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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#11

Post by fsloth »

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors.

This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them.

Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it seems there are like three people on the planet who are concerned about the quantifiable properties of our biosphere and only one of them got part time funding.

Re: Insect collapse

#12

Post by brazzy »

thebradbain wrote: post #6

And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered specie…

> When do we do something?

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

Re: Insect collapse

#13

Post by lucideer »

brazzy wrote: post #12
thebradbain wrote: post #6

And here I was recently musing to myself that if something embedded into our societal imagination, like the giraffe, went nearly extinct due to climate change, that would wake people up before it's too late. Little did I know that's already essentially happened here according to this article, and the powers that be neither seem to be aware nor care. And because I was curious: Giraffes are now on the endangered specie…

> When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

> When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of relatively economically comfortable people, and not a second earlier.

Re: Insect collapse

#14

Post by titzer »

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth".

When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit.

And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

Re: Insect collapse

#15

Post by amelius »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well.

Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

Re: Insect collapse

#16

Post by killjoywashere »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

I'll just leave this here

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Re: Insect collapse

#17

Post by 11235813213455 »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

Agreed, but I believe we can act about it.

My environmental fingerprint is probably At a single person level, these actions looks insignificant, but if everyone does it, it won't be since the major source of pollution is residential pollution, i.e. people, and the other sources of pollution (industry, large-scale transports...) are also driven by consumption. So if people stop over-consuming, this saves dramatically our planet, and our sibling animals. Of course governments need to foster this change

Re: Insect collapse

#18

Post by xg15 »

amelius wrote: post #15
titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

> And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in computers somewhere that represent some fiction of our collective imagination, all the while burning more energy and fuel and contributing to the massive side show that distracts us from our self-destruction? Not well. Well at least the mass consumption of virtual goods (software) seems to produce less waste than the mass consumption of physical goods. Yo…

I'm not sure about that. Sure, the software itself won't, but the hardware needed to run the software absolutely has environmental impact: It drives habitat destruction due to mining the raw materials, pollution from waste by the mining and production processes and than more pollution when the hardware is decommissioned and ends up on landfills.

Then there is the enormous energy demand of IT systems, which in turn requires more fuel to drive them.

The industry itself is not helping either. Not just is writing resource efficient software often not a priority, it's sometimes even seen as an anti-pattern (due to a misunderstanding of "premature optimization"). In the latest iteration, we have technologies like blockchains that make wasting energy into a feature.

> Your mission is to write software that's so good that people do not need to upgrade their hardware.

Meanwhile, the mission of your superiors is to make sure people upgrade their hardware as often as possible so the revenue keeps coming in.

Before there is a large-scale change of that culture, I don't think software development will be innocent in this.

Re: Insect collapse

#19

Post by lawlessone »

titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

We're essentially gobbling up all possible biomass at this stage...

Re: Insect collapse

#20

Post by voqv »

fsloth wrote: post #11

It's funny we think we are an "advanced" civilization, yet we have no real time diagnostics of the status of our biosphere. It's really creepy how little basic research apparently is going on into "boring" ecological factors. This insect apocalypse is like you suddenly notice you are missing an arm and a leg and have no idea what happened to them. Any professionals in um... ecological metrics here? To an outsider it…

For some reason we as humanity have been living really well for the last 50 years and, without thought, we imagine it's just going to stay like that.
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