7 ms·

any ideas on how to stop?

epgui 4y ago
We need to better price in the cost of destroying ecosystems-- think like we're doing with the carbon pricing, but much broader in scope. Basically what the "E" in "ESG" should stand for, if the system made sense. And we need international, cross-party alignment on this. I'm not extremely optimistic on our ability to do what it takes.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
You could kill all life on Earth, then there'd be no mass extinctions after that. You could put all animals in zoos and maintain their populations at a constant level but that's not a 100% guarantee. Best way would be to continue advancing human society so that we reach a state of such abundance that no one on Earth needs to put undue pressure on wild populations of animals while at the same time achieving a mastery of the natural world that would allow us to avert any major disasters that might befall the Earth such as asteroid impacts, coronal mass ejections, super volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, rogue black holes, and the death of the sun. Look sharp, we've got a lot of work ahead of us!
- defaulter4once 4y ago
- qwytw 4y ago
  You're assuming that almost all of those wild animal species won't be extinct by that point?
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I'm talking about future mass extinctions. The hard fact of life on Earth is that species die, we've had several mass extinctions (defined as >75% of species going extinct) but there is always a background extinction rate. That background rate is conservatively estimated to be 130 vertebrate species every 100 years. The reason people are saying we are at the beginning of another mass extinction event caused by human activity is because we have apparently accelerated that rate. I say we are at the beginning because as it stands about 1% to 2% of vertebrate animals that were present throughout human history have now gone extinct. We have a fair ways to go before we hit mass extinction levels but there are a significant number of species that are threatened or endangered. The confounding issue is that we are studying this problem and also have been mitigating it for at least 50 years if not longer if you count less organized attempts at conservation. Personally, I don't think we are going to continue to increase the rate of extinction as long as we continue to modernize the rest of the world. As people are lifted out of poverty they have more time to spend worrying about their environment and the animals that inhabit it. The best thing we can do is to make sure that no one on Earth lives in poverty that requires them to cut down and burn wood for fuel and heat, make sure they have fertilizer so they can get the best crop yields out of limited land without having to slash and burn wildlands, have access to refrigeration so they don't waste l3% or more of the food they grow, and have proper infrastructure so they can manage their waste water and garbage disposal without polluting natural water ways and the land surrounding urban centers.
- aew4ytasghe5 4y ago
  The road to hell was paved with good intentions.
- butMebbe 4y ago
  How do we know material abundance (I’m assuming that’s what you mean) “is the way”? Perhaps that’s not what you mean but it’s not an unreasonable way of describing contemporary zeitgeist. A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up. IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics. It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines. But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    If you think there are very long term existential threats we can’t protect against without massive technological advances, or if there might be existential threats we don’t know about yet, you probably don’t want a relatively static society regardless of how internally stable and comfortable it seems to be. We probably need to up our game a lot to even be safe from existential threats we know about, like asteroid/comet impacts. And what about supernovae? And what about stuff that might be even less frequent that we don’t even know about? I guess what I’m saying is that optimizing for stability and comfort almost certainly is at odds with optimizing for longevity. Unless we eventually have some good reason to think that we’ve discovered all the long-term existential threats and are protected against them.
    - pmitow 4y ago
      Human civilization is only 6,000 years old. Worrying about supernovae and comets is really jumping the gun. Our biggest danger -- by many orders of magnitude -- is ourselves.
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        Everything I said applies just as well to existential threats caused by humans!
Ancalagon 4y ago
- mc32 4y ago
  The P-word. No on wants to say the P-word and demand ZPG worldwide. Obviously this would be a planned and humane policy, unlike the forced and inhumane policies of the one child policy of the CCP. Education, opportunity, access to contraceptives as well as ideological propaganda.
  - Ancalagon 4y ago
    I say "don't have kids" half-heartedly because I actually want them. But I also understand that having them is perpetuating the system which got us here in the first place. You're kidding yourself if you believe otherwise, the way developing nations are coming up should be more than enough evidence of that. If it comes between living rich but destroying the environment, and living in poverty (or really even just less-rich) but keeping nature preserved, people will choose the former every single time.
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      If you want kids and don't eventually have them purely for this reason then you'll regret it doubly. The more conscientious people who have kids should at least maintain the number of conscientious people in the world (so I believe anyway, potentially romantically incorrectly). Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).
      - sammalloy 4y ago
        Idiocracy hypothesis says otherwise. The least educated and intelligent have the most numbers of offspring.
        BLKNSLVR 4y ago
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
- sensitivefrost 4y ago
  "Do we need to stop something called a 'mass extinction'" is certainly a take.
  - ativzzz 4y ago
    Just like a fire is part of a forest's ecosystem it's possible that a mass extinction is part of the Earth's natural lifecycle and is beneficial in the very very long term
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      Are we happy, however, with anything that's beneficial to Earth's long term natural cycle if it happens to come with our own potential / likely extinction? (or at least a very heavy hit to the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed). I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend as opposed to the environment in and of itself. It's my enjoyment of the environment and the wonder of its variation that is something valuable to lose, but it's loss is also an existential threat to, basically, me and all those I care about in the universe.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend I never thought I'd see a real-life version of the legendary Churchill quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-prepositi...
        BLKNSLVR 4y ago
        It didn't start that way, but I feel that attempts at profundity require adherence to such rules, and so I edited it thusly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
simlevesque 4y ago
Incredibly massive decrease in GDP. It'll happen regardless.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
end capitalism and establish especifist anarchism
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  there's no technology solution that comes fast enough in an economic growth at any cost technocracy. graeber/wengrow already did the legwork on finding alternatives to be possible without needing to undo discovery of agriculture or unwind to smaller societies.

