[HN Gopher] Biodiversity decline will require millions of years ...
___________________________________________________________________
Biodiversity decline will require millions of years to recover
Author : acdanger
Score : 235 points
Date : 2021-05-25 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.europeanscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.europeanscientist.com)
| imhoguy wrote:
| Unfortunatelly we are (in) ongoing extinction "event"
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
| hmmokidk wrote:
| In economic terms. This is an externality. The assumption, imho,
| is that others can profit from externalities. This externality
| may endanger our grandchildren and possibly even ourselves.
| hedora wrote:
| Environmental collapse is already endangering us.
| cabaalis wrote:
| It appears this analysis is limited to freshwater species. I wish
| that werent the case. It would be nice to be able to share the
| "higher rate than the extinction of the dinosaurs event"
| statement without that big old "but" attached.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| While I don't necessarily doubt any of the data cited in this
| article, this article isn't science, it is fearmongering
| propaganda. Not that we shouldn't be fearful. But the information
| should instill fear if there is something to be afraid of, not
| articles like this that are almost entirely devoid of
| information. Terrible, terrible article.
| teekert wrote:
| Only millions? What are we taking about then! Who cares, there is
| more time between the T-Rex and the Stegosaurus than there is
| between us and T-Rex (about 100 million more). And we have about
| 4000-5000 million years before the sun gives out.
| akurtzhs wrote:
| The sun won't give out until much longer, but life as we know
| it has far less than that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...
|
| Look at 500-600 million years. The sun's increasing luminosity
| means rising temperatures and falling CO2, which means no plant
| life at some point. The high estimate for plant and animal life
| is 1.2 billion years.
|
| The sun swells to a red giant around 5 billion, swallows the
| Earth around 7.5, and shrinks to a white dwarf around 8.
| raflemakt wrote:
| I'm not convinced that the Sun's expansion will be the demise
| of intelligent life on this planet. If there is a
| civilization of intelligent beings here ten million years in
| the future, let alone 100 or 1000, I'm tempted to think it
| would be trivial for them to A) Move the Earth farther out,
| or maybe better B) Change the composition of the sun to
| prolong its life (i.e. remove helium and other heavier
| elements with... the Sun's own energy).
| teekert wrote:
| Us SFIA fans aren't worried ;) [0]. We'll be black hole
| farming with our minds and every living thing ever
| sustained virtually at landauer limit efficiency up to
| 10^53 years from now.
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
| [deleted]
| williesleg wrote:
| Fucking dinosaurs are dead. Never going to get them back thanks
| to assholes burning shit in caves.
| meristohm wrote:
| It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a
| child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a
| hammer, and to burn things with fire. It's a way to explore. Now
| that I'm older I'm much more mindful about what I break. Are we
| collectively too child-like as a species?
| rhacker wrote:
| Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in
| TNG.
|
| Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as
| an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't
| have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the
| earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky
| - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate
| them.
| to11mtm wrote:
| > Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test
| in TNG.
|
| Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to
| acquire wealth.
|
| Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing
| divides between rich and poor.
|
| But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw
| the worst things that some of our current paths are or may
| lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear
| war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so
| the rest of society doesn't have to think about them).
|
| It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we
| pass or fail.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single
| resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone
| forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt,
| what's the end-game? Nothingness?
| cwillu wrote:
| Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more
| efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a
| bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All
| of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form
| that wood came from those sources originally, and while the
| energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's
| no shortage of replacement energy.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free
| energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a
| whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the
| resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit
| a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible
| fuel.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| While this is true and a very important part of
| understanding life on Earth, our current situation as a
| species is the consequence of high energy density, non-
| renewable fossil fuels.
|
| Solar, geothermal, wave and other forms of energy will
| surely continue to allow complex systems to thrive on this
| planet, but our particular system arose out of access to an
| abundant, but ultimately limited source of high energy
| density fuels. We could essentially view our civilizations
| work as assisting in breaking down the energy gradient
| caused by having very rich stores of energy locked in the
| bonds of hydro carbons beneath the surface. As this source
| of energy is exploited and depleted too will our
| civilization and possibly species begin to break down.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Oh, I agree with that, and think it's extremely necessary
| that we transition away fossil fuels prior to the onset
| of an energy famine, which seems imminent on a decadal
| timescale. Of course we are not going to run out of stuff
| to burn in only a few decades, but insofar as burning
| stuff requires additional air conditioning we are at or
| close to a tipping point.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we
| can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star.
| Eventually there are no more stars. And then?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't care. Worrying about such long timescales induces
| a sort of paralysis. The solution to uncertainty about
| truly fundamental questions of existence is to work on
| fundamental math and physics, to figure out where matter
| comes from, whether other dimensions exist and are
| accessible etc. If you just feel discouraged by the
| pointlessness of existence, that's just a sort of vertigo
| or cognitive overload. It's better to pick something you
| like and scurry around exploring it rather than being
| stuck in intellectual catatonia. The best cure for this
| is to engage in something you find physically enjoyable;
| rebooting your sense of physical autonomy helps to shake
| off the cognitive paralysis. Go for a walk, jump around
| to loud music, eat some of your favorite food, or amuse
| yourself with comical imagery so as to alter your mood.
| The seeming futility of existence _doesn 't matter_
| because it's on too large of a scale for you to
| experience or impact; the feeling that it overrides all
| other considerations is _just a feeling_.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| Comments like this are strange since anyone with eyes can
| see that the break down of the systems we rely on is not
| some far off future event, it's happening right now and
| will likely escalate fairly rapidly in the next few
| decades.
|
| It's not surprising that people feel stress from this and
| "walking it off" is not all that effective of a
| treatment.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm responding purely to the cosmic timescale brought up
| in the grandparent comment. I'm saying it's pointless to
| obsess over cosmic entropy because it inhibits one from
| doing anything about current problems. While current
| problems are stressful, reacting to that by fretting over
| the ultimate pointlessness or unsustainability of
| existence over the lifetime of the stars/universe is an
| unhealthy response to stress. Self-care and activity are
| more effective and productive, even if those long-term
| uncertainties remain unresolved.
| coding123 wrote:
| I don't believe the entropy hypothesis. What are the chances
| given that time is infinite that this is/was the first "use"
| of the particles were using?
|
| That being said, That makes MY head hurt.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from
| entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy.
|
| And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as
| individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly
| realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what
| individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to
| mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create
| something that lasts beyond us.
|
| But facing that directly leads you to make more rational
| choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is
| temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your
| time on this planet?
| r00fus wrote:
| Relevant quote from SMAC (one of many that struck me years
| ago when I played it):
|
| "Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and
| survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to
| pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy
| controls the means of survival."
|
| CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
|
| Pretty much sums up the extreme capitalist view for me.
