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Biodiversity decline will require millions of years to recover

308 points by acdanger 5y ago

meristohm 5y ago
It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire. It’s a way to explore. Now that I’m older I’m much more mindful about what I break. Are we collectively too child-like as a species?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice. Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
    - 8ytecoder 5y ago
      We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
    - genericone 5y ago
      Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
      - Retric 5y ago
        That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
    - simonsarris 5y ago
      minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
    - kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
      You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
      - fooker 5y ago
        And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
        ljp_206 5y ago
        Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
    - DeRock 5y ago
      This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
  - brobdingnagians 5y ago
    One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
    - ativzzz 5y ago
      Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
  - jtolmar 5y ago
    Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
    - nahuel0x 5y ago
      Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.
- est31 5y ago
  > Are we collectively too child-like as a species? See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc). Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.
  - kiliantics 5y ago
    You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the glass")
  - watwut 5y ago
    No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult. Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology, wish to prove himself or practical need.
    - threatofrain 5y ago
      The child in this metaphor refers to adults too.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy. And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us. But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
  - cwillu 5y ago
    Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.
    - sergiotapia 5y ago
      Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?
- TooKool4This 5y ago
  I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent. But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  It's not that we're childish. It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd behave similarly. We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being economic automata who simply react to their circumstances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
    - asdfman123 5y ago
      You should summarize what you mean instead of linking to an academic article. It's clearer that way.
      - anigbrowl 5y ago
        I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have cited this paper quite a few times because I think it offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've observed informally, that being that there's a few distinctly different personality types that pursue quite different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks, optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but I've found it an extremely useful model.
        pie420 5y ago
        That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc. The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc. "Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.
- forgotmypw77 5y ago
  Yes, it does make me think of a child sitting in a sandbox, claiming it as ,,mine,, without knowing the first thing about how it came to be.
- rhacker 5y ago
  Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    > Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth. Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor. But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them). It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
  - staticman2 5y ago
    In TNG most humans act like a different species altogether: almost angel-like beings who don't experience the broad range of negetive human emotions. I see no evidence that we are evolving in that direction in real life.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then heat it to 1700°c and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that pane with a rock? Takes an instant.
- Black101 5y ago
  > It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It builds itself...
- xg15 5y ago
  I think "childlike" is too friendly. Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value". This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers. /Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.
josefresco 5y ago
Reminds me of some of the issues fictional humanity deals with in The Ministry for the Future - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
- jelsisi 5y ago
  I really enjoyed the beginning of that book, but it had way to much fluff in it and I'd say I finished it in disappointment. Can't say I would recommend it.
  - josefresco 5y ago
    So much this. I'm 3/4 of the way through and am really struggling to finish despite starting strong. I'm now skimming over the "policy" chapters and am focusing on the character action. Oh well, it's happened before with KSR.
  - rmcpherson 5y ago
    It is definitely typical Kim Stanley Robinson in that it explores large ideas and delves into details that don't pertain directly to the plot. As a rumination on a possible non-dystopian future, it is excellent and I highly recommend it. The wandering plot and digressions into hikes in the Swiss Alps is also quintessentially Robinsonian. I loved it but you have to know what to expect.
mc32 5y ago
Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support billions more people, so we don't have to be careful about growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault. Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws around managing natural resources... But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn't live on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened. Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care? Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.
- maze-le 5y ago
  The planet can not support "billions more", it can barely support the billions we have. Maybe on a subsistence level of a basic minimum nutritional value it could theoretically, but not with industrial products, medicine, education, transportation infrastructure, energy, communications equipment and so on.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Cultivated land is 11.6% of the world, and we can improve the agricultural output of land by a large margin just by adding greenhouses. PV could supply each and every person in a well-fed global population of 10 billion roughly a thousand times the current power use of the average American today — less if you limit your PV to just deserts, but still far more than enough for “modern” lifestyles.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  Why limit that to survivability? If you like to do something (say, eating sugar and reproducing), do stop doing it right before it kills you, or when you believe it's reasonable to stop because this particular things is not the only thing you care about? We can perfectly stop destroying our habitat because it would kill us and because it makes no sense to do so. We're just addicted to things that kills us and we should get this addiction under control simply because it's an addiction (compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences). Addictions are bad for you, even when they don't kill you.
newaccount2021 5y ago
let's burn my last karma on fire: these stories just give HN an opportunity to hem and haw and wax philosophical...but then we all go back to lifestyles that result in us being in the top 1% of polluters and wasters on the planet today and the top .001% of polluters and wasters in history.
Ancalagon 5y ago
The article mentions the Yucatan asteroid setoff a 5 million-year extinction event. I'm assuming this was due to a slow-reacting chain reaction of extinction events in the ecosphere? It wasn't actually directly due to the asteroid right? Those immediate effects would have gone away in a few decades I'm assuming?
- jacobolus 5y ago
  The immediate effects were almost unimaginably dramatic. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
