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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

In just a 100 years time, we have completely wrecked this planet. Decimated wildlife, emptied the oceans, spread our pollution everywhere. Humanity as a whole very much behaves like a cancer, and that makes it hard to love ourselves.

The goal isn't necessarily self-hate, it's damage control.

Furthermore, consider the option that a lower population long term can be a positive to humanity itself.

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> Humanity as a whole very much behaves like a cancer, and that makes it hard to love ourselves.

I guess I see that kind of attitude as the primary thing and then arguments like climate change etc as post-fact justification.

Humanity has been and always will be a mix of beautiful and terrible. In the same time window you're talking about, we made huge strides in equality, science, reached for the starts, explored the depth, etc.

Go back decades, centuries and millennia and you will find something to be depressed about. Crusades? Slavery? Pandemics? Wars? Those things have existed for ever, and yet humanity has always found a way to move forward, trending towards better/safer/more equal. If you believe that "humans are as cancer", you are as justified today as you had ever been, but as a human, forgive me for not being interested when someone who loathes my species suggests it'd be better if we died out.

The difference in our thinking is that I look outside the scope of our singular species and also take into account what it does to this amazing planet, its habitats, and the millions of other species it houses. We're raping and wrecking this place.

All of the accomplishments you list are for our own species, whilst you dismiss anything else. I think humans are an amazing species, as well as a catastrophe. Or maybe it's technically not that humans are awful, rather our "systems" are, our endless growth machine of short term optimization.

I didn't advocate for dying out. There's quite a lot of wiggle room between the predicted 10 billion peak and zero. I would welcome a population decline if it is voluntary and think it's better both for people and for the planet.

> If you believe that "humans are as cancer", you are as justified today as you had ever been, but as a human, forgive me for not being interested when someone who loathes my species suggests it'd be better if we died out.

Scale makes a difference. Going back centuries and millennia is not comparable when talking about problems caused simply by the numbers in existence today.

I do not think anyone is suggesting humans die out in this thread. But it is a mathematical fact that it is possible for the number of humans (or total consumption of humans) to exceed boundary conditions that would allow humans to exist in a stable environment.

> Those things have existed for ever, and yet humanity has always found a way to move forward

This is different.

> guess I see that kind of attitude as the primary thing and then arguments like climate change etc as post-fact justification.

That reads like you're saying "I see accusing them of murder as the primary thing, and then arguments like the fact they stabbed someone 37 times as post-fact justification."

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