| makomk wrote:
| Eventually, nothingness, no matter what we do - the increase
| in entropy cannot be stopped. That's an incredibly powerful
| thing though - if you can redirect the increase in entropy so
| that it happens in a direction that causes useful order in
| one particular part of the system, you can use the increase
| in entropy to create immensely useful things. That's
| essentially what life is - a clever pump that uses the
| universe's inevitable increase in entropy to organise a small
| part of a small planet into copies of itself and increasingly
| complex systems, in much the same way as a ram pump uses the
| flow of a large amount of water downhill to pump a small
| amount up. Not forever, of course, only for a few billion
| years which in cosmic terms is almost nothing. In human terms
| though that's still a lot.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| Entropy is tricky when it comes to life and other forms of
| complexity.
|
| The book "Into the Cool" explores this is away you might find
| very interesting. It spends a lot of time exploring the
| question of how the complexity of life emerges given the
| second law of thermodynamics. It argues pretty strongly that
| the second law still rules everything but we have to look at
| larger non-equilibrium energy flows to really understand it.
|
| Energy fuels the complexity of our society, species and
| world. That wood you see burning is a solar battery in which
| complex life converted energy into hyrdocarbons over the
| period of many years.
|
| Energy shapes everything about our society and will determine
| everything about our future. We life in a technical
| wonderland as a direct consequence of our species discovering
| extremely high energy density fossil fuels not all that long
| ago.
|
| But in the end all of this complexity serves the second law
| in helping reduce energy gradients. All of that stored up
| potential energy in fossil fuels is being released into the
| environment, and we are the tools of nature to help. Thing of
| all of the energy we have spend freeing resources and energy
| from the grown. When we grow beyond the means of the energy
| supporting that system, all of it will break down.
|
| We're starting to see this now not just in climate but the
| ecosystem, our economy etc etc.
|
| The greatest illusion we've had as a species is that we are
| anything other than an expression of the second law in
| action.
| TooKool4This wrote:
| I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek
| to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have
| the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems
| imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent.
|
| But after all that, with the right perspective, what you
| describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of
| nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend
| towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to
| have an unordered system than an ordered system.
| est31 wrote:
| > Are we collectively too child-like as a species?
|
| See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5
| adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does.
| At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass
| yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who
| might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass,
| you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying
| fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc).
|
| Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species.
| Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes
| to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it
| comes to the question of its protection.
| watwut wrote:
| No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult.
| Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology,
| wish to prove himself or practical need.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The child in this metaphor refers to adults too.
| kiliantics wrote:
| You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent
| people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing
| structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such
| that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth
| (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the
| glass")
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort
| involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of
| sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then
| heat it to 1700degc and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A
| shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that
| pane with a rock? Takes an instant.
| Black101 wrote:
| > It is easier to destroy than it is to build.
|
| It builds itself...
| forgotmypw77 wrote:
| Yes, it does make me think of a child sitting in a sandbox,
| claiming it as ,,mine,, without knowing the first thing about
| how it came to be.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| It's not that we're childish.
|
| It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding
| to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd
| behave similarly.
|
| We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push
| incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that
| people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being
| economic automata who simply react to their circumstances:
| https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451
|
| Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed
| under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians
| to ignore the problem.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| You should summarize what you mean instead of linking to an
| academic article. It's clearer that way.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in
| the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have
| cited this paper quite a few times because I think it
| offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've
| observed informally, that being that there's a few
| distinctly different personality types that pursue quite
| different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty
| much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized
| in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks,
| optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of
| probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but
| I've found it an extremely useful model.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| This seems related to Evolutionarily Stable Strategy [1].
| Where certain behaviors stabilize other behavioral niches
| and prevent other behaviors from arising in a population
| until an shifting equilibrium between behaviors is
| reached.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable
| _strate...
| pie420 wrote:
| That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone
| in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them
| the same genetics and life experience that caused them to
| become a jerk, optimist, etc.
|
| The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an
| insight if they took people's souls and gave them
| hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic
| backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the
| impact that each had on how likely someone was to become
| a jerk, optimist, etc.
|
| "Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the
| only observation the paper makes, and it isn't
| particularly interesting.
| [deleted]
| xg15 wrote:
| I think "childlike" is too friendly.
|
| Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can
| consume some resource without immediate negative consequences
| for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is
| "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of
| how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not
| have a value".
|
| This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of
| tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting
| computing capacity and power.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which
| case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as
| hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers.
|
| /Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on
| transportation technologies and renewable technologies which
| will make our communities safer and more sustainable.
| [deleted]
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy
| (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to
| maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate
| profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice.
|
| Note that a business usually care about both its income
| statement _and_ its balance sheet. Society now optimizes
| everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does
| not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible
| (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is
| that those who force government to mostly care about profits
| will pretend they want society to be managed like a business
| (they 're dishonest, they don't care about society but their
| individual means).
| goatlover wrote:
| Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to
| suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now
| we have better technology and more people. We're not the only
| life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local
| environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria
| a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste
| product to eventually poison much of the environment for
| anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
| simonsarris wrote:
| minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more
| accurate.
|
| _Hominids' use of fire is historically deep and pervasive.
| Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old,
| long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to
| hominids, much of the world's flora and fauna consist of
| fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged
| by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so
| massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account
| of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop
| and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape
| architect doesn't register as it ought to in our historical
| accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over
| hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by
| "precivilized" peoples also known as "savages." In our age
| of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort
| of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects
| were momentous._
|
| _...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and
| arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids
| were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to
| drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could
| more easily be killed._
|
| From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest
| States (2017)
| goatlover wrote:
| Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some
| archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older
| than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of
| the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid
| ancestors self-domesticated.
| genericone wrote:
| Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period
| before cellulose could be digested. An organism then
| evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed
| that type of environmental possibility for all time, into
| earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological
| devastation than we'll ever accomplish.
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-
| fanta...
| Retric wrote:
| That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration
| of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is
| predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest
| cellulose isn't necessary to explain vast coal deposits
| which formed far more recently.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| We're now very efficient at destroying things (as were
| efficient at creating things as well)
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Realistically, there's very little in the economy that
| depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the
| loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some
| drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some
| tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly
| replaced by tourism to places like Vegas).
|
| But there's really no reason to believe that even a major
| loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic
| implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That
| doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring
| about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't
| rely on it.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| I suspect that we don't fully understand the extent to
| which we depend on biodiversity.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| All of our antibiotics depend on biodiversity. So does many
| of our medicines, all of our fruit. We still can't
| synthesize blood from the horseshoe crab so we need that.
| Biodiversity is how we ensure a robust civilization with
| multiple specialist humans in varieties of lifestyles and
| interests.
|
| A world without biodiversity is inflexible, therefore
| fragile. We already recreated it in minimally-diverse
| production systems, which have all been majorly screwed
| over as soon as covid required adaptation.