rexreed 5y ago
A biological blink of an eye.
- bulletsvshumans 5y ago
  And unfortunately millions of years in human eye blinks.
  - rexreed 5y ago
    We are but fruit fly lifespans in the grand schemes of the universe. We will be here and then gone and the earth will rotate away. All our damage to the ecosystem will be folded in like the asteroid that impacted tens of millions of years ago and we'll be fossils for others to discover. I wonder what they'll make of our cryptocurrency farms.
    - havelhovel 5y ago
      Well in the meantime I derive enjoyment from the animals and plants around me and believe this finding helps explain why similarly present-minded folks should be concerned about the survival of what remains.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  True, but also, we only have several hundred million years left until Earth becomes too hot for life.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years. Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.
- wellpast 5y ago
  Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every problem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.
    - ewmiller 5y ago
      Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        On a biological timeline, it’s almost completely irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in small tribal groups. I think we’ll be fine. Besides that, most people in cities already live in a biodiversity wasteland.
        cableshaft 5y ago
        So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there. Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.
esarbe 5y ago
I'm not so much worried about the biodiversity as such - earth will recover, and rather quickly I think. Humans may be a very peculiar extinction event, but just one among many. But I do think that the loss of biodiversity is also telegraphing troubles for humanity, or at least the experiment in civilization we're currently all taking part in. The predatory ecosystem exploitation that we have been doing for the past two hundred years is catching up with us . And if we want to retain any chance to continue this experiment a few hundred years, we seriously have to change our approach in evaluating the worth that the earth's eco system has for us. You know, our very own life support system. Currently we're losing about 30% of animal population every ten years. This cannot continue. We're wrecking the place. We are killing ourselves. (My pet theory? This is the great filter!)
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Correct. The earth doesn’t care about the ecosystem. That is a human concept. The earth spent millions of years as a barren volcanic wasteland. We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans, not because our anthropomorphic concept of Mother Earth is crying.
  - ewmiller 5y ago
    Well you can still empathize with the pain that other feeling, conscious creatures on Earth experience as a direct result of our actions. It's one thing if a meteor strikes the earth and you simply witness a mass extinction, it's another if you ARE the meteor. We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans AND because it affects other living things which also have emotions and feel pain and will suffer as a result of what we've done. "Mother Earth" as a concept doesn't exist but other animals do. I think that's what people usually mean by that phrase.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Yes, that is true. I meant to include animals in my statement too. I was mostly criticizing the idea that the Earth is somehow suffering. The Earth will be just fine.
imhoguy 5y ago
Unfortunatelly we are (in) ongoing extinction "event" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
slver 5y ago
It won't recover, our species won. It'll be just us, and whatever we eat and keep as pets. So prepare for a world of cats, dogs, cows, chickens and pigs. I don't like it but that's the natural course we're taking.
- trhway 5y ago
  Human species have lost to each other several times. Those "us" may be pretty different. Homo cyborgus, no need for meat, direct neural communication link to cats, dogs, polar bears, bee hives, ...
  - slver 5y ago
    We're past that, our cultural evolution is orders of magnitude faster, and we're otherwise evolving as a single species. That species will change slowly, but I doubt we'd "lose to ourselves". We'd need some cultural event that segregates us rather drastically for us to split into subspecies again and compete. This will happen if in theory we populate the Solar System, but since there are no habitable planets, that'd rather remain in the realms of limited research and small bases.
    - trhway 5y ago
      just imagine some embryo DNA modification which as a side effect comes without "backward compatibility" - i.e. impossibility to procreate (or more probably - with very bad results in case of procreation) between the people whose parents were able to afford the modification and the ones whose didn't. That is all it takes. No need for hundred thousand years of evolution.
      - slver 5y ago
        Sounds plausible I guess.
- mathieubordere 5y ago
  You're forgetting the pests.
williesleg 5y ago
Fucking dinosaurs are dead. Never going to get them back thanks to assholes burning shit in caves.
hmmokidk 5y ago
In economic terms. This is an externality. The assumption, imho, is that others can profit from externalities. This externality may endanger our grandchildren and possibly even ourselves.
- hedora 5y ago
  Environmental collapse is already endangering us.
teekert 5y ago
Only millions? What are we taking about then! Who cares, there is more time between the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus than there is between us and T-Rex (about 100 million more). And we have about 4000-5000 million years before the sun gives out.
- akurtzhs 5y ago
  The sun won't give out until much longer, but life as we know it has far less than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Earth,_the_Solar_System_and_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear... Look at 500–600 million years. The sun's increasing luminosity means rising temperatures and falling CO2, which means no plant life at some point. The high estimate for plant and animal life is 1.2 billion years. The sun swells to a red giant around 5 billion, swallows the Earth around 7.5, and shrinks to a white dwarf around 8.
  - raflemakt 5y ago
    I'm not convinced that the Sun's expansion will be the demise of intelligent life on this planet. If there is a civilization of intelligent beings here ten million years in the future, let alone 100 or 1000, I'm tempted to think it would be trivial for them to A) Move the Earth farther out, or maybe better B) Change the composition of the sun to prolong its life (i.e. remove helium and other heavier elements with... the Sun's own energy).
    - teekert 5y ago
      Us SFIA fans aren’t worried ;) [0]. We’ll be black hole farming with our minds and every living thing ever sustained virtually at landauer limit efficiency up to 10^53 years from now. [0] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
achenatx 5y ago
This should be retitled to be Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our models suggest that it could take millions of years for biodiversity to recover.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Experiments are too costly and the conclusions aren’t sexy enough for clickbait articles. Science is all about computer models now.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  > Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our models suggest … That's how science often works, yes. I'd wager most people are aware of that and won't expect a prophecy when confronted with such headlines.
  - tryonenow 5y ago
    You'd be overestimating the average person's ability. Laypeople know virtually nothing about computational modeling. I can't find the famous quote, but it is dangerous to consume such research uncritically because with enough degrees of freedom you can model virtually anything while also backfitting your ground truth. And these models are almost always composed of numerous nonlinear parameters which may be adjusted within wide ranges, individually seemingly reasonable, but with potentially nonsensical and/or trivially biasable results.
- StrictDabbler 5y ago
