Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps, but bacteria do it on time scales of hundreds of millions of years, while humans do it on timescales of decades or centuries.

Take ANY other process and speed it up by 5-6 orders of magnitude and see how different it is. For example, try sipping your coffee at only 3 orders of magnitude faster — it'll literally require an explosion to accelerate to 1000fps and then decelerate to 0 to traverse the 2' from saucer to lips in in 2/1000 sec instead of 2 sec. The effect on ecosystems is similar; changes that would be easily adapted to by all flora and fauna are instead fatal to many. And those ecosystems sustain us.

Moreover, even the slow pace of bacterial climate change is no solace — the most notable change they caused was the Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth wiping out almost all life for 300 million years.

I'd prefer to not whistle ignorance into the wind. I'd rather we take simple measures that make life better for everyone and everything, and yes, using sustainable energy sources instead of burning valuable and increasingly scarce hydrocarbons is a basic step.

[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...

The changes introduced by bacteria were certainly not adapted to by all flora and fauna, as you go on to describe. But here we are.

Had the bacteria said “hey guys all this Oxygen we’re making is seriously disrupting the environment and killing a lot of stuff, we should limit our productivity in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, after all we’re the greatest things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make sure it’s well suited for us and only us forever and ever and ever”, here we would not be.

It is silly to speculating about the results of bacteria somehow limiting or compensating for their excess O2 production, especially since there could be many ways it could have been done (not necessarily limiting, but evolving CO2 or CH4 producing species to counterbalance, etc.). Such speculations could just as easily conclude that we could have evolved a billion years earlier if they'd "done something", and we'd now be 1000x as mature a species.

Even if we make your assumption that humans are somehow entitled to do whatever we want, it is massively stupid to ignore the fact that we depend on an extremely complex web of life to survive. We can break some links, but breaking too many will literally be suicidal.

When we see that we are doing something that WILL inevitably break many of those links (not to mention flood most of our major cities in decades, which is already happening), the only wise thing to do is to adjust course to prevent that destruction.

Yet you seem to think it is a good idea to spread ignorance and stupidity. That way is guaranteed to NOT advance even humanity's self-centered interests. Do you have some fetish about burning hydrocarbons or some religion that makes it sacred?

> after all we’re the greatest things that will ever be on this planet so we have to make sure it’s well suited for us and only us forever and ever and ever”, here we would not be.

So your contention would be that we should all die off so something else can come around in a few hundred million years?

There isn’t a “should” involved. I don’t have hubris in near enough magnitude to think my desires about what species is in control in 3,000,000 hold any significance regardless.

My point is rather that if we do die off, there will be something that comes along, and it will in all likelihood be an evolutionarily “better” species than humanity. For instance, if we die in nuclear armageddon, there’s a very good chance that whatever comes next will have significant radiation hardening capabilities, and perhaps would even be able to metabolize radiation. These individuals would be far better suited to be Earth’s intergalactic vanguard.

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