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and
| phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap
| and transition to a completely different mode of
| functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after
| another.
| fooker wrote:
| And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any
| point. So what?
| ljp_206 wrote:
| Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning
| intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on
| biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related
| changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be
| fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe
| hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can
| do nothing about isn't helpful.
| amelius wrote:
| Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a
| gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
| DeRock wrote:
| This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps
| we overvalue the purely economic contribution of
| biodiversity.
|
| But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the
| end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long,
| complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't
| found life any where else in the universe like it exists on
| earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we
| have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like
| humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body
| it extends from.
| ska wrote:
| > Realistically, there's very little in ...
|
| More realistically, we do not understand the impacts of
| biodiversity well enough to be confident about the economic
| impacts of biodiversity loss.
|
| These are complex systems, and we very typically
| overestimate our understanding and mastery of complex
| systems.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think it's similar and deeper that.
|
| If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real
| time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on
| purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it
| was given to them or required relatively little work.
|
| For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through
| the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate
| in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely
| they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a
| mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the
| company.
| jtolmar wrote:
| Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect
| a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid
| either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share
| price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are
| controlled by people who primarily care about profits and
| growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick
| the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might
| not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control
| over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders
| who do prioritize growth.
|
| I think this specific part of the system is most responsible
| for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| One solution is to eliminate corporations.
|
| People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about
| the consequence of their choices. They care about
| biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care
| and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are
| more and more people buying local, supporting small business,
| and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do
| care.
|
| It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and
| sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits
| over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other
| people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby
| the government to give them special privileges, and run
| roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't
| personally making the decisions, and the officers can say
| they are just trying to maximize profits for investors.
|
| Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a
| conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal
| responsibility.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside
| the Overton window.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| let's burn my last karma on fire: these stories just give HN an
| opportunity to hem and haw and wax philosophical...but then we
| all go back to lifestyles that result in us being in the top 1%
| of polluters and wasters on the planet today and the top .001% of
| polluters and wasters in history.
| josefresco wrote:
| Reminds me of some of the issues fictional humanity deals with in
| The Ministry for the Future -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
| jelsisi wrote:
| I really enjoyed the beginning of that book, but it had way to
| much fluff in it and I'd say I finished it in disappointment.
| Can't say I would recommend it.
| josefresco wrote:
| So much this. I'm 3/4 of the way through and am really
| struggling to finish despite starting strong. I'm now
| skimming over the "policy" chapters and am focusing on the
| character action. Oh well, it's happened before with KSR.
| rmcpherson wrote:
| It is definitely typical Kim Stanley Robinson in that it
| explores large ideas and delves into details that don't
| pertain directly to the plot. As a rumination on a possible
| non-dystopian future, it is excellent and I highly recommend
| it. The wandering plot and digressions into hikes in the
| Swiss Alps is also quintessentially Robinsonian. I loved it
| but you have to know what to expect.
| mc32 wrote:
| Out there there is a contradiction. The planet can support
| billions more people, so we don't have to be careful about
| growth. The environment is in peril and people are at fault.
|
| Most of the pressure is in developing nations with more lax laws
| around managing natural resources...
|
| But, also this only matters because of people. If we didn't live
| on this planet all this would not matter even if it happened.
| Imagine an exo-planet that is experiencing species decline for
| any reason (cataclysmic, new species of locust-like predator
| taking over, etc.), does it matter at all? Would we care?
|
| Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our survivability
| as a species.
| snarf21 wrote:
| The planet can't support the the existing billions let alone
| more billions. The excuse can't be that we "just need..." all
| the billions to stop acting like humans and act some other
| human like race that cares more about the Earth than their own
| personal needs. We haven't got there in 10s of thousands of
| years, in fact the more we learn, the more we think we can
| outsmart the Earth. Our greed is what made us survive and is
| also our downfall. Even after the eventual near wipeout, we'll
| be back to the same tricks in a few thousand years. The human
| race will become a wax/wane cycle. It reminds me of the
| allegory of the frog and the scorpion....
| echelon wrote:
| > Ultimately the real question is, does it affect our
| survivability as a species.
|
| Biology is a rich and wealthy system of evolved solutions for
| living on earth.
|
| We could turn everything into people, but we'd lose so much
| information. Fungal growths on rocks may not seem like a lot to
| a layperson without appreciation, but such species took more
| work than the sum total human thought to arise. Killing it off
| is akin to burning the entire library of congress. Worse,
| perhaps.
|
| We're too primitive to harness the wealth of information in our
| biosphere today. In a hundred years, there will be solutions in
| biology readily available to biochemical problems we're only
| beginning to characterize.
|
| We hate that we killed the dodo and the woolly mammoth. But
| more than just erasing animals we learned about in childhood,
| and more than leaving holes in ecosystems, we destroyed the
| living and breathing universe solving unique and beautiful ways
| of dealing with itself. Solutions too complicated for humans to
| comprehend, and not even close to within our capacity to
| replicate.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| We are not much different of a paperclip-making AI gone rogue
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| That is an interesting perspective. It seems like the
| complete 180 degrees of the "singularity" fad that peaked a
| couple of decades ago, which envisioned humans eventually
| turning all matter on Earth (including the biosphere) and in
| the solar system into computing hardware, because _that_
| would be information-maximizing.
| defterGoose wrote:
| The problem with that line of thinking is that we're simply
| not wise enough to know _what_ should be computed. Life
| computes more life, but humans seem to be able to do no
| better than cryptocurrency on the average.
| lainga wrote:
| The "singularity" is 60's High Modernism come back in
| sci-fi clothes.
| ben_w wrote:
| If you ask Charlie Stross, it's Christian theology in
| atheist clothes, with Roko's basilisk playing the role of
| Satan.
| courtf wrote:
| Beautiful comment,thank you.
|
| The closer we look at anything, like fungal growths, the more
| we realize how little we actually understand. Trying to tease
| apart the microscopic mechanisms that underlay the behaviors
| of fungal spores and slime molds is enough to make an atheist
| reach for God. The world is still very much inexplicable and
| so exquisite, it puts our efforts as builders to shame.
| Everything is a rabbit hole stretching back to the creation
| of the universe, just as humans have inherited life from an
| unbroken chain of organisms stretching back to the first
| cell.
|
| We are still evolving, still bringing our frontal cortexes
| fully online, like teenagers. It is hubris to assume we are
| anything more than the link between our past forms and our
| future forms, although we may not survive through this
| particular transition.
| maze-le wrote:
| The planet can not support "billions more", it can barely
| support the billions we have. Maybe on a subsistence level of a
| basic minimum nutritional value it could theoretically, but not
| with industrial products, medicine, education, transportation
| infrastructure, energy, communications equipment and so on.
| ben_w wrote:
| Cultivated land is 11.6% of the world, and we can improve the
| agricultural output of land by a large margin just by adding
| greenhouses. PV could supply each and every person in a well-
| fed global population of 10 billion roughly a thousand times
| the current power use of the average American today -- less
| if you limit your PV to just deserts, but still far more than
| enough for "modern" lifestyles.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Why limit that to survivability? If you like to do something
| (say, eating sugar and reproducing), do stop doing it right
| before it kills you, or when you believe it's reasonable to
| stop because this particular things is not the only thing you
| care about?
|
| We can perfectly stop destroying our habitat because it would
| kill us _and_ because it makes no sense to do so. We 're just
| addicted to things that kills us and we should get this
| addiction under control simply because it's an addiction
| (compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse
| consequences). Addictions are bad for you, even when they don't
| kill you.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > The planet can suppor billions more people, ...
