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Comment by once_inc | Hacker News Reader

For hundreds of millions of years, animals have walked our Earth. We are a cosmic blip on our planet. What spectacular hubris we have to think we are so special that we can 'manage' our climate and have the authority to do so.

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Any geoengineering efforts we undertake will also be a blip on cosmic timescales. Particles we put into the stratosphere will decay and either escape to space or fall back to earth. Structures we put in orbit will succumb to drag and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. If our civilization collapses in the next 200 years, the most notable thing we will have left behind is earth's sixth mass extinction event (the one we call the Holocene extinction, but ofc that name will be long forgotten in a million years).

Reducing the impact of the extinction event we are causing doesn't seem like hubris to me.

We're the first animal that can form a computational model of the climate. We're also the only chance for terran life to survive the death of our sun.

It takes more hubris to believe, as cosmic blips, that we have no responsibility to mitigate our outsized effect on the long-term direction on the ecology of the planet.

It would only be natural for a sapient creature to try to stabilize the climate and prevent a mass extinction.

It’s happened many, many times before. (The climate change, that is!)

if there’s no one stopping you then how do you not have the authority

There's no one "stopping you" from robbing a person you've cornered in an alley, do you have the authority to rob them?

The other person, the police, the law... my point is that no one's going to stop humanity from geoengineering the planet, in fact we already have.

There are no mechanisms preventing humanity from having this authority. We will do it, just as we have done it.

It's not hubris, it's just reality. The "how dare we" argument is a waste of time and will not stop it.

I'll explicitly spell out the other assumptions of the scenario since you chose to miss them.

If you've cornered someone in an alleyway, you have overpowered them, there are no police or bystanders to physically interfere, and "the law" isn't going to manifest as Captain America and beat you like a mook in some comic strip. You would get away with what society calls a crime. Nothing is stopping you from robbing that person. Do you have the authority to?

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