Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function."
Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
171–180 of 447 posts
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good way to grasp huge numbers on a national or global level is to see what they are per person. In this case, 1.9 billion tonnes per 7 billion people is about 270kg (600 lb) per human
Unfortunately I can't grasp the number of humans either.
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> otherwise we'll lose them So what? What value are these species? What are they for ? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainl…
♫ They paved paradise... put up a parking lot ♫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3g9_dnjaFY
I think this reply says it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934162
In short, I think from a humility standpoint that's probably not the best solution. I think there's value in preserving animal life, and also they really help balance Earth's environment which we don't understand well enough nor have adequate industries to replace yet, I believe. If we're going to live in Caves of Steel anyway, why not reserve say 50% of land for wild reserves? Do you want to have paradise and however many billion people you can fit in a planetary steel maze, or do you want just one single planetary steel maze with twice as many individuals? I think the answer is the former, pretty clearly.
Also, in the long term we do have other planets we can build planetary scale steel mazes unimpeded, like Mercury -- I'm sure we'll be able to within a few centuries if we don't destroy our ourselves and our environmental sustainability (I'll be rooting for humanity meanwhile).
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extirpation of keystone species causes the rest of the food chain to become disrupted, resulting in proliferation of some species and extinction of others. The consequences for humans are zoonotic diseases and loss of natural food sources.
This is basically bioforming, and I'm sure it's more complicated than "removing keystone species == always bad". For instance, sperm whales compete significantly with humans for tuna fish, making up about 50% of the fish eaten. As our demand for tuna grows, wouldn't exterminating sperm whales help us meet that demand?
"The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year. While they claim this is to smooth supply on a year-to-year basis, conservationists believe they are acting in the expectation that in the event of the fish’s extinction in the wild, prices will skyrocket. Frozen in great stacks at –60oC by the same company who made my childhood cassette player, the bodies would be sold for astronomical prices.
It has a name, this uniquely vile game: it is called extinction speculation. It’s practised by those who collect Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders and rhino horn; men and women with hearts that sing along only to the song of money. There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar."[0]
The tuna is not on brink of collapse because it competes with sperm whales for food. They were here together, perfectly fine, for ... i don't know ... millions of years? It's near die off because we eat them and work tirelessly towards their extinction.
Also ... if you want to know more what happens to the ecosystem when some key species die off (it collapses), I highly recommend the movie Seaspiracy [1]
[0] https://granta.com/tuna/ [1] https://www.seaspiracy.org/
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.
From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…
Cruelty aside that is something to take so much pride in. I think it’s easy to forget the bigger picture of progress here. Are we destroying the planet, oh yeah. Have we created a machine of unfathomable cruelty, also yes. But are we well fed with exactly the food we want to be eating given the choice, hell yeah and that’s an insane accomplishment. That’s something that was not possible 150 years ago.
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.
From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…
I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed.
This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
All you've done is asserted it doesn't make sense. You could at least make an argument as to why.
What do we talk about when we talk about human populations? Like say, you want to formulate an opinion on Germanic peoples' population in history. Do you EVER talk about percentage aggregate biomass of Germanic peoples? No, meaningful numbers are # of individuals, lifespan, sex/age composition, fertility, height, weight, etc. Percentage of aggregate biomass is not among them, for good reason. Look, I have no problem…
Broadly speaking, different ecosystems can support different total biomasses, as a function of total energy input into the system (mainly from the sun), and a variety of limiting factors (like availability of water). So a desert--which can be a perfectly healthy ecosystem--sustains, both in theory and practice--far less biomass than, say, a tropical rain forest.
Let's take an example, pulled more or less randomly from Google Scholar, an article titled "Hunting pressure modulates the composition and size structure of terrestrial and arboreal vertebrates in Amazonian forests". Here is the abstract:
>Overhunting is a leading contemporary driver of tropical forest wildlife loss. The absence or extremely low densities of large-bodied vertebrates disrupts plant-animal mutualisms and consequently degrades key ecosystem services. Understanding patterns of defaunation is therefore crucial given that most tropical forests worldwide are now “half-empty”. Here we investigate changes in vertebrate community composition and size structure along a gradient of marked anthropogenic hunting pressure in the Médio Juruá region of western Brazilian Amazonia. Using a novel camera trapping grid design deployed both in the understorey and the forest canopy, we estimated the aggregate biomass of several functional groups of terrestrial and arboreal species at 28 sites along the hunting gradient. Generalized linear models (GLMs) identified hunting pressure as the most important driver of aggregate biomass for game, terrestrial, and arboreal species, as well as nocturnal rodents, frugivores, and granivores. Local hunting pressure affected vertebrate community structure as shown by both GLM and ordination analyses. The size structure of vertebrate fauna changed in heavily hunted areas due to population declines in large-bodied species and apparent compensatory increases in nocturnal rodents. Our study shows markedly altered vertebrate community structure even in remote but heavily settled areas of continuous primary forest. Depletion of frugivore and granivore populations, and concomitant density-compensation by seed predators, likely affect forest regeneration in persistently overhunted tropical forests. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how cascading effects induced by historical defaunation operate, informing wildlife management policy in tropical peri-urban, rural and wilderness areas.
Let's think about this for a bit. You are making observations about lots of different animals. Some animals are common. Some are not. Some animals are small. Some are not. But you aren't interested in, say, just the effect of hunting on some particular species of woodland mouse, but across groups of species (e.g. frugivores, granivores, etc.), and as a whole. So, how are you going to do it. You found a 10,000,000 really healthy ants, and 5000 mice, 100 snakes, 10 weasels and 1 cougar. You can't just add them up. Sure, you could measure the decline in number of individuals from each of those in percentage terms, and then, maybe, what, average that? But aren't you really making a mistake doing that? What if that 1 cougar died, roughly the weight of all those ants put together. Aren't we missing something here? Yes, we are. And that thing is the total mass.
A fact like, humans and our livestock, account for (some huge proportion) of the total biomass in a particular ecosystem, that's actually pretty damn relevant, and meaningful. Less meaningful perhaps than comparing to the theoretical capacity it could achieve, if such numbers could actually be derived, but it still says a lot about the state of ecosystems today.
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#178Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.
From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…
You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appraisal of it and I don’t believe the hype.
People have acted like you since the dawn of time. They might be right one day but they’ve been wrong every time so far. Line the guys who claim the market is crashing every month.
Re: Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue. From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves. We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it... It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and…
I do not equate animal lives to human lives. I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed. This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit
I think sone people need the guilt of being alive religion gave them. But they rejected traditional methods and invented a new religion of self hatred. Humans as sinners that need to seek redemption or some other silly idea.