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Comment by tbirrell | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so if the planet has done it on its own before, who are we to think we can stop it? Are we gods to command the sea and tides?

On a slightly less melodramatic note, it takes a massive amount of hubris to think that we can do anything to the rock we live on that will affect it in any meaningful way. The worst thing we can do is set our civilization back a couple hundred years.

Earth has been through several mass extinction events and life keeps coming back, we are only the current stage. There is nothing we can do to change the course nature has set.

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This is a nonsensical straw man. People have died from lung cancer before me, does that mean I should continue a pack a day smoking habit?

Your premise is built on humans being some passive observer to planetary changes. We’re not. Look at any historical records regarding CO2 and temperature. The volumes we have emitted in the past couple hundred years is significant and measurable. The fact that this has happened for different causes in the past does not excuse humans doing the same. After all, it is we who will suffer.

it probably takes a lot of hubris to think anyone can possibly overfish the oceans. but here we are. if you have any doubts about it, ask literally anyone who's been in the industry for a few decades.

humanity is headed for very bad things in the next couple hundred years. unfortunately capitalism [and investment-fueled perpetual growth] doesnt see much further than a human lifetime and externalities seem rather inconsequential at those time scales.

>it takes a massive amount of hubris to think that we can do anything to the rock we live on that will affect it in any meaningful way.

I think the scientific consensus is that we already have, sadly for the worse.

Are we doing more than a massive comet hitting the earth?

Is smoking a cigarette worse for you than getting shot in the head?

If you want a discussion you have to ask a real question.

The context is people in this thread claim current climate change is happening at a historically unprecedented rate. However, supposedly a comet struck our planet and wiped out most large animals. That would presumably be a global climate change that happened really quickly, probably more quickly than anything we can do. If so, it is false to say current climate change is historically unprecedented.

Sure if you want to be pedantic about it there have (probably) been a few years in the geological record with higher deltaT's than what is currently being experienced due to volcanoes, comets, and etc. I'm sure someone else might want to debate what qualifies as 'climate' in climate change.

My point: the implication of your statement is that the former is irrelevant to us [modern humanity] because the more extreme latter has occurred previously - which is a logical non-sequitur.

And yet we are here, despite the past.

> Are we gods to command the sea and tides?

Yes. We are, actually. It doesn't even need to take a coordinated international political effort. The only thing stopping those with the imagination is the ethical question over whether doing it is right and proper. And maybe a few million dollars for materials and processing.

We probably can't extinct all life on the planet, but we can certainly kill off all the interesting species. Your fatalism does not absolve you of your share of the blame if it happens.

Terraforming is a nascent science, with broad potential, and we actually have the opportunity to test it out on its namesake.

“The worst thing we can do is set our civilization back a couple hundred years.”

I'd like to avoid that, thanks.

Um, it's only hubris if it's wrong (and evidence suggests we _can_, so this argument is irrelevant). And what's hubris for a single person is not hubris for a global civilization. And it's clearly _not_ an act of hubris to think we can have _some_ outsized effects on the world around us (say, nuclear bombs affecting weather global weather patterns in measurable ways). And it's only hubris to think that because we can do this that we _should_.

These claims of humanity's hubris are wishful self-denial but they have no grounding in any kind of logic besides an emotional need to retreat from responsibility.

Well, we didn't call it the anthropocene because it just rolls off the tongue...

Wow, thanks for that word :o

You do realize that George Carlin was being sarcastic when he did his 'save the planet' skit?

Your train of logic is flawed in that the rate of change is crazy fast (https://xkcd.com/1732/). Also, since all the science is pointing to the fact the we are causing it, why shouldn't we think that we can fix it? I don't think it's outlandish at all to try to fix something caused by us.

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