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Comment by new2628 | Hacker News Reader

Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?

May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route.

There's more people living better lives, so things are better. There are new problems caused by our previous success that we solve next.

Grading the state of the Earth is subjective, what's good for plants or bacteria may be bad for mammals or fungi, and there's a few mass extinctions every million years anyway.

If you don't care about homo sapiens, then global warming isn't really "bad" - the ecosystems will adapt.

> May as well just say The Earth would be better off if people had never existed if you're going to go that route.

No, that most certainly doesn't follow. It's entirely usual and normal for an amount of something in a system to be fine but then an excess of the same thing to be not fine. This is a very common situation in medicine, for example.

It's also a common situation in the rest of population and community ecology. For instance, removing wolves as a predator here in Michigan has caused an explosion in the deer population. That, in turn, changed the makeup in undergrowth as they eat more now, which has all kinds of extended effects. Not to mention the propagation of diseases in a more sense population.

We only care about the state of the system as it relates to humans.

That's certainly not true for a sizeable number of environmentalists. Have you never heard the 'humanity is a virus on the planet' take?

Worse. We are able to produce more calories on less land than would otherwise be required. If you check out some photographs of the countryside of the East Coast of the US, particularly, from the turn of the century, and then look at those places today, considerable reforestation has occurred.

Thanos, is that you?

You really have to define and defend what you mean by better to get a meaningful answer.

It eliminated one bottleneck (regular mass starvations) and allowed us to get to the next one faster (global warming).

Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.

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