|
| Do you mean concurrently, or over the next hundreds of years?
| vagrantJin wrote:
| The sooner the "we" stops pretending to care, the better for
| everyone involved. The environment is going to take a beating for
| as long as humans walk the earth. No one here actually gives a
| rat's tail about the environment. If we did care we'd have to
| talk about accountability and we all know where that road goes.
| neolog wrote:
| > If we did care we'd have to talk about accountability
|
| Could you elaborate on what accountability means to you?
| esarbe wrote:
| It is pretty obvious that nobody cares. Most of the people are
| doing an amazing job of just filtering the fact of mankind's
| destructive impact out of their daily lives. And others -- like
| many on HN -- have an almost religious believe in a technical
| miracle. The Elon will save us all.
|
| Don't expect any talk of accountability. That would mean biting
| the bullet of accepting that we -- as a species -- are
| seriously messing up and are in the act of driving the car
| against the iceberg. Or something like that.
|
| Better not to rock the cradle and just enjoy the last few good
| decades we have. The pest on all our children, no concern for
| them is going to ruin this party!
| isoprophlex wrote:
| _our burden raised the world set free_
|
| _the earth returns to land and sea_
|
| _our buildings burned and highways gone_
|
| _I love my friends and everyone but we 've had our chance let's
| move aside_
|
| _let time wash us out with the tide_
| ThomPete wrote:
| 99.9% of all species ever existed are gone today. Earth have been
| through 5 mass extinctions.
|
| Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make
| unsafe, nature gives us a hostile and unsafe environment we make
| safe through our impact of the planet.
|
| Yes we need to get better at many things and luckily we are, but
| the idea that humans are the destroyers of biodiversity is simply
| untrue. We might in fact be the only species who will be able to
| not only avoid mass-extinction but also rebuild biodiversity. No
| matter what. Nature doesn't care about us and have no issue
| adding us to the 99.9% if we don't learn how to control and
| manipulate the planet and our nearby solar system.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Note that a declining number of species doesn't mean fewer living
| animals.
|
| As the world globalizes, 10 isolated bird species occupying an
| ecological niche can be replaced by 1 species across the planet,
| without there being fewer birds total.
| rabidrat wrote:
| And millions of animal species occupying thousands of
| ecological niches are being replaced by 10 species across the
| planet: humans, the animals that humans eat, and the animals
| humans keep as pets. Even if the quantity of biomass is
| relatively constant, I think we can all agree that a planet
| with only humans and cows and chickens is a pretty bleak
| outcome.
| DickingAround wrote:
| I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species.
| This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped
| out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut
| case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so
| powerful. We out compete everything.
|
| And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution
| makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of
| evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a
| lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees
| grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In
| the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the
| place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through
| all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant
| even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that
| aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all
| that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us
| humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and
| steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a
| different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff
| we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a
| people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-
| eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice
| in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the
| next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from
| the past.
| macksd wrote:
| >> And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that
| evolution makes organisms that do that
|
| I'm not exactly a highly qualified expert on evolution, but I
| hear this step in lines of thinking a lot and it strikes me as
| being a logical fallacy. As a more extreme example, I often
| hear "these climate changes activists make no sense because
| they're also the ones pushing evolution: why would a species
| evolve and then destroy the planet it evolved on"? It's also
| circular logic. Sometimes evolution results in weaker things
| dying off. But that doesn't mean that weaker things dying off
| is inherently a good thing and that because we have evolved we
| probably do it at the optimal rate.
|
| What you're seeing as the result of evolution is everything
| that survived SO FAR. It wasn't intentionally planned to keep
| surviving. It's just that those two things tend to go together.
| We could annihilate every living thing on the planet with an
| all-out nuclear war later this afternoon, and it wouldn't be
| inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| Who said we don't belong to the weaker things? Us dying off
| would just be the proof that we belonged to the weaker
| things, if weaker things means by definition things that
| don't survive.
|
| Also I don't believe that we have the power to annihilate
| every living thing on the planet, no matter how many nukes
| you throw on it. If we die off, then those who survive us
| will have been proven to be the stronger things.
| Isinlor wrote:
| We are not capable of annihilating life on this planet.
|
| If we detonated all nuclear arsenals the planet would barely
| notice.
|
| Chicxulub impact event had yield comparable to 100 million
| megatons of TNT.
|
| Assuming we have 10 000 nuclear warheads each with yield of
| 100 megatons of TNT it would be still ~100 less than
| Chicxulub impact event.
|
| Also, we already did destroy most of megafauna, but the whole
| life is just a different ballpark.
|
| We would need to change Earth into Venus end even then it may
| not be enough.
|
| BTW - It is also true that all pain and misery on this planet
| is the result of evolution.
| neolog wrote:
| All we have to to replicate Chicxulub is build a million
| copies of a bomb we've made before? The iPhone might be
| harder to make than a bomb, and we've made 200 million of
| those.
| Isinlor wrote:
| Probably easier option is just redirecting an asteroid
| bigger than Chicxulub impactor. But the point is that
| even that is not enough to eradicate life.
|
| As I said, you would need something like Late Heavy
| Bombardment or Venus like greenhouse effect and even that
| may not be enough.
|
| Based on the Moon craters Late Heavy Bombardment would
| include:
|
| - 22,000 or more impact craters with diameters >20 km (12
| mi),
|
| - about 40 impact basins with diameters about 1,000 km
| (620 mi),
|
| - several impact basins with diameters about 5,000 km
| (3,100 mi)
| playingchanges wrote:
| I wonder, how exactly do we determine the ideal amount of
| biodiversity for the planet / a given region?
|
| Outside of ideas like 'we should not exterminate entire species'
| and 'we should not hunt so much that we ruin hunting grounds for
| future generations' it does not seem obvious to me.
|
| I guess maybe we are so far gone that the only thought is to
| damage control.
| hirundo wrote:
| And do microscopic and subsurface diversity count? If they do
| the proportion of anthropogenic diversity decline might look a
| lot smaller. Or do we only care about visible flora and fauna
| for this purpose?
|
| Human pollution creates new niches that didn't exist before.
| Microbes in particular can adapt to them in dramatic ways,
| increasing genetic diversity. Surely we don't want to promote
| diversity by finding novel ways to pollute. Biodiversity can
| increase as a sick ecosystem decays, so sustainability is a
| crucial consideration. Below some threshold more radiation
| increases biodiversity. But is it worth more mutant babies?
|
| So changes in absolute quantities of biodiversity might not be
| a good way to measure the health of the environment. Optimal
| biodiversity probably depends on for who, and is different each
| species and niche.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Perhaps not because microscopic organisms can re-evolve
| faster.
| jes wrote:
| Do you think questions like that can ever be answered?
|
| There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese Farmer," by
| Alan Watts.
|
| The gist of the video is that reality is so unimaginably
| complex that we cannot know if a given change is going to be a
| net positive (over what time frame?) or a net negative (again,
| over what time frame?).
|
| This pretty much informs my thinking these days, and when
| something happens that I notice, I find myself more able to
| refrain from labeling it as either good or bad.
