Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

The industrial revolution is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity. It allowed the planet to host seven and a half billion people instead six hundred million. Do the lives of all these people mean nothing to you? What about all their positive experiences? Would you return us to the Malthusian limit to live out your agrarian fantasy? Which 6.9 billion people would you let die?

View on HN

Nobody would die since they wouldn‘t even exist in the first place.

And what about the negative experiences? Especially for the vast majority of poor people?

I agree that in the end the industrial revolution was a wonderful thing. But not because of the number of people.

Number of poor people has gone down thanks to industrialization - even while at the same time total population numbers have exploded.

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=508

That's a rather fallacious argument. 6.9bn people never existing != killing 6.9bn people.

And the hosting of those 7bn people has caused irreperable damage to ecosystems. Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?

> Why are you so happy for the extinction of entire species, but not for 6.9bn people not existing?

Why should I care about "entire species"?

I'm happy that we made smallpox extinct. Likewise, I'd be ecstatic if we decided to drive the mosquito out of existence. I'm all for caring about nature, but towards the end of improving human welfare. Where saving some random species conflicts with saving people, choosing anything but the latter is just monstrous. Sentient creatures (only humans, currently) have moral worth. Non-sentient creatures, none.

Thats such a selfish outlook. The same outlook that leads to overfishing, soil erosion and monoculture agricuture. We think we are optimising for human welfare and happiness whilst simultaneously destroying our ability to give future generations the same prospects that we have.

So why are you happy for the untold billions who will never be born because we've ruined out planets ability to sustain us?

Sustainability is about being able to give future generations the same quality of life that you have had. And society as it stands is not sustainable

In case you are unaware we were losing babies by the truckload just a century ago. There was death, but we all forgot since we dont see it anymore.

I am aware. And that is progress that is good for humanity. However air quality is decreasing and global temperatures are increasing.

A century from now we'll be losing a truckload more babies

Its like we rose to the top of the bell curve and are now hurtling down the other side

Where exactly is air quality decreasing? At least in developed nation air quality, and water quality, improved over the last decades.

Climate Change is another topic but there seems to be some movement as well on that front.

Depends what you value more I guess. These lives or the many more lives that could live in the future?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com