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> My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was taught in scouts: “leave no trace”. This position isn't really coherent on its own, because with enoug
by burntsushi 5y ago
> My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was taught in scouts: “leave no trace”.
This position isn't really coherent on its own, because with enough time, it doesn't matter what we do: there won't be a trace of us left. So really, you need to say what you mean by "trace" and on what time scale. Your time scale can't be zero, because then we couldn't build anything. But it can't be arbitrarily long either, because then it ceases to be any kind of restraint at all.
- eutropia 5y agoI thought I laid out what I meant by that in the following paragraphs -- it was intended as a finger pointed at the moon, not a prescriptive maxim to be taken literally. A goal to work towards instead of "everyone do whatever is profitable for them in the near term"... In the very long term it would be awesome if our industrial systems emitted only manageable waste heat and the produced good, with all waste streams recycled or otherwise kept from contaminating the environment; but this is pure sci-fi utopian optimism on my part.
- burntsushi 5y agoFair enough.