| JTon wrote:
| > There's a YouTube video I like, called "The Chinese
| Farmer," by Alan Watts.
|
| Wasn't familiar with this video myself, so I searched it up.
| Passing it along for the next person:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byQrdnq7_H0
|
| I like the message as well.
| achenatx wrote:
| This should be retitled to be
|
| Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our
| models suggest that it could take millions of years for
| biodiversity to recover.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| A better title would be "Computer biodiversity models suggest
| how many millions of years it may take to recover."
|
| It's impossible that it will take _less_ than millions of
| years.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > Based on the assumptions built into our computer models, our
| models suggest ...
|
| That's how science often works, yes. I'd wager most people are
| aware of that and won't expect a prophecy when confronted with
| such headlines.
| tryonenow wrote:
| You'd be overestimating the average person's ability.
| Laypeople know virtually nothing about computational
| modeling. I can't find the famous quote, but it is dangerous
| to consume such research uncritically because with enough
| degrees of freedom you can model virtually anything while
| also backfitting your ground truth. And these models are
| almost always composed of numerous nonlinear parameters which
| may be adjusted within wide ranges, individually seemingly
| reasonable, but with potentially nonsensical and/or trivially
| biasable results.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Experiments are too costly and the conclusions aren't sexy
| enough for clickbait articles. Science is all about computer
| models now.
| slver wrote:
| It won't recover, our species won. It'll be just us, and whatever
| we eat and keep as pets. So prepare for a world of cats, dogs,
| cows, chickens and pigs.
|
| I don't like it but that's the natural course we're taking.
| mathieubordere wrote:
| You're forgetting the pests.
| trhway wrote:
| Human species have lost to each other several times. Those "us"
| may be pretty different. Homo cyborgus, no need for meat,
| direct neural communication link to cats, dogs, polar bears,
| bee hives, ...
| slver wrote:
| We're past that, our cultural evolution is orders of
| magnitude faster, and we're otherwise evolving as a single
| species. That species will change slowly, but I doubt we'd
| "lose to ourselves".
|
| We'd need some cultural event that segregates us rather
| drastically for us to split into subspecies again and
| compete.
|
| This will happen if in theory we populate the Solar System,
| but since there are no habitable planets, that'd rather
| remain in the realms of limited research and small bases.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A periodic reminder that if you're concerned with
| climate/biodiversity issues, it's increasingly a _waste of time_
| to work on persuading skeptics and fatalists (who either eny it
| 's happening or say it doesn't matter for philosophical reasons).
| Some are sincere,s ome are not, but the pursuit of persuasion and
| consensus is ultimately founded on the hope that the 'marketplace
| of ideas' will move to a new stable equilibrium; available
| evidence suggests that this may take longer than changes in the
| underlying conditions, such that the more effort you spend in
| arguing the worse worse the problem will get. I suggest it's
| better to pursue unilateral policy goals wherever possible.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Right, screw discussion or examination of contradicting
| evidence. _Your side_ is unquestioningly right, double down and
| ram your policies down everyone else 's throats, regardless of
| the potential downsides.
|
| This is a recipe for authoritarian tyranny. Imagine if the shoe
| was on the other foot. This kind of closed mindedness is far
| more dangerous than any likely impending climate change.
| efields wrote:
| Totes. Our biome is an externality to most markets right now.
| It's simply not a factor in day to day business.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| It recovered multiple times before, it will recover again,
| luckily humanity is not yet powerful enough to sterilise or
| destroy the biosphere of the whole planet and I hope the next
| time evolution comes up with something psychologically better
| suited for long term survival then our own species since we are
| so obsessed to change our environment without thinking through
| the long term consequences. And even if we thinking it through we
| fail to prioritise to keep our environment in a state where the
| next 10 generation have a chance to survive. We also fail to look
| at humanity as part of the environment and biosphere and not as
| some kind of higher being who is independent from the
| consequences of its doing to the environment. Evolution have time
| to start over, I'm sad that we failing to realise we don't.
| jelsisi wrote:
| If the 6th extinction we are in takes humans with it, I doubt
| that new intelligent species that pop up as a result of
| evolution on earth will behave any differently. One powerful
| difference that could change that: our fossil records. We can
| look to dinosaurs and see that with a little bit of bad luck we
| could be wiped out, but it's not a strong enough message. Our
| remains will show future species that collectively, individuals
| have the power to completely destroy the earth, and that might
| be a strong enough lesson to prevent this from happening again.
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm afraid that evolution favors a species that can quickly
| and efficiently exploit resources. Honestly, I'm afraid that
| our problems are such that they're at the genetic and species
| level, and therefore unsolvable. I am honestly afraid that we
| are literally unable, as a species, to fix these things,
| because it's what we are.
|
| And I believe that will be the case for whatever comes after
| us as well.
| asdff wrote:
| What we have to worry about in the mean time is environmental
| changes leading to crop failures. The earth will be fine,
| whether we are able to continually feed ourselves in this
| society is an open question that we are actively trying to
| solve. But it's an uphill battle when even liberal minded
| people have villianized GMOs. GMOs are the tools we need to use
| to ensure our world is not like what was pictured in
| _Interstellar._ Inaction means famine.
| developer93 wrote:
| Crops can't grow in barren soil however hardy they are. Soil
| is dying at an amazing rate right now, it's a living
| ecosystem that gets renewed and changes constantly, with all
| the bacteria, fungus, worms, dead organic matter, minerals,
| air and water cycling around. Many farming methods that we
| use at the moment don't prioritise it, and long term they
| destroy the productivity of the soil. GMOs might be part of
| the solution but they aren't all of it.
| asdff wrote:
| With GMOs you would have a wider variety of profitable
| crops to rotate in your fields to rebuild soil conditions
| between harvests of certain crops. This sort of practice is
| already done in some areas where this farming is
| permissive, like with corn and soybean. No till practices
| and other soil rebuilding efforts are also finding their
| way into larger and larger operations.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| I am fine with GMO and other genetic technology in principle.
| But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of
| deploying more and more herbicides. Unfortunately that's what
| it has been about mostly in the past.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not sure I agree with that. There have been several GMOs
| that improve yields, or improve nutrition ("golden rice").
