A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii • Hacker News Board

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#101

Post by JR1427 » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

mactavish88 wrote: post #5

It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural". Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.) M…

Humans have brought with them the ability to dramatically change ecosystems on timescales far shorter than usually seen without them (exceptions being volcanic eruptions etc).

These short timescales mean that the mechanism of natural selection and evolution do not have time to adjust ecosystems to changes, so they can collapse rapidly.

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#102

Post by thatcat » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 11:55 PM UTC

jermaustin1 wrote: post #96

thatcat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO2 and NOx produces acid rain

My bad - point stands, just wrong element/molecule.

I for sure agree with your sentiments. I added the correction because I thought the acid rain reduction program worked and was a good example of how regulation can work, but after looking it up again I found that the pH of rain didn't increase even though so2 emissions of power plants were significantly reduced.

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#103

Post by jlaternman » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 2:08 AM UTC

sfn42 wrote: post #100

jermaustin1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did it take to oxygenate the planet though? Millions of years, billions? How long did it take to spew enough carbon into the atmosphere to create acid rain? How long did it take to clear cut most of the wester European forests? No one thinks the earth was perfectly harmonious before man, but in the last 200k years (0.0004% of the earth's age), we have DEFINITELY left a mark that no other life form before had…

That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back. Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before. That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just…

“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“

When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigger that change. It’s a small planet, and even if we had no knowledge of it, looking around in the universe suggests its ecosystems and atmosphere are fragile and can’t be taken for granted.

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#104

Post by keithalewis » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

542354234235 wrote: post #21

mactavish88 wrote: post #5

It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural". Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.) M…

I think it is a useful distinction for non-religious reasons. First is that humans change the environment more than anything else, by a large margin. As they say, “the dose makes the poison”. All species modify the environment they live in, but none are reshaping the oceans, every landmass, the air, the climate etc. like humans. Humans created multiple elements that never existed on earth. Second, humans are consciou…

I see what you did there.

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#105

Post by southernplaces7 » Thu, Apr 10, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

jlaternman wrote: post #103

sfn42 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere was once part of the atmosphere. We're just putting it back. Similarly, life forms are responsible for removing it, producing oxygen etc. The planet has gone through multiple mass extinctions, ice ages etc, it has changed much more significantly and over short time periods before. That's not to say we shouldn't be reducing emissions and trying to reduce our impact. I just…

“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“ When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigg…

>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life

You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our ability and follow this up with the launch of all our nuclear weapons everywhere in the world, and we'd kill ourselves off (or at least enough of us to no longer be able to continue our destruction efforts in a meaningful way) long before we'd more than pull off a tiny fraction of the destruction one large asteroid causes.

And no, we wouldn't at all ruin the Earth's ability to sustain life. Our planet and its ability to regenerate ecosystems has survived multiple impacts my massive asteroids, at least a couple of impacts by literal small planets, at least two total ice ages in which the planet turned into an essential snowball (think ice caps from pole to pole) and at least three massive magmatic events (that I can think of off the top of my head) spanning whole subcontinents worth of lava flow and multiple massive volcanoes erupting constantly, without pause, for hundreds of thousands of years, only for life to bounce back from all of this.

It's pure ignorant hubris to think that any human effort today could come close.

Re: A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii

#106

Post by jlaternman » Fri, Apr 11, 2025, 2:08 AM UTC

southernplaces7 wrote: post #105

jlaternman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We can change it so we and many other life forms can't live here any more but it will still be a planet and there will most likely still be some form of life here for millions of years to come.“ When people talk of destroying the planet, they do not mean obliterating its mass in a Death Star-like way. They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life, and it seems clear we have the potential to trigg…

>They’re just talking about destroying its ability to sustain life You should really look deeper into the effects of large historical asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms. Literally, the worst that humanity could do even if it tried with current technology doesn't even come close to being so fantastically destructive. We could, tomorrow, start polluting the earth to the absolute straining maximum of our abilit…

I agree that, obviously, large scale asteroid impacts and other major cataclysms have exponentially bigger immediate destructive outcomes. Ridiculously so.

That doesn't mean the atmosphere itself, and the weather systems governing them, don't have to be kept in balance from the inside. It's a different kind of threat, man-made effects on the planet, sustained and over time. Two different systems – one where the life-sustaining systems suffer an acute disruption but then can naturally restore itself over time, and another where the nature of the system itself could slowly be adjusted, potentially compromising its basic life-sustaining qualities.

I wouldn't say it's a bigger threat than large asteroid impacts or cataclysmic events – though, those are relatively minuscule percentages, where the other is something approaching 100% on our current trajectory –, but that doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a threat in itself to the planet's life-sustaining properties. Every threat merits attention, regardless of how they compare.

And the threat is not about human effort, it's about ignorant human hubris.