Comment by adekok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adekok | Hacker News Reader

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While a good chunk of things are getting better, it's hard to say that eating most of the planet is a good idea.

There are many, many, fewer animals now than even 50 years ago:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161027113306.h...

58% of species are in decline

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_...

Many fewer insects than 50 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_fishing_in_Newfoundland

After his voyage in 1497, John Cabot's crew reported that

"the sea there is full of fish that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets".[3]

and around 1600 English fishing captains still reported cod shoals

"so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them."[4]

While individual human life has gotten better, it has largely been at the expense of every other organism on the planet.

For a logical conclusion (mostly) to this process, see "The Godwhale" by TJ Bass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godwhale

In it, people are the only animals left on the planet, as they've eaten everything else.

Yes. It's amazing how most people can handwave away the health of the biosphere that supports our existence.

The simple fact of the matter is that we are making the planet uninhabitable at a rate that is too low for the average person to understand, while being too fast for species' evolutionary adaptations to kick in.

In a couple of generations we've polluted most bodies of water with some form of pollution, be it microplastics, fertilizer runoff, or a myriad other things whose effects are not understood.

We've altered the Earth's atmosphere to a point where it is, for all intents and purposes, irreversible.

We have no mechanisms to restore fertility and biodiversity to the levels where they used to be before our population explosion. No one would care anyway.

I agree and I'm very concerned about the same things, although the recovery of habitats after human habitation is gone does make me more optimistic a) because that means we could likely rehabilitate wildlife populations ourselves as long as they are not extinct and b) because we'll more likely kill ourselves off and the world will recover.

Indeed. People frequently point to reduced poverty numbers as a sign that we are on the right track. And those numbers are impressive, and very important for the people who moved into the "not poor" category instead of the "poor" one.

But....I suspect it has only been possible by a rapid use of carbon energy, and by expansion into the biosphere. I doubt it is sustainable, to use the more literal sense of the word.

Well, what do we expect? We've got a giant human-making machine called the government. If you remove all the fluff and noble-intentions around it, it's core effect is the creation of more people at the expense of the top-producers that are already-existing. Net result being what we see happening to our planet. And the answer is apparently, as usual, is to have "more government". Not more government to reduce population or to make us more efficient in usage, but to punish the heavy-users and heavy-producers.

It's all fine and dandy to help people, and to move the destitute and suffering out of poverty and struggle, but we've gone way beyond that. I'd argue that we've gone way too-far and we're now actively breeding more people than we should-be. Eventually, it'll get to a point where we either destroy the environment permanently and X% of the world dies off as a result, we discover some sort of tech-utopian-advancements that negate all the bad effects and we live happily ever after, or we start saying no to more humans and go forward as a society in a sustainable way where tech and conservation technology follows-pace with our population growth.

Uncomfortable questions await us in the future.

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