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes, but OP's point is that GMO has been mostly used to
| enable chemical use. I am inclined to agree with them,
| without data.
|
| BT corn, roundup ready corn and beans, and other
| herbicide tolerant strains of common field crops are
| very, very prevalent and enable the use of not just more
| glyphosate to compensate for resistance in the weeds, but
| also accompanying chemicals for the same reasons.
| asdff wrote:
| There is more to this narrative than meets the eye.
| Before roundup ready crops we used far worse herbicides
| and pesticides that are much more prevalent in runoff and
| in the local ecology, like atrazine, metribuzin, and
| alachlor. So while they use more pounds per acre in some
| cases, it's usually stuff that is far less harmful to the
| environment.
|
| BT corn is brilliant. Bt has been used in organic farming
| for 50 years and doesn't harm people or animals or
| pollinators. Having the corn produce it directly rather
| than having to spray excess amounts of it regularly over
| your crops is a boon. You use far less since it's
| concentrated at the site where it matters: in the tissue
| the insect bites into.
|
| We have to take these measures. If we didn't treat with
| pesticides and herbicides, we go back to biblical plague
| levels of insect blight and are unable to feed our
| population. It happens even in backyard gardens. I've
| seen cabbage loopers turn my tomato plant into swiss
| cheese in a matter of days.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But I am not happy about GMO with the sole purpose of
| deploying more and more herbicides.
|
| If you want to deal with herbicide use (or pesticides more
| generally), target that, not GMOs. Because targeting GMOs
| means that while the existing major established uses with a
| sold revenue model can find ways to take the hit -- so the
| big herbicide producing chemical/GMO giants are only
| modestly inconvenienced, and their tweaks and refinements
| to their existing products barely affected -- all the
| startups doing development of GMOs for yield and nutrition
| traits which are more speculative, higher risk, and not as
| politically connected are screwed.
| ozim wrote:
| That is the point I always see when someone is promoting
| "save the Earth", Earth will be fine. It is humans who will
| have it tough while some bugs or bacteria will not even
| notice when those pesky people died out.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| It's not save the Earth. It's save me and my descendants.
|
| It just doesn't have the same ring to it...
| Buldak wrote:
| If you just mean that the earth will continue to exist, or
| that some manner of organism will live on it, then yeah
| that seems like a safe bet. But a lot of people think it
| would be a bad thing if we drove elephants to extinction,
| or destroyed the Great Barrier Reef (and not for any
| prudential reasons tied to human interests, either), and
| that's what they mean when they urge us to "Save the
| Earth."
| 613style wrote:
| Evolution better get to work fast. We only have around 500
| million years until the sun's increasing luminosity leaves
| Earth uninhabitable.
| mdavidn wrote:
| The extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs was "just" 66
| million years ago.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Hopefully humanity will have developed enough space
| exploration technology to get off this rock by then.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Half a billion years is probably enough time to figure out
| how to jump start a star.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| It would be except the longevity of any human
| civilization will probably stop that from happening.
| grumple wrote:
| All sources I've seen say we have much longer than that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=Four%2.
| ...
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Humans wont care about the environment until humans live
| forever and their actions now will impact their own lives
| later.
| pphysch wrote:
| A ridiculously anthropocentric statement. Humans are part of
| a very long lineage of life increasing in complexity without
| achieving immortality.
|
| Compare: "Mitochondria wont care about non-mitochondria (i.e.
| their environment) until mitochondria are individually
| immortal..."
| esarbe wrote:
| How do you come to the idea that evolution would ever come up
| with something more psychologically suited for long-term
| survival?
|
| Nothing is going to optimize for long-term survival. Any
| species that is not using all its capacity to extract resources
| and reproduce is going to be out-competed by everything else. A
| sensible long-term approach for regenerative resource
| consumption is not something that nature will ever select for.
| It will optimize for eat-as-much-as-you-can-without-having-to-
| vomit and reproduce-the-shit-out-of-the-free-energy-available-
| in-the-environment.
|
| I'm sad about us failing too. Humans are a fascinating species,
| and I think we have a lot of 'redeeming' qualities, ike our
| incredible ability to cooperate and our empathy. It's a shame
| that we're a dead-end.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| The article mentions the Yucatan asteroid setoff a 5 million-year
| extinction event. I'm assuming this was due to a slow-reacting
| chain reaction of extinction events in the ecosphere? It wasn't
| actually directly due to the asteroid right? Those immediate
| effects would have gone away in a few decades I'm assuming?
| jacobolus wrote:
| The immediate effects were almost unimaginably dramatic.
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
| hyko wrote:
| No it won't.
|
| Can anyone think about why this mass extinction event is unlike
| the last one? Anyone? Yes, that's right: Homo Sapiens. If we want
| biodiversity, we're not going to sit around smelling our farts
| for millions of years waiting for evolution to do it.
| asdff wrote:
| This is why it's been so dangerous to allow anti GMO rhetoric
| into our grocery stores. It's normalized. GMOs are seen like
| harmful pesticides to the lay public, but GMOs are what we will
| need to rely upon if we are to ensure our grandchildren don't
| go hungry. We will have to introduce biodiversity ourselves as
| we lose it in our monocropped cultivars.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| A) I don't think that's true. GMOs are not the kind of
| biodiversity we need. We can move to mechanized automated
| organic farming and get all the biodiversity we need from
| healthy soil and diverse planting regimes. I am working on
| this problem and making our solution open source so the
| technology can quickly spread. [1]
|
| B) In practice GMOs are used to enable massive use of harmful
| biocides (glyphosate) which poison the soil, the workers, and
| our food. So the idea that they are like pesticides is not
| exactly correct but it's not far off. [2]
|
| C) GMO patents have allowed large firms to extort farmers
| with predatory business models and Monsanto/Bayer for example
| have filed hundreds of lawsuits against farmers who
| accidentally had some contamination with their "patented"
| seeds. [3]
|
| GMOs are not a cure all. The whole reason we have problems in
| farming is our failure to see the whole system of life and
| our reliance on pinpoint "solutions" that only cause more
| problems.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/fFhTPHlPAAk
|
| [2] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/study-
| monsant...
|
| [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsa
| nto...
| asdff wrote:
| I agree the lawyers are a cancer, but the technology is
| golden. Mechanized automated farming does not get you
| biodiversity in your crops, it's unrelated. These organic
| farms plant monocrops just like nonorganic farms, and these
| cultivars will also fail no matter how you harvest them
| since the farmer has selected for a handful of commercially
| desirable traits even if they are farming organically.
|
| For example, an organic banana you buy in the store is the
| exact same cultivar of cavendish banana you get that is
| nonorganic. It is also susceptible to the blight that is
| spreading around central America and whiping out entire
| plantations of banana. The cavendish is selected by the
| farmer because it transports better than land race
| varieties you can also grow in central America. genetic
| modification could include increasing expression of traits
| found in the cavendish, like a more durable peel, in these
| other cultivars that are naturally resistant to this
| blight. Suddenly you have a new banana cultivar in grocery
| stores in America that is resistant to blight. Blight
| actually whiped out the cultivar that used to be found in
| grocery stores in the 1950s, the gros michel banana.
|
| Reliance on monocrops is a huge issue for our food supply
| as the environment changes. Genetic modification is an
| excellent tool to perform changes that might take dozens of
| seasons making crosses in the field otherwise, with many
| more perhaps unfavorable traits also being inadvertently
| selected for thanks to linkage.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| There are issues with massive commercial "organic" farms
| and I've got a book on the way that has more details on
| it.
|
| https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277465/agrarian-
| dreams
|
| But I have been studying small scale regenerative organic
| or "biodynamic" agriculture and it seems that
| biodiversity in the soil itself - a healthy complex
| microbiome - is an important part of fighting disease.
| Stressed soil leads to stressed crops that can't fight
| disease when it comes.
|
| But don't take my word for it. Listen to Jason Hobson
| talk about this here: http://regenerativeagriculturepodca
| st.com/episode-69-jason-h...
