Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

This is true in the animal kingdom as well. Especially for a farm animal, being eaten. If wolves can catch deer or elk, they can catch a cow. I mean you've seen cows right, not very fast. :) This is also an unfortunate consequence when animal rights activists decide to release domesticated animals, they don't know how to survive in the wild. My family would always take cats people didn't want anymore on our farm, and they disappeared quickly. We assumed coyotes, because their parents didn't teach them how to be careful. :( Instinct can only get you so far, you need to be taught as well, and generations in captivity means the parents didn't know what to teach.

And food gets scarce in winter. I was watching a documentary where one chipmunk was storing acorns, and another was hiding nearby, and just stealing them. I don't remember the name, but it was on netflix, and it was focused on high speed, high resolution camera work. The animals seemed to be an excuse to use the cameras, lol.

Also, if I had to die, I'd rather have a humane execution like a farm animal, rather than being eaten or starving. I know there are 'documentaries' that portray suffering on farms, but the farmers I know take good care of their animals. At least in the dairy magazines my dad gets, they are constantly stressing animal comfort, prevention of disease, reduce stress, etc. Because this maximizes production. First, those documentaries are biased, and second, those farmers aren't good at their jobs. Our cows seem happy and content, and why shouldnt they be? Plentiful food and water, we keep threats away(which is unfortunately why predators are often endangered or threatened), we do everything we can to make them comfortable, healthy, and happy. Keep in mind cows don't care about being in captivity, they don't have the concept of freedom. They just want food, safety, and mating.

Hope this doesn't sound harsh, but that argument is wrong. A good farm is supposed to be the ideal environment for the animal, the same way a garden is supposed to be the ideal place for a vegetable. The animals die much more humanely than in the wild. I facepalm every time i hear on of those "it is more ethical to hunt than buy from the store" arguments.

My one quibble is the defeatist “it’s going to be”. Advances in lower-level physics can open up new possibilities. Even now terrestrial solar, while depriving some types organisms from sunlight, can provide shade for other types of organisms to thrive, and who knows what it would be on balance.

I doubt that avoiding any environmental change is in itself a sensible goal, and framing it as always “disruption at the expense of other organisms” seems not constructive. Like any organism, we change the environment purely by existing and interacting with other organisms. Becoming more and more well-off, stable and conscientious ourselves, learning what conscience is and how many conscious agents are around us that are not us, we’ll have resources to iterate and become better at taking care of those agents, from not breaking them up unnecessarily to helping them thrive and build up complexity themselves.

Eventually, if we don’t go extinct too soon, as a result of our growth I believe we’d expand our definition of “us” to include life and nail energy absorption enough to shift the rising entropy entirely to the outside of that scope. That picture of food being synthesized industrially in space, ensuring nothing is harmed in the process—along those lines.

My point here is that renewable energy has an ecologic footprint that goes beyond the ostensible animal deaths caused by the blades of wind turbines. It is a zero sum game, and it is disruptive in ways we can't all anticipate (especially in an economic growth context).

Whether or not other organisms are conscious is not very relevant to our survival. What's relevant is how useful they are to environmental stability.

Also re. taking care, nature is generally brutal. Few wild organisms die of old age, sipping mojitos on the beach.

Starvation, injury, disease or being eaten is the norm, and that chaos is part of what makes ecosystems resilient (within bounds that we're currently breaking).