  A better title would be "Computer biodiversity models suggest how many millions of years it may take to recover." It's impossible that it will take less than millions of years.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Must be noted that the empirical observations of fossil biodiversity in the last five mass extinctions support the same idea.
loriverkutya 5y ago
It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again, luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next time evolution comes up with something psychologically better suited for long term survival then our own species since we are so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as some kind of higher being who is independent from the consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time to start over, I’m sad that we failing to realise we don’t.
- 613style 5y ago
  Evolution better get to work fast. We only have around 500 million years until the sun's increasing luminosity leaves Earth uninhabitable.
  - mdavidn 5y ago
    The extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs was "just" 66 million years ago.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Hopefully humanity will have developed enough space exploration technology to get off this rock by then.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      Half a billion years is probably enough time to figure out how to jump start a star.
      - imoverclocked 5y ago
        It would be except the longevity of any human civilization will probably stop that from happening.
betwixthewires 5y ago
While I don't necessarily doubt any of the data cited in this article, this article isn't science, it is fearmongering propaganda. Not that we shouldn't be fearful. But the information should instill fear if there is something to be afraid of, not articles like this that are almost entirely devoid of information. Terrible, terrible article.
vagrantJin 5y ago
The sooner the "we" stops pretending to care, the better for everyone involved. The environment is going to take a beating for as long as humans walk the earth. No one here actually gives a rat's tail about the environment. If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability and we all know where that road goes.
- esarbe 5y ago
  It is pretty obvious that nobody cares. Most of the people are doing an amazing job of just filtering the fact of mankind's destructive impact out of their daily lives. And others -- like many on HN -- have an almost religious believe in a technical miracle. The Elon will save us all. Don't expect any talk of accountability. That would mean biting the bullet of accepting that we -- as a species -- are seriously messing up and are in the act of driving the car against the iceberg. Or something like that. Better not to rock the cradle and just enjoy the last few good decades we have. The pest on all our children, no concern for them is going to ruin this party!
- neolog 5y ago
  > If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability Could you elaborate on what accountability means to you?
anigbrowl 5y ago
A periodic reminder that if you're concerned with climate/biodiversity issues, it's increasingly a waste of time to work on persuading skeptics and fatalists (who either eny it's happening or say it doesn't matter for philosophical reasons). Some are sincere,s ome are not, but the pursuit of persuasion and consensus is ultimately founded on the hope that the 'marketplace of ideas' will move to a new stable equilibrium; available evidence suggests that this may take longer than changes in the underlying conditions, such that the more effort you spend in arguing the worse worse the problem will get. I suggest it's better to pursue unilateral policy goals wherever possible.
- efields 5y ago
  Totes. Our biome is an externality to most markets right now. It’s simply not a factor in day to day business.
- tryonenow 5y ago
  Right, screw discussion or examination of contradicting evidence. Your side is unquestioningly right, double down and ram your policies down everyone else's throats, regardless of the potential downsides. This is a recipe for authoritarian tyranny. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. This kind of closed mindedness is far more dangerous than any likely impending climate change.
hyko 5y ago
No it won’t. Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.
- asdff 5y ago
  This is why it's been so dangerous to allow anti GMO rhetoric into our grocery stores. It's normalized. GMOs are seen like harmful pesticides to the lay public, but GMOs are what we will need to rely upon if we are to ensure our grandchildren don't go hungry. We will have to introduce biodiversity ourselves as we lose it in our monocropped cultivars.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    A) I don’t think that’s true. GMOs are not the kind of biodiversity we need. We can move to mechanized automated organic farming and get all the biodiversity we need from healthy soil and diverse planting regimes. I am working on this problem and making our solution open source so the technology can quickly spread. [1] B) In practice GMOs are used to enable massive use of harmful biocides (glyphosate) which poison the soil, the workers, and our food. So the idea that they are like pesticides is not exactly correct but it’s not far off. [2] C) GMO patents have allowed large firms to extort farmers with predatory business models and Monsanto/Bayer for example have filed hundreds of lawsuits against farmers who accidentally had some contamination with their “patented” seeds. [3] GMOs are not a cure all. The whole reason we have problems in farming is our failure to see the whole system of life and our reliance on pinpoint “solutions” that only cause more problems. [1] https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk [2] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-monsantos-glyphosate-most-heavily-used-weed-killer-history https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-monsant... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
    - asdff 5y ago
cabaalis 5y ago
It appears this analysis is limited to freshwater species. I wish that werent the case. It would be nice to be able to share the "higher rate than the extinction of the dinosaurs event" statement without that big old "but" attached.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Note that a declining number of species doesn't mean fewer living animals. As the world globalizes, 10 isolated bird species occupying an ecological niche can be replaced by 1 species across the planet, without there being fewer birds total.
- rabidrat 5y ago
  And millions of animal species occupying thousands of ecological niches are being replaced by 10 species across the planet: humans, the animals that humans eat, and the animals humans keep as pets. Even if the quantity of biomass is relatively constant, I think we can all agree that a planet with only humans and cows and chickens is a pretty bleak outcome.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    I expect the endgame here is the whole planet is a managed park. We'll still keep Yellowstone and Serengeti looking as is, but there won't be any true wilderness. There is nothing unsustainable about this, but I agree that it is quite dull.
DickingAround 5y ago
I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so powerful. We out compete everything. And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from the past.
- macksd 5y ago
  >> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we probably do it at the optimal rate. What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together. We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
isoprophlex 5y ago
our burden raised the world set free the earth returns to land and sea our buildings burned and highways gone I love my friends and everyone but we've had our chance let's move aside let time wash us out with the tide
ThomPete 5y ago
99.9% of all species ever existed are gone today. Earth have been through 5 mass extinctions. Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, nature gives us a hostile and unsafe environment we make safe through our impact of the planet. Yes we need to get better at many things and luckily we are, but the idea that humans are the destroyers of biodiversity is simply untrue. We might in fact be the only species who will be able to not only avoid mass-extinction but also rebuild biodiversity. No matter what. Nature doesn't care about us and have no issue adding us to the 99.9% if we don't learn how to control and manipulate the planet and our nearby solar system.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Walk more. Eat less meat. Live a more spartan life. Consume more porn and have less actual sex. (Because sex leads to babies. Duh.) Someone should start a religion around those tenets. This stuff is not hard, you just have to apparently con people into living right or some nonsense.
