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Technology will never replace nature, only augment. People who think wrongly will be the destroyers of nature.
by foxhop 5y ago
Technology will never replace nature, only augment. People who think wrongly will be the destroyers of nature.
- vimacs2 5y agoI'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago. Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.
- ninkendo 5y agoHumans have always been a disaster for the environment they move into. We drove mammoths to extinction over 10,000 years ago. Australia used to have large numbers of megafauna species which the aborigines killed off tens of thousands of years ago. Humans would use fire to burn their prey out of hiding (and destroying their habitat in the process), then just move off to the next habitat once everything was burned up. Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.
- vimacs2 5y agoThat humans had a major role in the extinction of wooly mammoths is likely correct. However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existed-with-the-megafauna-for-at-least-17-000-years-70589 https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe... Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature. Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies. There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-cultivated-trees/3747940.html https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...
- dtech 5y agoWhere are all the horses augmented by technology doing the plowing?
- dataflow 5y agoWell we are destroying nature. And don't forget the whole "sustainable agriculture" movement, and recent attentions brought to how plowing degrades soil, etc. (Just responding to your point; not claiming the parent is right or wrong.)
- robotastronaut 5y agoI think in your scenario we’re augmenting humans, not horses.
- nawgz 5y agoIs this a trick question? The horse does not naturally have a plough attached, as far as I am aware.
- obiwan14 5y agoThe horse or cow was not put there to plow our fields. We just figured out a way to get them to do that, until we developed enough to figure out ways to build more efficient methods.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe plough was meant to augment the nature of the soil, not the horse. The plough turns out to mine the soil, not augment it. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/967376880/new-evidence-shows-fertile-soil-gone-from-midwestern-farms https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/967376880/new-evidence-shows-...
- basilgohar 5y agoI am so glad to hear this statement from someone else. You put into words a feeling that I have have struggled to express properly. A lot of folks look at the narrow window of time of their life as evidence for very broad-sweeping claims and frankly, I find that to be very arrogant, short-sighted, and frightening. A lot of people with this kind of mindset are now in high-power positions and making decisions that we have yet to see the repercussions for, with the short-term results they can show as evidence of their success and no concern for the long-terms effects.
- foreigner 5y agoMy favourite is when they suggest replacing bees with miniature quadcopters for pollenation.