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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

What if say 200 years from now, we have a human population of 20 billion people where everyone lives like the current top 10% of people in the USA. There is long life-expectancy, very low childhood mortality. Low inequality.

There are however no wild animals on land. Every land animal is either a pet, livestock, or in a zoo or preserve. Except for the limited species above, every other land species is extinct (but their DNA is preserved).

Would the above scenario be one that is appealing to you. Is wildlife and ecological diversity a good apart from its human benefit? Is human good worth harming ecological diversity for?

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Why wouldn't it? Certainly better, than attempts to artificially limit population.

I’d highly recommend visiting Serengeti or the Masai Mara.

100’s of kilometers of wilderness where animals freely roam about and do their thing without human competition is a very surreal sight.

If the mara+Serengeti or the barrier reef disappear from the planet, I wouldn’t want to live with joy anymore.

I bet you would.

I'd say that in this utopia of yours maybe all those mostly equal super rich inhabitants of earth could afford to drop one or two percent of their luxuries for the benefit of biodiversity.

I am reading your post wondering how that could happen. Wildlife disappearing is not the problem is merely as symptom of the problem - too many people.

We have much more people on earth than we had 500 years ago. We probably have much less wildlife than before. However, people now on average live longer, healthier lives than before. As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago. Wildlife as a whole is probably worse off than it was 500 years ago. Thus, it is not an impossible scenario to have humans thriving, but wildlife in serious danger.

> As humans, we are much, much better off than we were 500 years ago.

That's very subjective and depends on what you are measuring. Sure we have less conflict, less people in absolute poverty, but we also have more people in slavery than any time in history.

I don't think it's the number of people that matter, but rather the behavior of those people.

It appears that humanity lived in balance (Lotka-Volterra style) with the rest of the inhabitants of the planet until the invention of agriculture, which is still relatively recent.

The transitions that led from agriculture to walled cities to city-states to modern nation-states all occurred within the past 10,000 years or so. Whereas the oldest known human fossil is something like a million years old. Divide that 10,000 by the million years our species has been on this planet, you get 1%. So for 99% of humanity's time on the planet we probably behaved a lot like most of the other land mammals.

Something happened that led to the changes in our behavior, and we are now facing the consequences of our collective actions for the past thousands of years. It looks like we'll need to change even more before it's too late.

Me, personally, I would find that outcome depressing as hell. But I also recognize that as my personal preference.

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In a less personal sense I think Nature is sentient and could destroy us overnight if She wanted to, but apparently She doesn't, at least so far.

Perhaps the natural, wild world is like the yolk to humanity's chick embryo and the Earth is a cosmic egg... What we are experiencing could be totally Natural.

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Along a completely different tack, I don't think that scenario would be stable: I believe eventually something would go seriously out of whack in a simplified and artificially-controlled ecosystem (cf. Biosphere II)

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In any event, I believe there's a better option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo

"Toby Hemenway - How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization"

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