Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Holocene Extinction

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 136 posts

Re: Holocene Extinction

#11

Post by cheerlessbog »

mc32 wrote: post #7
jarpschop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

Re: Holocene Extinction

#12

Post by titzer »

CM30 wrote: post #3

This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the s…

> That might be why space travel is so important to focus on too.

Exponential growth does not work. In the limit you can only expand in a sphere at the speed of light: O(n^3), so exponential growth is coming to a halt, one way or another, in this universe.

Going to other planets ultimate solves nothing. You either reach homeostasis with your limited resources or you don't, which means you will reach the end of your resources and collapse.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#13

Post by jbay808 »

jonnypotty wrote: post #9
CM30 wrote: post #3

This makes me wonder if perhaps sentient life/civilisation is simply incompatible with nature by default. That doesn't make the former bad or mean that we shouldn't try and preserve the nature world, just that I suspect any species that evolves to be like humanity is probably going to have a similar effect on its ecosystem. Any alien world with a sentient species might also be in a similar situation for many of the s…

We _are_ nature and have no more control over our destiny than ants do.

This philosophy makes me wonder what concept you think is communicated by the word "control". In a sense you're not wrong, but in that same sense my thermostat has no control over the temperature of my house. If I believed that, I'd look for ways to reinterpret the word "control" to make it a useful concept again.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#14

Post by titzer »

jostmey wrote: post #8
jarpschop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.

All the more reason to focus on space travel to expand the our resources!

There are some fun sci-fi explanations for the Fermi Paradox. One of them is that no one likes neighbors that break out of their box, since they tend to ruin everything, like we ruined our planet. So coalitions develop that instantly blast civilizations that try to expand.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#15

Post by MattGaiser »

mc32 wrote: post #10
jarpschop wrote: post #4

This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!

Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.

Technology really is the only way out.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#16

Post by throwaway894345 »

jarpschop wrote: post #4

This way of living, with that many people on the planet is not sustainable. We are on a runaway train to extinction and we want it to go faster. The economy!

Are there any resources for determining which US politicians support environmentalism (specifically meaningful, evidence-based policies as opposed to vapid virtue signalling) and/or where the "battleground" states are? I guess in general I'm looking to get involved more in climate politics, but I don't know where to start.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#17

Post by throwphoton »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #11
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

> We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event

There's evidence that cyanobacteria did it earlier, on an even more massive scale:

"...biologically induced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere... causing almost all life on Earth to go extinct." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Re: Holocene Extinction

#18

Post by titzer »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #11
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

Earth has undergone lots of (short) periods of unsustainable ecosystems. They always crash and annihilate themselves. What is left has no choice but to gradually come into homeostasis, because the instability of too many aggressive species just leads to chaotic behavior and more crashes.

Re: Holocene Extinction

#19

Post by everdrive »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #11
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

That's not true at all -- there have been countless problems similar to this, it's simply that in time life has rebounded, and that species without an "evolutionarily stable strategy" have died out. Here's just one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

[edit]

A bit more info on ESS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

Re: Holocene Extinction

#20

Post by [deleted] »

cheerlessbog wrote: post #11
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.

Yet billions of years in, until we arrived, there was no failure to be sustainable. We're the first species to potentially cause a global extinction event (arguably we already did)

[deleted]
Post reply on HN