- watwut 5y ago
  > Live a more spartan life. You mean, beat up whoever is weaker then you and take kids out of families to indoctrinate them into violent dictatorship body? Have them kill slave as rite of passage? Could not resist, was reading about sparta lately.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Comments like yours make me thankful I am American so I am given the liberty to defend my life (and I will pass on the porn and have more sex, thanks.)
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    You should probably listen to him and walk more since you're much more likely to die of heart disease than you are from anyone trying to take your life.
    - achillesheels 5y ago
      How much do you squat brah?
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playingchanges 5y ago
I wonder, how exactly do we determine the ideal amount of biodiversity for the planet / a given region? Outside of ideas like ‘we should not exterminate entire species’ and ‘we should not hunt so much that we ruin hunting grounds for future generations’ it does not seem obvious to me. I guess maybe we are so far gone that the only thought is to damage control.
- hirundo 5y ago
  And do microscopic and subsurface diversity count? If they do the proportion of anthropogenic diversity decline might look a lot smaller. Or do we only care about visible flora and fauna for this purpose? Human pollution creates new niches that didn't exist before. Microbes in particular can adapt to them in dramatic ways, increasing genetic diversity. Surely we don't want to promote diversity by finding novel ways to pollute. Biodiversity can increase as a sick ecosystem decays, so sustainability is a crucial consideration. Below some threshold more radiation increases biodiversity. But is it worth more mutant babies? So changes in absolute quantities of biodiversity might not be a good way to measure the health of the environment. Optimal biodiversity probably depends on for who, and is different each species and niche.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Perhaps not because microscopic organisms can re-evolve faster.
- jes 5y ago
  Do you think questions like that can ever be answered? There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese Farmer," by Alan Watts. The gist of the video is that reality is so unimaginably complex that we cannot know if a given change is going to be a net positive (over what time frame?) or a net negative (again, over what time frame?). This pretty much informs my thinking these days, and when something happens that I notice, I find myself more able to refrain from labeling it as either good or bad.
  - JTon 5y ago
nahuel0x 5y ago
This is a disaster, and we must be deeply ashamed as species for it, but I think in many of us there is some consolation in the implicit thinking "ok, we are destroying our planet life, but there are other planets and surely there are many biodiversity pockets out there in the Universe". Or.. "ok, maybe we are transforming the Earth to a naked rock, but let's wait a couple of billion years and surely there will be another rich ecosystem as the one who made us". Now consider the following: we don't really know if that is true. We can be materialists, atheists, and post-copernicus evolutionists, but we don't have the confirmation there is life in other planet. Also, we are not really sure if the process can be repeated, we can guess it can be, but we don't have the confirmation. So maybe we are extinguishing all the biodiversity emerged through eons of evolution on the only planet in the entire Universe with life on it. Just imagine that as a possibility, because life in other planets/future is only a theoretical idea, not a known fact. We simply don't know, maybe we are burning the only chance for life and his richness in all the eternity. In any case, we need to change.
- defterGoose 5y ago
  Thank you for articulating this. I agree that anyone who doesnt feel deeply ashamed of this fact at this point in time has never spent time in actual nature; "outside" doesnt cut it. In addition, they are deluding themselves that "someone will come up with something", or are just incapable of truly internalizing the truth that (at least for the boomer generation) "we are fucking this up/have already fucked it up". Its a basic defense mechanism. I encourage anyone who has thought deeply and actually cares about these issues to read Jem Bendell's "Deep Adaptation" paper.
- notdang 5y ago
  What is wrong in an universe without life?
  - javajosh 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with a universe without life, just as there's nothing wrong with a world without life. Mars, for example, is without life (as far as we know). Does that mean there's something wrong with Mars? I don't think so, in the same way there's nothing "wrong" with the Sun because it doesn't support life. That said, Earth's biosphere is a unique system that has endured terrible degradation in the past; the fact that so-called "rational animals" would cause it, not even out of malice but sheer intellectual laziness and moral cowardice, seems to me to define a very clear test of our collective mettle as humans. Right now, we're failing, and accelerating the failure.
ericmcer 5y ago
I am kinda tired of this narrative that I am part of some responsible group and should walk through life riddled with guilt about each plastic bottle or gallon of gas that my existence consumes. I am not saying you should be throwing soda cans from your Hummer, but I feel a sort of fatalism around environmental issues and don't think individual self-deprivations is going to fix it. The people with actual power in the richest nations don't seem to care, and most developing nations don't even have it on their radar as an issue to care about. I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.
- javajosh 5y ago
  Guilt doesn't solve anything, and individual action doesn't solve anything either. The real solution is almost certainly political, and quite nasty.
  - just_one_time_ 5y ago
    If rich people, like the guys here, stopped flying they could solve a lot of problems
  - heterodoxxed 5y ago
    Public transportation, requiring biodegradable packaging and transitioning our energy grid doesn't have to be nasty.
    - javajosh 5y ago
      No, but its certainly not enough.
      - heterodoxxed 5y ago
        Restricting the greatest excesses of the rich and militaries (the US specifically) and some form of aggressive carbon sequestration, but I don't think any of that requires some kind of Year Zero political program.
arvinsim 5y ago
Sadly, it can be summed in just three words, “it’s just business”.
mybrid 5y ago
Genetic engineering is something that does not get taken into account in these dystopian predictions. Humans can learn to accelerate the evolutionary process as well as reconstitute extinct species. This is especially true if we consider the rate of technological change and that natural evolution moves at a snail pace.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  We can't just flip a few genes around and call it a day. We don't know how to engineer a sustainable food web from scratch. We can hardly balance our own artificial ecosystems without tons of intervention. What good is biodiversity if it's just a planet-sized zoo?
JohnnyGamer003 5y ago
I honestly don't think we need to be so pessimistic about this issue, since we can all do something to enact change, no matter how small! This past year with the pandemic, I think we've all learned the importance and value of nature and how we need to take care - what takes care of us! I also go by the motto that we don't need to change the world necessarily, start with creating the change in yourself by noticing where you can be more environmentally friendly, maybe pick up a scrap/junk on the sidewalk wherever you can, and it doesn't have to be a mandatory thing that weighs you down, more like a change of lifestyle! Once we start changing one by one, then collectively others may notice and follow along
nickpp 5y ago
With genetical engineering we'll create an infinite number of new species better adapted to the changing environment and also more useful to us. In just a few years, not millions.

