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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

The ape pattern is proving self destructive.

Well the Holocene extinction event we are currently causing rivals the destructive power of supervolcanoes and asteroids in the number of species driven to extinction.

Every time a species becomes so well adapted that it takes over the entire biosphere, it effectively wipes out most everything else. When land plants first evolved they did the opposite of what we're doing, turned all the CO2 into oxygen and killed 85% of all life.

> When land plants first evolved they did the opposite of what we're doing, turned all the CO2 into oxygen and killed 85% of all life

That was billions of years before land plants or land anything. The feat was accomplished by cyanobacteria, the first photosynthesis capable organisms on Earth. And they were blue...

I cannot find it, but this reference wouldn't be misplaced in older science fiction works, where humans are templates of an advanced civilization's creation engine (along with other species that have evolved sentience).

Or even from Halo, although there humans are--spoiler spoiler spoiler--"exalted."

Dunno about older sci-fi, but I'm reminded of the short(~100 pages) story All Tomorrows by Nemo Ramjet where humanity is genetically transformed by an alien civilisation into various other human-ish species across the galaxy, as slaves in a vast empire. Alt Shift X has a good audio version of it on youtube.

It definitely hits an interesting nexus point between existential sci-fi and Lovecraftian horror, highly recommend it.

Thank-you, I gave it a watch:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4

This one has sections to help organize the story:

All Tomorrows: the Complete Timeline - https://youtu.be/qw9b9LnhY-8

No it's not. Don't be a misanthrope.

Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for most of us on average.

Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto. Or that we don't not exist.

On average. But the median is falling.

Pointing out humanity's flaws isn't being a misanthrope, we should strive not to fuck up our planet. Things are usually on an upwards trajectory, until they are not. When I have a company that is growing, there had better be some sustainability there, right? Today, there is some evidence that humanity's improvements used the environment as leverage, and the debt may have come due without the customer base to support it.

edit: removed mixed metaphors

Pluto is a pretty low bar.

I'm so old I remember when Pluto was a planet, as good as Jupiter or any of them. Now, it's just a punch line.

A cold, cold dwarf planet.

wildly off topic but have you seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5XPuS-Y0fg ? it gave me a lot of feelings.

The next step when thinking along those lines should be to remember that linearity plays only a temporary role in nature, until some threshold is reached of one or many developments, and things change.

A look at the historic human population numbers on this planet, which exploded to unseen heights only very recently (200 years or so), coupled with looking at the also vastly increased impact of every single person compared to far more spartan living ancient humans, might give one some ideas that extending past trends might be an especially bad idea in our times. Sure, we as a species lived through a lot for hundreds of thousands of years - but none of that past is of much use to predict our future.

> Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for most of us on average

If you're freezing cold and start burning your living room everything also gets better and better, on average, for a while

> Every year gets better and better for most of us on average.

No, it’s not that “better”. Life expectancy increase but stress increase, smartphone penetration grow as well as children working in mines, there’s less and less food shortage but people eat crap and die from obesity. Meanwhile slums continues poping and growing everywhere - even in rich countries - and there’s a ton more lung cancer even for non-smokers.

Is it being misanthropic to point out what feels wrong in our world ? Not being mad or sad does not makes you more a humanity lover.

I don't think your view is supported by the data. As for stress, I'm not sure how you can measure that. But as for child labor, there has been a steady decrease over the decades (source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/various-measures-of-child...). Your comment on food shortages vs. eating bad food is hard to understand. Are you saying it is worse to eat bad food rather than starve to death? Starvation rates are way down from 50 years ago. (source: https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/05/2_170405_world_fam...) As for lung cancer, that doesn't seem to be increasing in rich countries. Here is a link to CDC data for the US (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6730a8.htm) Do you have data to back up your claims?

> Every year gets better and better for most of us on average.

So it also did in Rome until it all fell apart. True, things could be worse. But they could be a hell of a lot better too.

> Everything is awesome. Every year gets better and better for most of us on average.

A man falling 50 stories feels just fine as he passes the 10th floor.

> Be glad we're not an icy hellscape like Pluto.

If we'd evolved on Pluto, we'd be adapted to Pluto. And you'd be saying "Be glad we're not on a flesh-vaporizing hellscape like Earth."

This is the right answer. Life is getting better for the vast majority of humanity. Less poverty, more education, better healthcare, longer life, better governments, less war, etc.

The average HN reader is probably in the top 5% of humanity in terms of all these things, so from our point of view things aren't getting that much better (but even we are seeing improvements). But for the rest of humanity, this generation is massively better off than their parents' generation, who are better off than their parents' generation, and so on. Obviously there are places in the world that are not having a great time at the moment, but on average it's getting better.

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