Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adwhit | Hacker News Reader

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Given that 400+ years of growth has got us into a position where the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years, I'd be curious to find out what future historians will make of the West's supposedly proud story of progress.

In the end, would we all have been better sticking with the Native American way of life? Benjamin Franklin: “When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

Perhaps some kind of voluntary winding down is necessary. "It was good while it lasted. For some people."

Life will be fine. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, flies, jellyfish, quite a few plants, fungi, etc, will all be fine.

The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.

Will there be Eastern Brown Pecker Grouse habitat? No. Will there be coral reefs? Lol no. Will most of the pages of National Geographic be unrecognizable by the naturalists of the future? Yup.

But life will continue. All we're doing is robbing future generations of the myriad beautiful and delicate old growth ecologies that we were taught about in school. We can go snorkeling in them, or hiking in them. They'll just watch 1080p videos of them on their AR glasses.

We're headed back to the Cretaceous. We're going to take the biodiversity of the planet down two orders of magnitude. Maybe four.

That's all.

If we coders get our act together we'll get a decentralized anarchist bioremediation movement going which will rehome millions of acres of biome to Cretaceous-friendly locations, we'll limit the biodiversity loss to that 100x range. 10x if I'm feeling optimistic and smoking really good weed.

I think we can do it!

> The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.

Extinction scale events have been "a thing" in Earth's history for as long as Earth's been around [0], as you note we are very likely in the middle of another one right now [1]

The big difference this time being: Previous ones most certainly had not been man-made, this one has a very high chance of being man-made. Who's to say humanity is incapable of damaging Earths biosphere beyond a point where it can recover? If we can manage to fill the oceans with more plastic than fish by 2050, then I'm certain we can manage to do quite a bit of damage to this planet as a whole [2].

A while ago I read a paper reasoning something like that might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox; extraterrestrial civilizations getting so advanced that they destroy the biosphere of their own planet, beyond repair, but not advanced enough to escape said destroyed planet. Sadly I can't find it anymore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...

[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destr...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/2...

You're probably thinking of the "Great Filter"

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

Wasn't that Great Filter even tho it might qualify as a Great Filter, I managed to find the paper [0], it's about applying the "Principle of Mediocrity".

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

Humans live in Siberia and the Sahara, it'll be pretty much impossible to kill us off completely - we're definitely the hardiest large mammal.

It's a good question whether civilisation will be here in 400 years, but humanity will be.

"hardiest large mammal" - hopefully but you might want to be related to tardigrades for real hardiness.

Those are neither large, nor mammals.

>hardiest large mammal

Pigs.

That's true now, but it's not going to be the same place over the next few hundred years

We might be tough, but we also will need to develop radically new survival skills in a short amount of time. Remember there will be less food, clean water ad more natural disasters to work with etc. So surviving in the "new" world will be more difficult.

We will have transitioned to sustainable energy sources long before the Earth is inhospitable to human life.

Not only that but on the cultural side of things, look how quickly Trump farcical politics and neo nazi grouped resurfaced. Was the 20th century western world a bubble ?

ps: where was that Franklin quote from ?

The native American life wasn't all roses, but there are things we could and should learn from them and other peoples about community and the environment.

>the likelihood is that the planet will be unable to sustain human life within a few hundred years

Clearly, I haven't been paying the amount of attention I ought. Is this the present level of orthodoxy I need to subscribe to, in order not to be deemed a climate denier? (Or is it "sceptic" these days?).

I write about a possible future where communities of people purchase robots that do most of the work they need for survival, and they otherwise live a simpler non-consumerist life.

I’d like to make this a reality.

http://tlalexander.com/sanctuary/

What's better about your future than the exact same future except humans do the work and the robots are just disembodied AIs who teach the humans how to be useful?

In the future you describe, humans continue to be treated as tools to be used by others. In the future I describe, people are not exploited for their labor but are free to follow their own desires.

Or more succinctly, in my future people don’t have to work.

Not all work involves people being treated like tools. Much work involves people being treated like magicians.

By finding "someone else" to treat like a tool (a robot) you are not only solving the wrong problem, you are keeping yourself stuck in the mindset that allows the problem to persist.

Very few enjoy the privilege of being treated like a magician. Practically speaking, workers are treated like cogs in a machine whose labor buys them another day’s survival. It’s difficult and painful for people and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Furthermore I have no qualms against treating machinery as a tool. There is no exploration of intelligent beings when you take advantage of the output of a tool. I want to end exploitation of living things.

I just wrote you a mail about that.

Yes, and our growth in the 19th century put us into a position where the likelihood that the planet would be able to sustain our horse production within a few hundred years seemed incredibly unlikely. Gee, I wonder what happened, and why we aren't beholden to horses any more?

Pretty sure that was before modern medicine. /s

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