We need to better price in the cost of destroying ecosystems-- think like we're doing with the carbon pricing, but much broader in scope. Basically what the "E" in "ESG" should stand for, if the system made sense. And we need international, cross-party alignment on this. I'm not extremely optimistic on our ability to do what it takes.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

You could kill all life on Earth, then there'd be no mass extinctions after that. You could put all animals in zoos and maintain their populations at a constant level but that's not a 100% guarantee. Best way would be to continue advancing human society so that we reach a state of such abundance that no one on Earth needs to put undue pressure on wild populations of animals while at the same time achieving a mastery of the natural world that would allow us to avert any major disasters that might befall the Earth such as asteroid impacts, coronal mass ejections, super volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, rogue black holes, and the death of the sun. Look sharp, we've got a lot of work ahead of us!

defaulter4once 4y ago
qwytw 4y ago
You're assuming that almost all of those wild animal species won't be extinct by that point?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I'm talking about future mass extinctions. The hard fact of life on Earth is that species die, we've had several mass extinctions (defined as >75% of species going extinct) but there is always a background extinction rate. That background rate is conservatively estimated to be 130 vertebrate species every 100 years. The reason people are saying we are at the beginning of another mass extinction event caused by human activity is because we have apparently accelerated that rate. I say we are at the beginning because as it stands about 1% to 2% of vertebrate animals that were present throughout human history have now gone extinct. We have a fair ways to go before we hit mass extinction levels but there are a significant number of species that are threatened or endangered. The confounding issue is that we are studying this problem and also have been mitigating it for at least 50 years if not longer if you count less organized attempts at conservation. Personally, I don't think we are going to continue to increase the rate of extinction as long as we continue to modernize the rest of the world. As people are lifted out of poverty they have more time to spend worrying about their environment and the animals that inhabit it. The best thing we can do is to make sure that no one on Earth lives in poverty that requires them to cut down and burn wood for fuel and heat, make sure they have fertilizer so they can get the best crop yields out of limited land without having to slash and burn wildlands, have access to refrigeration so they don't waste l3% or more of the food they grow, and have proper infrastructure so they can manage their waste water and garbage disposal without polluting natural water ways and the land surrounding urban centers.
aew4ytasghe5 4y ago
The road to hell was paved with good intentions.
butMebbe 4y ago
How do we know material abundance (I’m assuming that’s what you mean) “is the way”? Perhaps that’s not what you mean but it’s not an unreasonable way of describing contemporary zeitgeist. A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up. IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics. It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines. But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  If you think there are very long term existential threats we can’t protect against without massive technological advances, or if there might be existential threats we don’t know about yet, you probably don’t want a relatively static society regardless of how internally stable and comfortable it seems to be. We probably need to up our game a lot to even be safe from existential threats we know about, like asteroid/comet impacts. And what about supernovae? And what about stuff that might be even less frequent that we don’t even know about? I guess what I’m saying is that optimizing for stability and comfort almost certainly is at odds with optimizing for longevity. Unless we eventually have some good reason to think that we’ve discovered all the long-term existential threats and are protected against them.
  - pmitow 4y ago
    Human civilization is only 6,000 years old. Worrying about supernovae and comets is really jumping the gun. Our biggest danger -- by many orders of magnitude -- is ourselves.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      Everything I said applies just as well to existential threats caused by humans!

Ancalagon 4y ago

mc32 4y ago
The P-word. No on wants to say the P-word and demand ZPG worldwide. Obviously this would be a planned and humane policy, unlike the forced and inhumane policies of the one child policy of the CCP. Education, opportunity, access to contraceptives as well as ideological propaganda.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  I say "don't have kids" half-heartedly because I actually want them. But I also understand that having them is perpetuating the system which got us here in the first place. You're kidding yourself if you believe otherwise, the way developing nations are coming up should be more than enough evidence of that. If it comes between living rich but destroying the environment, and living in poverty (or really even just less-rich) but keeping nature preserved, people will choose the former every single time.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    If you want kids and don't eventually have them purely for this reason then you'll regret it doubly. The more conscientious people who have kids should at least maintain the number of conscientious people in the world (so I believe anyway, potentially romantically incorrectly). Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      Idiocracy hypothesis says otherwise. The least educated and intelligent have the most numbers of offspring.
      - BLKNSLVR 4y ago

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

sensitivefrost 4y ago
"Do we need to stop something called a 'mass extinction'" is certainly a take.
- ativzzz 4y ago
  Just like a fire is part of a forest's ecosystem it's possible that a mass extinction is part of the Earth's natural lifecycle and is beneficial in the very very long term
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    Are we happy, however, with anything that's beneficial to Earth's long term natural cycle if it happens to come with our own potential / likely extinction? (or at least a very heavy hit to the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed). I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend as opposed to the environment in and of itself. It's my enjoyment of the environment and the wonder of its variation that is something valuable to lose, but it's loss is also an existential threat to, basically, me and all those I care about in the universe.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend I never thought I'd see a real-life version of the legendary Churchill quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-prepositi...
      - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
        It didn't start that way, but I feel that attempts at profundity require adherence to such rules, and so I edited it thusly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

simlevesque 4y ago

Incredibly massive decrease in GDP. It'll happen regardless.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

end capitalism and establish especifist anarchism

wahnfrieden 4y ago
there's no technology solution that comes fast enough in an economic growth at any cost technocracy. graeber/wengrow already did the legwork on finding alternatives to be possible without needing to undo discovery of agriculture or unwind to smaller societies.