308 points by acdanger 5y ago

It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire. It’s a way to explore. Now that I’m older I’m much more mindful about what I break. Are we collectively too child-like as a species?

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rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice. Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).
- giantg2 5y ago
  I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
  - genericone 5y ago
    Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
    - Retric 5y ago
      That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
  - simonsarris 5y ago
    minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
  - kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
    You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
    - fooker 5y ago
      And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
      - ljp_206 5y ago
        Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
  - DeRock 5y ago
    This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
- jtolmar 5y ago
  Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
  - nahuel0x 5y ago
    Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.
est31 5y ago
> Are we collectively too child-like as a species? See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc). Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.
- kiliantics 5y ago
  You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the glass")
- watwut 5y ago
  No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult. Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology, wish to prove himself or practical need.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    The child in this metaphor refers to adults too.
sergiotapia 5y ago
I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?
- asdfman123 5y ago
  I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy. And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us. But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
- cwillu 5y ago
  Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?
TooKool4This 5y ago
I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent. But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.
asdfman123 5y ago
It's not that we're childish. It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd behave similarly. We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being economic automata who simply react to their circumstances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    You should summarize what you mean instead of linking to an academic article. It's clearer that way.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have cited this paper quite a few times because I think it offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've observed informally, that being that there's a few distinctly different personality types that pursue quite different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks, optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but I've found it an extremely useful model.
      - pie420 5y ago
        That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc. The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc. "Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.
forgotmypw77 5y ago
Yes, it does make me think of a child sitting in a sandbox, claiming it as ,,mine,, without knowing the first thing about how it came to be.
rhacker 5y ago
Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  > Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth. Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor. But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them). It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
- staticman2 5y ago
  In TNG most humans act like a different species altogether: almost angel-like beings who don't experience the broad range of negetive human emotions. I see no evidence that we are evolving in that direction in real life.
raffraffraff 5y ago
I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then heat it to 1700°c and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that pane with a rock? Takes an instant.
Black101 5y ago
> It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It builds itself...
xg15 5y ago
I think "childlike" is too friendly. Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value". This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers. /Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.

josefresco 5y ago

Reminds me of some of the issues fictional humanity deals with in The Ministry for the Future - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

jelsisi 5y ago
I really enjoyed the beginning of that book, but it had way to much fluff in it and I'd say I finished it in disappointment. Can't say I would recommend it.
- josefresco 5y ago
  So much this. I'm 3/4 of the way through and am really struggling to finish despite starting strong. I'm now skimming over the "policy" chapters and am focusing on the character action. Oh well, it's happened before with KSR.
- rmcpherson 5y ago
  It is definitely typical Kim Stanley Robinson in that it explores large ideas and delves into details that don't pertain directly to the plot. As a rumination on a possible non-dystopian future, it is excellent and I highly recommend it. The wandering plot and digressions into hikes in the Swiss Alps is also quintessentially Robinsonian. I loved it but you have to know what to expect.

mc32 5y ago

Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support billions more people, so we don't have to be careful about growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault. Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws around managing natural resources... But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn't live on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened. Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care? Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability as a species.

maze-le 5y ago
The planet can not support "billions more", it can barely support the billions we have. Maybe on a subsistence level of a basic minimum nutritional value it could theoretically, but not with industrial products, medicine, education, transportation infrastructure, energy, communications equipment and so on.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Cultivated land is 11.6% of the world, and we can improve the agricultural output of land by a large margin just by adding greenhouses. PV could supply each and every person in a well-fed global population of 10 billion roughly a thousand times the current power use of the average American today — less if you limit your PV to just deserts, but still far more than enough for “modern” lifestyles.
rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Why limit that to survivability? If you like to do something (say, eating sugar and reproducing), do stop doing it right before it kills you, or when you believe it's reasonable to stop because this particular things is not the only thing you care about? We can perfectly stop destroying our habitat because it would kill us and because it makes no sense to do so. We're just addicted to things that kills us and we should get this addiction under control simply because it's an addiction (compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences). Addictions are bad for you, even when they don't kill you.

newaccount2021 5y ago

let's burn my last karma on fire: these stories just give HN an opportunity to hem and haw and wax philosophical...but then we all go back to lifestyles that result in us being in the top 1% of polluters and wasters on the planet today and the top .001% of polluters and wasters in history.

Ancalagon 5y ago

The article mentions the Yucatan asteroid setoff a 5 million-year extinction event. I'm assuming this was due to a slow-reacting chain reaction of extinction events in the ecosphere? It wasn't actually directly due to the asteroid right? Those immediate effects would have gone away in a few decades I'm assuming?

jacobolus 5y ago
The immediate effects were almost unimaginably dramatic. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...

rexreed 5y ago

A biological blink of an eye.

bulletsvshumans 5y ago
And unfortunately millions of years in human eye blinks.
- rexreed 5y ago
  We are but fruit fly lifespans in the grand schemes of the universe. We will be here and then gone and the earth will rotate away. All our damage to the ecosystem will be folded in like the asteroid that impacted tens of millions of years ago and we'll be fossils for others to discover. I wonder what they'll make of our cryptocurrency farms.
  - havelhovel 5y ago
    Well in the meantime I derive enjoyment from the animals and plants around me and believe this finding helps explain why similarly present-minded folks should be concerned about the survival of what remains.
anonporridge 5y ago
True, but also, we only have several hundred million years left until Earth becomes too hot for life.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand years. Funny how writers like to project some things into the future (“millions of years to recover”) but still assume that technology and society will just remain the same.

wellpast 5y ago
Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and multiply for thousands of years.
  - ewmiller 5y ago
    Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      On a biological timeline, it’s almost completely irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in small tribal groups. I think we’ll be fine. Besides that, most people in cities already live in a biodiversity wasteland.
      - cableshaft 5y ago
        So you're basically just arguing that technically humans will not go extinct, as long as there's at least two of them out there. Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most of us would prefer not to live or have children or grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population decline, which would still be 76 million people at the current population count.

esarbe 5y ago

I'm not so much worried about the biodiversity as such - earth will recover, and rather quickly I think. Humans may be a very peculiar extinction event, but just one among many. But I do think that the loss of biodiversity is also telegraphing troubles for humanity, or at least the experiment in civilization we're currently all taking part in. The predatory ecosystem exploitation that we have been doing for the past two hundred years is catching up with us . And if we want to retain any chance to continue this experiment a few hundred years, we seriously have to change our approach in evaluating the worth that the earth's eco system has for us. You know, our very own life support system. Currently we're losing about 30% of animal population every ten years. This cannot continue. We're wrecking the place. We are killing ourselves. (My pet theory? This is the great filter!)

