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I’m not sure it is arrogant. Arrogant would be saying we have some divine right or special capacity that places us at the center of this. I think we’ve gotten

I’m not sure it is arrogant. Arrogant would be saying we have some divine right or special capacity that places us at the center of this. I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet. We don’t necessarily deserve this role. I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years. But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade. If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that. If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for? To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets. I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people." > my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade. This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities. Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.
- courgette 4y ago
  To clarify; human are not part of the environment? What is setting us apart exactly ? I suspect the fact that we use various tools. But at the end of the day we need food, light and water.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  It's just stupid Nihilism in an attempt to seem cool. It's putting lipstick on the pig of just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem. There's a lot of money in ignoring the problem, so a lot of pressure by certain groups to do so.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  Agreed, I suspect we are closer to being on the same page than it originally seemed. I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there. It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested. Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement. One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.” The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems. You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds. To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently. You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc. I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.

whimsicalism 4y ago

Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people." > my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade. This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities. Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.

courgette 4y ago
To clarify; human are not part of the environment? What is setting us apart exactly ? I suspect the fact that we use various tools. But at the end of the day we need food, light and water.
mrguyorama 4y ago
It's just stupid Nihilism in an attempt to seem cool. It's putting lipstick on the pig of just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem. There's a lot of money in ignoring the problem, so a lot of pressure by certain groups to do so.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
Agreed, I suspect we are closer to being on the same page than it originally seemed. I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there. It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested. Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement. One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.” The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems. You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds. To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently. You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc. I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.