goal, the the space colonies are extremely likely to fail anyway, in the end.

gbrown 6y ago

> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop in a coordinated and self sustaining way, rather than as a grand experiment in tragedy of the commons. Microbes don’t coordinate their growth, and therefore fall into boom-bust cycles that dominate and exhaust their local environment. Humans can reason about these issues, but we see insufficient ability to collectively coordinate in response to them.

ledauphin 6y ago
I agree that it's _possible_ we're headed for the boom-bust cycle that you're talking about, but unlike microbes that's a hypothesis, not a scientifically verifiable fact, as humans have never (to my knowledge) experienced the sort of planet-wide bust that you're implying.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  One interesting counterexample is the Bronze Age collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI&ab_channel=HistoriaCivilis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq4G-7v-_xI&ab_channel=Histo... I'm not sure if it's technically a counterexample, but it's fascinating. Society seemed to collapse due to a series of causes, more or less unexplained to this day. (We have hypotheses, but it's still something of a mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples)
  - jcrites 6y ago
    Wasn't it hypothesized that the collapse was due to an Ice Age? I thought there was strong geological evidence for that, and the challenges it put on human population, but I don't know enough about history to place the last Ice Age on a timeline relative to the Bronze Age without doing research. Update: Upon some brief research, the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, whereas the Bronze Age Collapse was around 1200 BCE. So totally unrelated.
    - 6y ago

anigbrowl 6y ago

The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy I's not misanthropy to note that we're not so different from other species and that our growth/behavior is in many respects similar to other natural phenomena involving complex systems. Our long term success is correlated with our ability to shift resources away from negative-sum behaviors so as not to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment.

timeslip1523 6y ago
Better to increase carrying capacity through innovation.

siculars 6y ago

I don't think it is possible for humans to be optimal vs, say, slime. Slime, presumably, does not have incentive structure that individual humans collude in at their benefit to the detriment of others. For example, why did the US build roads at the expense of rail? The incentive structure of the auto industry.

BoiledCabbage 6y ago
And yet, would the rail corridors have looked drastically different, or stopped at different cities? Or would it still have run between the same major metro hubs we have now?