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Correct. The earth doesn’t care about the ecosystem. That is a human concept. The earth spent millions of years as a barren volcanic wasteland. We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans, not because our anthropomorphic concept of Mother Earth is crying.
- ewmiller 5y ago
  Well you can still empathize with the pain that other feeling, conscious creatures on Earth experience as a direct result of our actions. It's one thing if a meteor strikes the earth and you simply witness a mass extinction, it's another if you ARE the meteor. We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans AND because it affects other living things which also have emotions and feel pain and will suffer as a result of what we've done. "Mother Earth" as a concept doesn't exist but other animals do. I think that's what people usually mean by that phrase.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Yes, that is true. I meant to include animals in my statement too. I was mostly criticizing the idea that the Earth is somehow suffering. The Earth will be just fine.

imhoguy 5y ago

Unfortunatelly we are (in) ongoing extinction "event" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

slver 5y ago

It won't recover, our species won. It'll be just us, and whatever we eat and keep as pets. So prepare for a world of cats, dogs, cows, chickens and pigs. I don't like it but that's the natural course we're taking.

trhway 5y ago
Human species have lost to each other several times. Those "us" may be pretty different. Homo cyborgus, no need for meat, direct neural communication link to cats, dogs, polar bears, bee hives, ...
- slver 5y ago
  We're past that, our cultural evolution is orders of magnitude faster, and we're otherwise evolving as a single species. That species will change slowly, but I doubt we'd "lose to ourselves". We'd need some cultural event that segregates us rather drastically for us to split into subspecies again and compete. This will happen if in theory we populate the Solar System, but since there are no habitable planets, that'd rather remain in the realms of limited research and small bases.
  - trhway 5y ago
    just imagine some embryo DNA modification which as a side effect comes without "backward compatibility" - i.e. impossibility to procreate (or more probably - with very bad results in case of procreation) between the people whose parents were able to afford the modification and the ones whose didn't. That is all it takes. No need for hundred thousand years of evolution.
    - slver 5y ago
      Sounds plausible I guess.
mathieubordere 5y ago
You're forgetting the pests.

williesleg 5y ago

Fucking dinosaurs are dead. Never going to get them back thanks to assholes burning shit in caves.

hmmokidk 5y ago

In economic terms. This is an externality. The assumption, imho, is that others can profit from externalities. This externality may endanger our grandchildren and possibly even ourselves.

hedora 5y ago
Environmental collapse is already endangering us.

teekert 5y ago

Only millions? What are we taking about then! Who cares, there is more time between the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus than there is between us and T-Rex (about 100 million more). And we have about 4000-5000 million years before the sun gives out.

akurtzhs 5y ago
The sun won't give out until much longer, but life as we know it has far less than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Earth,_the_Solar_System_and_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear... Look at 500–600 million years. The sun's increasing luminosity means rising temperatures and falling CO2, which means no plant life at some point. The high estimate for plant and animal life is 1.2 billion years. The sun swells to a red giant around 5 billion, swallows the Earth around 7.5, and shrinks to a white dwarf around 8.
- raflemakt 5y ago
  I'm not convinced that the Sun's expansion will be the demise of intelligent life on this planet. If there is a civilization of intelligent beings here ten million years in the future, let alone 100 or 1000, I'm tempted to think it would be trivial for them to A) Move the Earth farther out, or maybe better B) Change the composition of the sun to prolong its life (i.e. remove helium and other heavier elements with... the Sun's own energy).
  - teekert 5y ago
    Us SFIA fans aren’t worried ;) [0]. We’ll be black hole farming with our minds and every living thing ever sustained virtually at landauer limit efficiency up to 10^53 years from now. [0] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

achenatx 5y ago

This should be retitled to be Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our models suggest that it could take millions of years for biodiversity to recover.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Experiments are too costly and the conclusions aren’t sexy enough for clickbait articles. Science is all about computer models now.
hh3k0 5y ago
> Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our models suggest … That's how science often works, yes. I'd wager most people are aware of that and won't expect a prophecy when confronted with such headlines.
- tryonenow 5y ago
  You'd be overestimating the average person's ability. Laypeople know virtually nothing about computational modeling. I can't find the famous quote, but it is dangerous to consume such research uncritically because with enough degrees of freedom you can model virtually anything while also backfitting your ground truth. And these models are almost always composed of numerous nonlinear parameters which may be adjusted within wide ranges, individually seemingly reasonable, but with potentially nonsensical and/or trivially biasable results.
StrictDabbler 5y ago
A better title would be "Computer biodiversity models suggest how many millions of years it may take to recover." It's impossible that it will take less than millions of years.
pvaldes 5y ago
Must be noted that the empirical observations of fossil biodiversity in the last five mass extinctions support the same idea.

loriverkutya 5y ago

It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again, luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next time evolution comes up with something psychologically better suited for long term survival then our own species since we are so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as some kind of higher being who is independent from the consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time to start over, I’m sad that we failing to realise we don’t.

