6 ms·

You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that

by titzer 2y ago

You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products. Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle. Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.
pixl97 2y ago
Until the thing you're still using as a product gets ate by this vast global cooperative.
lazide 2y ago
Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot). Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around. If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature. Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Nature absolutely does not have an equivalent because nature (sans humans) does not produce the scale nor types of refuse that we do. Superficial similarities like “sometimes it smells bad too!” are complete red herrings.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Or you just have no idea what you’re talking about, because you live in a nice cushy region. [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year. [https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/valley-fever/symptoms-causes/syc-20378761] https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/... [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20356212# https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...] [https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/Rapport%201%20-%20Arsenic%20online.pdf https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5. [https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-regional-prediction-uranium-groundwater https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...] All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more. And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas. Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’. If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature. Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me. First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!” Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!” Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.
      - lazide 2y ago
SI_Rob 2y ago
> in a vast, global cooperative I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection. But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative." The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere. And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system. It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Nature is neither cruel nor kind. Those are human concepts applied to a system that just systems.
  - titzer 2y ago
    I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.
    - SI_Rob 2y ago
      An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that. But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all. Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction). Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
shiroiushi 2y ago
I disagree. The biosphere doesn't recycle many things, and instead just buries them underground, much like humans do. Just look ores: all that stuff that humans are mining in the Earth's crust is material from ancient asteroids that struck the surface and got buried.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Indeed. Also, in line with SI_Rob's parallel comment here[0], it's worth pondering what does it bury those ores under. Answer: it's bodies. Piles and piles and piles of dead bodies, covering the resources or even becoming them (e.g. limestone). Hell, the soil - the most important, life-giving resource we need to survive - is itself made of rock mixed with lots of dead bodies. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744826
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Sure, the soil and other things are literally made of the corpses of earlier lifeforms, but that still qualifies as "recycling". I'm just addressing the fact that not everything is actually "recycled" in this way, and is simply buried, similar to a human landfill, although for nature and asteroids, the stuff wasn't used by the biosphere in the first place so it isn't exactly "garbage" in the normal sense. Stuff like lead (Pb), for instance, isn't useful to the biosphere as far as I know, and is actively harmful to lifeforms in fact. It came from asteroid impacts to my knowledge, and was buried in the ground before humans dug it up and extracted it from ore, yielding the lead pollution we have today.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I view stuff like lead less as something that biosphere couldn't figure out how to recycle yet, so it sequesters and buries it - but by the nature of how life works, if some random mutation would make lead useful as a building block (like many, many other elements are), the biosphere would happily suck all the lead back up and spread it. The pattern I see here is that over time, the biosphere makes everything it finds useful diffuse, present everywhere in low concentrations; everything else, it sequesters and stashes in high concentration in few places. So not unlike what our industry is doing, just with different materials.
scotty79 2y ago
Biosphere chucked in a hole huge amounts of materials in the past. The hole is where our coal and oil come from. Chucking our solid carbon in a hole where it can wait for the species that considers it a treasure rather than a trash is pretty reasonable approach.
Bjartr 2y ago
On the timescales of the biosphere (thousands of years) the vast majority of plastics will break down and hydrocarbons bound in them will be as bioavailable (probably moreso) than they were originally. And on the timescales evolution can operate on, something will figure out how to digest it if there's enough of it available for long enough. Which has nothing to do with whether or not we should work to solve the harm plastic presents to humanity and existing ecosystems (we should)

by titzer 2y ago

TeMPOraL 2y ago

I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle. Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.

pixl97 2y ago

Until the thing you're still using as a product gets ate by this vast global cooperative.

lazide 2y ago

Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot). Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around. If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature. Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Nature absolutely does not have an equivalent because nature (sans humans) does not produce the scale nor types of refuse that we do. Superficial similarities like “sometimes it smells bad too!” are complete red herrings.
- lazide 2y ago
  Or you just have no idea what you’re talking about, because you live in a nice cushy region. [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year. [https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/valley-fever/symptoms-causes/syc-20378761] https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/... [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20356212# https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...] [https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/Rapport%201%20-%20Arsenic%20online.pdf https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5. [https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-regional-prediction-uranium-groundwater https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...] All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more. And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas. Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’. If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature. Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me. First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!” Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!” Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.
    - lazide 2y ago

SI_Rob 2y ago

> in a vast, global cooperative I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection. But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative." The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere. And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system. It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Nature is neither cruel nor kind. Those are human concepts applied to a system that just systems.
- titzer 2y ago
  I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.
  - SI_Rob 2y ago
    An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that. But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all. Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction). Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.

shiroiushi 2y ago

I disagree. The biosphere doesn't recycle many things, and instead just buries them underground, much like humans do. Just look ores: all that stuff that humans are mining in the Earth's crust is material from ancient asteroids that struck the surface and got buried.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Indeed. Also, in line with SI_Rob's parallel comment here[0], it's worth pondering what does it bury those ores under. Answer: it's bodies. Piles and piles and piles of dead bodies, covering the resources or even becoming them (e.g. limestone). Hell, the soil - the most important, life-giving resource we need to survive - is itself made of rock mixed with lots of dead bodies. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40744826
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Sure, the soil and other things are literally made of the corpses of earlier lifeforms, but that still qualifies as "recycling". I'm just addressing the fact that not everything is actually "recycled" in this way, and is simply buried, similar to a human landfill, although for nature and asteroids, the stuff wasn't used by the biosphere in the first place so it isn't exactly "garbage" in the normal sense. Stuff like lead (Pb), for instance, isn't useful to the biosphere as far as I know, and is actively harmful to lifeforms in fact. It came from asteroid impacts to my knowledge, and was buried in the ground before humans dug it up and extracted it from ore, yielding the lead pollution we have today.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I view stuff like lead less as something that biosphere couldn't figure out how to recycle yet, so it sequesters and buries it - but by the nature of how life works, if some random mutation would make lead useful as a building block (like many, many other elements are), the biosphere would happily suck all the lead back up and spread it. The pattern I see here is that over time, the biosphere makes everything it finds useful diffuse, present everywhere in low concentrations; everything else, it sequesters and stashes in high concentration in few places. So not unlike what our industry is doing, just with different materials.

scotty79 2y ago

Biosphere chucked in a hole huge amounts of materials in the past. The hole is where our coal and oil come from. Chucking our solid carbon in a hole where it can wait for the species that considers it a treasure rather than a trash is pretty reasonable approach.

Bjartr 2y ago

On the timescales of the biosphere (thousands of years) the vast majority of plastics will break down and hydrocarbons bound in them will be as bioavailable (probably moreso) than they were originally. And on the timescales evolution can operate on, something will figure out how to digest it if there's enough of it available for long enough. Which has nothing to do with whether or not we should work to solve the harm plastic presents to humanity and existing ecosystems (we should)