|
| And I agree completely that monocropping is a problem.
| But look at the farming of JM Fortier or Eliot Coleman.
| There is no monocropping. I am hopeful that with my open
| source farming robot we can help make farming like that
| viable at larger scales without sacrificing biodiversity
| in the soil or the crop patterns.
| esarbe wrote:
| It is still not the kind of genetic diversity you need
| for a resilient ecosystem.
| asdff wrote:
| No, but it is far better than doing nothing and allowing
| our cultivars to be wiped out from blight.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| GMO -- separated from the pure research angle -- is a tool, a
| method of production. And like any tool in an industrial
| capitalist society, the primary purpose of it is to increase
| profits. Industrial capitalism increases profits through
| mechanization. This isn't a recipe for diversity. In fact,
| given the fact that the primary use of GMO at this point is
| to allow for large monocrop farms via wide application of
| herbicides to resistant plants, it is having the opposite
| effect.
|
| I know personally what happens when the farmer next door to
| my hobby farm (and forest) sprays his field of GMO soy. And
| is the opposite of an increase in plant (or animal)
| diversity, let me tell you that. The effects of spray drift
| is visually obvious immediately, god knows what it does in
| the long term.
|
| The science behind genetic engineering has the possibility of
| increasing diversity. Market forces do not. At least not for
| now. Perhaps some competitive pressure will eventually get us
| there. But primarily this is just about making lots of soy,
| maize, and sorghum. Mostly to put into animal feed.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Walk more.
|
| Eat less meat.
|
| Live a more spartan life.
|
| Consume more porn and have less actual sex. (Because sex leads to
| babies. Duh.)
|
| Someone should start a religion around those tenets. This stuff
| is not hard, you just have to apparently con people into living
| right or some nonsense.
| watwut wrote:
| > Live a more spartan life.
|
| You mean, beat up whoever is weaker then you and take kids out
| of families to indoctrinate them into violent dictatorship
| body? Have them kill slave as rite of passage?
|
| Could not resist, was reading about sparta lately.
| achillesheels wrote:
| Comments like yours make me thankful I am American so I am
| given the liberty to defend my life (and I will pass on the
| porn and have more sex, thanks.)
| [deleted]
| rexreed wrote:
| A biological blink of an eye.
| anonporridge wrote:
| True, but also, we only have several hundred million years left
| until Earth becomes too hot for life.
| bulletsvshumans wrote:
| And unfortunately millions of years in human eye blinks.
| rexreed wrote:
| We are but fruit fly lifespans in the grand schemes of the
| universe. We will be here and then gone and the earth will
| rotate away.
|
| All our damage to the ecosystem will be folded in like the
| asteroid that impacted tens of millions of years ago and
| we'll be fossils for others to discover. I wonder what
| they'll make of our cryptocurrency farms.
| havelhovel wrote:
| Well in the meantime I derive enjoyment from the animals
| and plants around me and believe this finding helps explain
| why similarly present-minded folks should be concerned
| about the survival of what remains.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Cloning will solve the problem, even if it takes a few thousand
| years.
|
| Funny how writers like to project some things into the future
| ("millions of years to recover") but still assume that technology
| and society will just remain the same.
| mempko wrote:
| The biodiversity is going down because of habitat loss (global
| warming, human encroachment). How will cloning help when there
| won't be a habitat to sustain the clones?
|
| Global warming alone will destroy the vast majority of habitat
| for existing creatures. The change is faster than evolution can
| deal with.
| asdff wrote:
| With genetic engineering you can introduce favorable traits
| or increase diversity in monocrops to buffer against changing
| environments. This is already done to some extent and will be
| done for pretty much all food we consume in the future, as
| our climate changes faster than planted crops can adapt to
| produce yields under these changes.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| In 500 years, all energy may be clean energy. Enough societal
| change or depopulation can result in the re-establishment of
| nature biomes. I don't see this as utopian or wildly
| unlikely.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| In 500 years? It has to be 50 or there won't be any
| societies to power in 500 years
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| As bad as climate change is, it's not going to wipe out
| human civilization in 50 years.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| No but if we keep polluting at this rate, in 500 years
| civilisations will crumble. If food supply chains fail
| we'll see a bunch of wars break out and a global chain
| reaction that will destroy massive amounts of progress.
|
| Most likely we'll land back at the Middle Ages- it's
| happened to pretty much every civilisation to date so
| it's unlikely ours will be any different.
|
| If anything given our global scale it will be worse.
| hedora wrote:
| Actually, climate change is likely to have "major
| economic consequences" in ~2038, followed by "globally
| catastrophic events" in ~2067. After that, the economy
| and civilization as we know it will presumably no longer
| exist.
|
| https://mk0insideclimats3pe4.kinstacdn.com/wp-
| content/upload...
|
| (Page 14)
|
| So, _this_ human civilization is on schedule to collapse
| in about 50 years.
|
| Of course, science in this matter has improved since
| 1980, but I like that report because it correctly
| predicted the current state of things 40 years ago. Also,
| it was written by the big oil companies. It's difficult
| to argue they were being intentionally alarmist or had
| the science wrong.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Science isn't fortune telling. It doesn't predict the
| future.
|
| I'm sorry, but a PDF from 1980 isn't exactly a reliable
| source of information about the future. It's a little
| scary how people think this is a real possibility.
| hedora wrote:
| Of course science can predict the future. Drop a pen off
| your desk. Newton correctly predicted what speed it would
| hit the floor at, and he did it back in 1687.
|
| If not science, what do you suggest people use to predict
| the future?
|
| Anyway, here's a more modern source. It was peer
| reviewed, and is considered up to date and also reliable:
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
|
| I suggest reading it, but if you scroll halfway down, you
| can type in a county, and it'll provide more detailed
| predictions. I suggest checking it against recent news.
| You'll find that the areas it predicts will soon be
| uninhabitable are already showing signs of ecosystem
| collapse. (Especially the US southwest)
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Observations of computer models are not observations of
| the natural world. They can be helpful, but the map is
| not the territory.
|
| Again, civilization is not going to collapse in the 2060s
| because an academic research paper says so.
| riffic wrote:
| But will it be extinct in 500/5000/50,000 years?
|
| There's an incredible arrogance in this thread of man's
| capabilities over natures. People better check
| themselves.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I don't think cloning animals is some kind of godlike
| technological power. It's clearly something humans are
| already capable of doing to some extent.
|
| Projected 500-1000-5000 years into the future, it doesn't
| seem arrogant to me to assume we will be able to clone
| extinct animals en masse.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Let me get this straight: climate change models predict
| conditions likely to lead to the collapse of civilization
| and you say "the map is not the territory, no need to be
| alarmed", but your extrapolation of our cloning
| capability should totally be respected?