613style 5y ago
Evolution better get to work fast. We only have around 500 million years until the sun's increasing luminosity leaves Earth uninhabitable.
- mdavidn 5y ago
  The extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs was "just" 66 million years ago.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Hopefully humanity will have developed enough space exploration technology to get off this rock by then.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    Half a billion years is probably enough time to figure out how to jump start a star.
    - imoverclocked 5y ago
      It would be except the longevity of any human civilization will probably stop that from happening.

betwixthewires 5y ago

While I don't necessarily doubt any of the data cited in this article, this article isn't science, it is fearmongering propaganda. Not that we shouldn't be fearful. But the information should instill fear if there is something to be afraid of, not articles like this that are almost entirely devoid of information. Terrible, terrible article.

vagrantJin 5y ago

The sooner the "we" stops pretending to care, the better for everyone involved. The environment is going to take a beating for as long as humans walk the earth. No one here actually gives a rat's tail about the environment. If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability and we all know where that road goes.

esarbe 5y ago
It is pretty obvious that nobody cares. Most of the people are doing an amazing job of just filtering the fact of mankind's destructive impact out of their daily lives. And others -- like many on HN -- have an almost religious believe in a technical miracle. The Elon will save us all. Don't expect any talk of accountability. That would mean biting the bullet of accepting that we -- as a species -- are seriously messing up and are in the act of driving the car against the iceberg. Or something like that. Better not to rock the cradle and just enjoy the last few good decades we have. The pest on all our children, no concern for them is going to ruin this party!
neolog 5y ago
> If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability Could you elaborate on what accountability means to you?

anigbrowl 5y ago

A periodic reminder that if you're concerned with climate/biodiversity issues, it's increasingly a waste of time to work on persuading skeptics and fatalists (who either eny it's happening or say it doesn't matter for philosophical reasons). Some are sincere,s ome are not, but the pursuit of persuasion and consensus is ultimately founded on the hope that the 'marketplace of ideas' will move to a new stable equilibrium; available evidence suggests that this may take longer than changes in the underlying conditions, such that the more effort you spend in arguing the worse worse the problem will get. I suggest it's better to pursue unilateral policy goals wherever possible.

efields 5y ago
Totes. Our biome is an externality to most markets right now. It’s simply not a factor in day to day business.
tryonenow 5y ago
Right, screw discussion or examination of contradicting evidence. Your side is unquestioningly right, double down and ram your policies down everyone else's throats, regardless of the potential downsides. This is a recipe for authoritarian tyranny. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. This kind of closed mindedness is far more dangerous than any likely impending climate change.

hyko 5y ago

No it won’t. Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike the last one? Anyone? Yes, that’s right: Homo Sapiens. If we want biodiversity, we’re not going to sit around smelling our farts for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.

asdff 5y ago
This is why it's been so dangerous to allow anti GMO rhetoric into our grocery stores. It's normalized. GMOs are seen like harmful pesticides to the lay public, but GMOs are what we will need to rely upon if we are to ensure our grandchildren don't go hungry. We will have to introduce biodiversity ourselves as we lose it in our monocropped cultivars.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  A) I don’t think that’s true. GMOs are not the kind of biodiversity we need. We can move to mechanized automated organic farming and get all the biodiversity we need from healthy soil and diverse planting regimes. I am working on this problem and making our solution open source so the technology can quickly spread. [1] B) In practice GMOs are used to enable massive use of harmful biocides (glyphosate) which poison the soil, the workers, and our food. So the idea that they are like pesticides is not exactly correct but it’s not far off. [2] C) GMO patents have allowed large firms to extort farmers with predatory business models and Monsanto/Bayer for example have filed hundreds of lawsuits against farmers who accidentally had some contamination with their “patented” seeds. [3] GMOs are not a cure all. The whole reason we have problems in farming is our failure to see the whole system of life and our reliance on pinpoint “solutions” that only cause more problems. [1] https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk [2] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-monsantos-glyphosate-most-heavily-used-weed-killer-history https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-monsant... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
  - asdff 5y ago

cabaalis 5y ago

It appears this analysis is limited to freshwater species. I wish that werent the case. It would be nice to be able to share the "higher rate than the extinction of the dinosaurs event" statement without that big old "but" attached.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Note that a declining number of species doesn't mean fewer living animals. As the world globalizes, 10 isolated bird species occupying an ecological niche can be replaced by 1 species across the planet, without there being fewer birds total.

rabidrat 5y ago
And millions of animal species occupying thousands of ecological niches are being replaced by 10 species across the planet: humans, the animals that humans eat, and the animals humans keep as pets. Even if the quantity of biomass is relatively constant, I think we can all agree that a planet with only humans and cows and chickens is a pretty bleak outcome.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  I expect the endgame here is the whole planet is a managed park. We'll still keep Yellowstone and Serengeti looking as is, but there won't be any true wilderness. There is nothing unsustainable about this, but I agree that it is quite dull.

DickingAround 5y ago

I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so powerful. We out compete everything. And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from the past.

macksd 5y ago
>> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we probably do it at the optimal rate. What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together. We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

isoprophlex 5y ago

our burden raised the world set free the earth returns to land and sea our buildings burned and highways gone I love my friends and everyone but we've had our chance let's move aside let time wash us out with the tide

ThomPete 5y ago

99.9% of all species ever existed are gone today. Earth have been through 5 mass extinctions. Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, nature gives us a hostile and unsafe environment we make safe through our impact of the planet. Yes we need to get better at many things and luckily we are, but the idea that humans are the destroyers of biodiversity is simply untrue. We might in fact be the only species who will be able to not only avoid mass-extinction but also rebuild biodiversity. No matter what. Nature doesn't care about us and have no issue adding us to the 99.9% if we don't learn how to control and manipulate the planet and our nearby solar system.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Walk more. Eat less meat. Live a more spartan life. Consume more porn and have less actual sex. (Because sex leads to babies. Duh.) Someone should start a religion around those tenets. This stuff is not hard, you just have to apparently con people into living right or some nonsense.

watwut 5y ago
> Live a more spartan life. You mean, beat up whoever is weaker then you and take kids out of families to indoctrinate them into violent dictatorship body? Have them kill slave as rite of passage? Could not resist, was reading about sparta lately.
achillesheels 5y ago
Comments like yours make me thankful I am American so I am given the liberty to defend my life (and I will pass on the porn and have more sex, thanks.)
- ativzzz 5y ago
  You should probably listen to him and walk more since you're much more likely to die of heart disease than you are from anyone trying to take your life.
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    How much do you squat brah?
- deleted 5y ago
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playingchanges 5y ago

I wonder, how exactly do we determine the ideal amount of biodiversity for the planet / a given region? Outside of ideas like ‘we should not exterminate entire species’ and ‘we should not hunt so much that we ruin hunting grounds for future generations’ it does not seem obvious to me. I guess maybe we are so far gone that the only thought is to damage control.

hirundo 5y ago
And do microscopic and subsurface diversity count? If they do the proportion of anthropogenic diversity decline might look a lot smaller. Or do we only care about visible flora and fauna for this purpose? Human pollution creates new niches that didn't exist before. Microbes in particular can adapt to them in dramatic ways, increasing genetic diversity. Surely we don't want to promote diversity by finding novel ways to pollute. Biodiversity can increase as a sick ecosystem decays, so sustainability is a crucial consideration. Below some threshold more radiation increases biodiversity. But is it worth more mutant babies? So changes in absolute quantities of biodiversity might not be a good way to measure the health of the environment. Optimal biodiversity probably depends on for who, and is different each species and niche.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Perhaps not because microscopic organisms can re-evolve faster.
jes 5y ago
Do you think questions like that can ever be answered? There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese Farmer," by Alan Watts. The gist of the video is that reality is so unimaginably complex that we cannot know if a given change is going to be a net positive (over what time frame?) or a net negative (again, over what time frame?). This pretty much informs my thinking these days, and when something happens that I notice, I find myself more able to refrain from labeling it as either good or bad.
- JTon 5y ago

nahuel0x 5y ago

This is a disaster, and we must be deeply ashamed as species for it, but I think in many of us there is some consolation in the implicit thinking "ok, we are destroying our planet life, but there are other planets and surely there are many biodiversity pockets out there in the Universe". Or.. "ok, maybe we are transforming the Earth to a naked rock, but let's wait a couple of billion years and surely there will be another rich ecosystem as the one who made us". Now consider the following: we don't really know if that is true. We can be materialists, atheists, and post-copernicus evolutionists, but we don't have the confirmation there is life in other planet. Also, we are not really sure if the process can be repeated, we can guess it can be, but we don't have the confirmation. So maybe we are extinguishing all the biodiversity emerged through eons of evolution on the only planet in the entire Universe with life on it. Just imagine that as a possibility, because life in other planets/future is only a theoretical idea, not a known fact. We simply don't know, maybe we are burning the only chance for life and his richness in all the eternity. In any case, we need to change.

defterGoose 5y ago
Thank you for articulating this. I agree that anyone who doesnt feel deeply ashamed of this fact at this point in time has never spent time in actual nature; "outside" doesnt cut it. In addition, they are deluding themselves that "someone will come up with something", or are just incapable of truly internalizing the truth that (at least for the boomer generation) "we are fucking this up/have already fucked it up". Its a basic defense mechanism. I encourage anyone who has thought deeply and actually cares about these issues to read Jem Bendell's "Deep Adaptation" paper.
notdang 5y ago
What is wrong in an universe without life?
- javajosh 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with a universe without life, just as there's nothing wrong with a world without life. Mars, for example, is without life (as far as we know). Does that mean there's something wrong with Mars? I don't think so, in the same way there's nothing "wrong" with the Sun because it doesn't support life. That said, Earth's biosphere is a unique system that has endured terrible degradation in the past; the fact that so-called "rational animals" would cause it, not even out of malice but sheer intellectual laziness and moral cowardice, seems to me to define a very clear test of our collective mettle as humans. Right now, we're failing, and accelerating the failure.

ericmcer 5y ago

I am kinda tired of this narrative that I am part of some responsible group and should walk through life riddled with guilt about each plastic bottle or gallon of gas that my existence consumes. I am not saying you should be throwing soda cans from your Hummer, but I feel a sort of fatalism around environmental issues and don't think individual self-deprivations is going to fix it. The people with actual power in the richest nations don't seem to care, and most developing nations don't even have it on their radar as an issue to care about. I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.

javajosh 5y ago
Guilt doesn't solve anything, and individual action doesn't solve anything either. The real solution is almost certainly political, and quite nasty.
- just_one_time_ 5y ago
  If rich people, like the guys here, stopped flying they could solve a lot of problems
- heterodoxxed 5y ago
  Public transportation, requiring biodegradable packaging and transitioning our energy grid doesn't have to be nasty.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    No, but its certainly not enough.
    - heterodoxxed 5y ago
      Restricting the greatest excesses of the rich and militaries (the US specifically) and some form of aggressive carbon sequestration, but I don't think any of that requires some kind of Year Zero political program.

arvinsim 5y ago

Sadly, it can be summed in just three words, “it’s just business”.

mybrid 5y ago

Genetic engineering is something that does not get taken into account in these dystopian predictions. Humans can learn to accelerate the evolutionary process as well as reconstitute extinct species. This is especially true if we consider the rate of technological change and that natural evolution moves at a snail pace.

EamonnMR 5y ago
We can't just flip a few genes around and call it a day. We don't know how to engineer a sustainable food web from scratch. We can hardly balance our own artificial ecosystems without tons of intervention. What good is biodiversity if it's just a planet-sized zoo?

JohnnyGamer003 5y ago

I honestly don't think we need to be so pessimistic about this issue, since we can all do something to enact change, no matter how small! This past year with the pandemic, I think we've all learned the importance and value of nature and how we need to take care - what takes care of us! I also go by the motto that we don't need to change the world necessarily, start with creating the change in yourself by noticing where you can be more environmentally friendly, maybe pick up a scrap/junk on the sidewalk wherever you can, and it doesn't have to be a mandatory thing that weighs you down, more like a change of lifestyle! Once we start changing one by one, then collectively others may notice and follow along

nickpp 5y ago

With genetical engineering we'll create an infinite number of new species better adapted to the changing environment and also more useful to us. In just a few years, not millions.