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I didn't say there was no need to be alarmed, I said
| civilization isn't going to collapse.
|
| These also aren't the same things. Cloning is a
| technology that will likely continue to be more and more
| possible. It's not really a question of if, but when.
| Even then it was just a creative suggestion.
|
| Modeling civilizations responses to climate change is
| basically science fiction. Yes, bad stuff will happen.
| No, you can't predict that society will collapse because
| of it.
| riffic wrote:
| projecting 5000-50,000 years into the future and failing
| to see humanity's extremely likely extinction based on
| current trends is the arrogance.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| No, it isn't, it's being realistic. Human beings aren't
| going extinct because of climate change, nuclear weapons,
| or anything else. Some people would survive and they
| would inevitably repopulate.
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| I think the unbounded optimism / arrogance is that life
| as is will continue indefinitely, or just get better and
| better.
|
| That might happen, but climate change is one of very few
| things that will stop it (others being nuclear war,
| asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, solar flares and
| other disease)
| [deleted]
| wellpast wrote:
| Biodiversity requires incremental, organic evolution. Funny how
| humans think that our intellect can somehow solve every
| problem.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| And incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct
| animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats, and
| multiply for thousands of years.
| ewmiller wrote:
| Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the
| meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will
| have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak
| biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just
| industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider
| me skeptical.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| On a biological timeline, it's almost completely
| irrelevant. Humans spent tens of thousands of years in
| small tribal groups. I think we'll be fine.
|
| Besides that, most people in cities already live in a
| biodiversity wasteland.
| cableshaft wrote:
| So you're basically just arguing that _technically_
| humans will not go extinct, as long as there 's at least
| two of them out there.
|
| Okay fine, that very well be the case, but I think most
| of us would prefer not to live or have children or
| grandchildren that live to suffer (and probably be one of
| the casualties of) a 99% or higher percent population
| decline, which would still be 76 million people at the
| current population count.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _incremental organic evolution will happen after extinct
| animals are cloned, reintroduced into amenable habitats,
| and multiply for thousands of years_
|
| This is better than nothing. But species don't exist in a
| vacuum. Re-introducing an extinct species to a biome could
| be as jarring to its neighbors as its original elimination
| was. The most conservative path would be to cauterize the
| would and let the system heal, even if it takes a few
| million years.
|
| For an absurd example, consider the effect of introducing a
| large number of saber-toothed tigers to their original
| habitats.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural ecosystem
| is nonsense. Humans and other organisms have been
| changing the environment since the beginning of life.
|
| Life is a process, not a state.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think you're confusing ecosystem (which word itself
| implies process) with equilibrium. It's quite fair to say
| that there was an actual ecosystem at least until the
| establishment of writing, at which point state
| information became transmissible across time and space
| beyond the capacity of individual organisms or eusocial
| colonies.
|
| While you are correct that evolution would sooner or
| later take over, whether with assistance via cloning or
| blind luck if humans were to go extinct, you do need to
| consider the possibility that under some circumstances
| systems can collapse rather than bouncing back over a
| relatively short timeframe. Life would eventually re-
| establish itself, just as life persists in extremely arid
| desert conditions, but there's no guarantee it will do si
| n a timely fashion, and by timely here I mean on a
| timescale short enough for a human civilization to
| flourish in parallel with it.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I am just saying that the idea of returning to a natural
| equilibrium is nonsensical. We really just mean a form of
| nature that has a balance we find agreeable to human
| beings. Nothing more, nothing less. No human is okay with
| an equilibrium if it's filled with killer wasps and
| sentient bears.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Heal to what? The idea that there is a natural
| ecosystem is nonsense_
|
| There isn't a stable state, but there are multiple
| equilibria. We can quantify the robustness of an
| ecosystem, its resilience to exogenous shocks. That makes
| certain states "better" than others.
|
| That resilience is low and decreasing. "Healing" means
| helping it increase. Re-introducing extinct species may
| or may not build a more robust and more productive
| biosphere.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Better to try to solve the problem, even if the solution is
| not perfect, rather than putting our heads in the sand.
| asdff wrote:
| That's one way to get biodiversity, but you can also generate
| more diverse populations in the lab and plant them in the
| field. You can also seek out natural reservoirs of variation
| in the form of wild or land race cultivars, and introduce
| favorable traits into your elite commercial cultivar. I work
| in this field. This is where our food supply is going, where
| it has to go if we are to feed ourselves in a century, when
| changing conditions mean the crops being planted today will
| not achieve the same yields in the future.
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| How does making identical copies of an animal increases
| biodiversity?
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I meant cloning dead or extinct animals.
|
| Even then, if you cloned a small number of identical animals
| (100,000 pigs cloned from 100 originals) they would become
| biologically diverse in a fairly small amount of time.
| esarbe wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating the sheer amount of
| genetic diversity required to have a healthy base
| population. 100'000 pigs cloned from 100 originals would be
| susceptible to any number of pathogens. And because
| pathogens evolve so much faster than theirs hosts, chances
| are high that we will struggle very, very hard to keep them
| alive. Sex and horizontal gene exchange make it clear that
| life on earth cares very much for genetic diversity. And
| you can be sure that's not because it is woke.
|
| Humanity went through a genetic bottleneck a few hundred
| thousand years ago. It's still pretty much obvious in our
| genetic record; two random chimpanzee tribes have more
| genetic diversity between them than humanity as a whole.
|
| It takes a lot more knowledge then what we currently have
| for such a project to be reasonable. Maybe another hundred
| years until we are familiar enough with the metabolic
| pathways and all the idiosyncrasies that are present.
|
| But only if there's enough complexity left to study...
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| It was just an example. Obviously we would want more than
| 100 original pigs. The point is that biological diversity
| is a natural consequence of the evolutionary process.
| esarbe wrote:
| I'm not so much worried about the biodiversity as such - earth
| will recover, and rather quickly I think. Humans may be a very
| peculiar extinction event, but just one among many.
|
| But I do think that the loss of biodiversity is also telegraphing
| troubles for humanity, or at least the experiment in civilization
| we're currently all taking part in. The predatory ecosystem
| exploitation that we have been doing for the past two hundred
| years is catching up with us . And if we want to retain any
| chance to continue this experiment a few hundred years, we
| _seriously_ have to change our approach in evaluating the worth
| that the earth 's eco system has for us. You know, our very own
| life support system.
|
| Currently we're losing about 30% of animal population every ten
| years. This cannot continue. We're wrecking the place. We are
| killing ourselves.
|
| (My pet theory? _This_ is the great filter!)
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Correct. The earth doesn't care about the ecosystem. That is a
| human concept. The earth spent millions of years as a barren
| volcanic wasteland.
|
| We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans,
| not because our anthropomorphic concept of Mother Earth is
| crying.
| ewmiller wrote:
| Well you can still empathize with the pain that other
| feeling, conscious creatures on Earth experience as a direct
| result of our actions. It's one thing if a meteor strikes the
| earth and you simply witness a mass extinction, it's another
| if you ARE the meteor.
|
| We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans
| AND because it affects other living things which also have
| emotions and feel pain and will suffer as a result of what
| we've done. "Mother Earth" as a concept doesn't exist but
| other animals do. I think that's what people usually mean by
| that phrase.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Yes, that is true. I meant to include animals in my
| statement too.
|
| I was mostly criticizing the idea that the Earth is somehow
| suffering. The Earth will be just fine.
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