They're talking about total mass. So I think insects and whatever is in the ocean would probably be in very last place. According to them, it's white-tailed deer.
> The heavyweight champion is that furtive denizen of parks, meadows, and forests throughout the Americas, the white-tailed deer. It accounts for almost 10% of the total biomass of wild land mammals.
Truth of it’s the opposite. Even now general estimates put insect and fish biomass at significantly eclipsing mammal biomass. Insects might be small, but there are so many of them that it doesn’t matter.
I did a nature guiding course a long time ago, and according to that the biomass of termites in the Kruger National Park exceeds the elephant population there.
I still think we fail to perceive entire orders of life, in the air around and above us, in the earth below us; as well as having a very tenuous grasp of the mechanics of the ecosystems on our scales that we can observe and participate in.
Surely if we're going by weight then the bacteria rule the earth, right?
"They can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains. It is estimated that 6–8% of Earth's land surface is covered by lichens. There are about 20,000 known species."
The fun thing about lichens is that they can carry multiple copies of DNA and switch between them at pivotal moments. I dunno how. My mother's PhD was in this many many years ago.
What I'd really like to know: the approximate total mass of all the COVID-19 viruses/virii that have infected humans since the start of the pandemic; the volume (in a vacuum perhaps) these virii would take up if dumped into a container and given a few shakes. Would they take up a thimble? shot glass? coffee mug? liter bottle? drinks cooler? bathtub? car cabin? back yard swimming pool? olympic pool? Larger? (ChatGPT was just full of excuses on this question. Past searches also turned up nothing.)
I was able to pull this up quickly because I remembered they used a Coke can specifically, which helped zoom in quickly despite the noise in the search results.
Here's another question... if I drank a spoonful of HIV, would I get HIV? Would it even survive my stomach acid? I suppose it depends on whether it found its way into my blood, right? Or would mere exposure to the mucous membranes in my mouth be enough? You can't, as far as I know, transfer HIV by kissing, but maybe if there was lots of it?
I don't think anyone can answer that concretely, we've never had any virus at that concentration. In general, yes, stomach acid will neutralize most viruses (stomach viruses require specialized and fascinating adaptations to survive), but when you're talking about consuming by the quadrillions or quintillions (or more) particles that only need on the order of several dozens to get lucky and infect you, only a few of them need a lucky journey to get you. The process of swallowing will still end up with them in your throat, some in your mucus membranes in your mouth, nose, and probably your entire sinus system, etc. I wouldn't take that bet. Rates of success we would normally call "non-infectious" would get you in this case.
"Virus" kinda refers more to the phenomenon of the species as a whole (kinda like how "humanity" refers to all of us, plus people who came before, plus all the stuff associated with us). Likewise "COVID-19" refers to the pandemic, rather than the viral species.
Meanwhile "virion" is the term to refer to the virus particles, so I suppose the most precise/pedantic way to say it would be "all SARS-CoV-2 Virions"?
And I don't necessarily think they should, I just think language is a fun toy. From context it's clear what they meant, I thought it was interesting to find the most precise way of conveying the concept.
I don't think that level of precision is needed for this discussion, except as a "proof of concept" of sorts.
I enjoyed it too, don't get me wrong, but as much as I like playing with the cruft in the (English) language spec, constructions like this are write-only.
It should, and quite significantly. Since WW2 ended thanks to Haber-Bosch process we burn hydrocarbons stored for millions of years to suck nitrogen from air and turn it into artifical fertilizers that then are used by our farmed plants and animals to make biomass that wouldn't be there otherwise.
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[59] Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.
Agricultural land area is 38 percent of the global land surface, about one-third of this is used as cropland [1].
Land is 29% of Earth [2].
So we use 1/3 * 0.38 * 0.29 = 3.6% of Earth's surface for farming crops and 7% for cattle. Most of that is fertilized every year, and then the surplus fertilizer is flushed to rivers and seas and ends up in the oceans fertilizing algae there. [3]
Basically we're all in the food chain, it doesn't matter where you add the new nitrogen - it goes everywhere.
On what timescale? I think on the correct timescales biomass tracks what the environment supports. I'm not a geologist or biologist, but I have the impression that estimating biomass from fossil records is difficult. We do know that the oxygen boosts of the Proterozoic eon and Cambrian explosion caused an increase in biodiversity.
Given the lemma "life will thrive in a comfortable environment" it should thrive more when the environment is better.
We live in an empty, denuded world, a faint shadow of its former self. Even "green" Ireland which sells itself as a natural place is an ecological wasteland.
"""
In 1623 it was reported chat Ireland was exporting 20,000 tons of pilchard annually.4 To pm this figure in perspective, it is over four times the toal landings for all species from the Irish Sea in 2014 and is exceeded today only by the individual open-water catches of mackerel. horse mackerel. and blue whiting Even if this figure is m exaggeration it gives some idea of the scale of shoals. However, It was not to last. The pilchard began its decline in the middle of the eighteenth century and by 1795 the Baltimore fishery was spoken of in the past tense. After thh, shoals of fish continued to appear, albeit intermittently. well into the nineteenth century. An appearance off Kilmore Quay in County Wexford in 1835 was the first in living memory and 'people did not know their value and there was no means of saving them and great quantities were used as manure'. In 1879 the Baltimore Company was wound up after a number of unsuccessful years and then fell into a terminal decline. The pilchards didn't disappear entirely but subsequent appearances resulted in catches being dumped or used to fertilise fields because demand was nor there to actually eat them. Today, there is no targeted fishery for pilchards and their occurrence in Irish waters is sporadic and of no commercial signifieance.
"""
Ah yes. An empty, denuded world, with unprecedented flourishing for our friends, family, and fellow humans. This type of nostalgia for a wild world full of disease and dangerous predators fails so utterly to motivate me.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that humans haven’t flourished. What is being lamented is that this has clearly been at the expense of other species on Earth and biodiversity and ecology seems to be quite a fair bit worse.
Plastics in every source of water, rapid global warming, acidification of the ocean. There’s not a whole lot of good news about the health of the Earth ecosystem and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does).
A great joke. It makes a good point; almost. I'm still waiting for the doomsday that's always just around the corner. We're technologists here. Let's focus on solving problems rather than trying to turn back the clock.
It's not a joke. Billions of Dinosaurs, back then most of all live, have been wiped of the earth, with no human input at all. A 'healthy' earth is quite relative.
It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard of and that will just end up on the list of species to have died, which is quite full of things we human did not cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame it as keeping our own life support system running.
I'm agreeing with that part. The part I disagree with is that we are somehow "fucked". We have lots of smart people working on that problem. Which is why we've actually had some good climate news lately. Doomer-ish statements like, "we're fucked", are just as likely to lead to demotivation and panic as they are to helpful solutions or action. So I avoid that mindset completely.
It is a funny punchline. That's why I say it's a great joke. But let's not read too much into that.
It depends on the perspective you take. From my comfortable place here in Western society, 2C of global warming isn't going to destroy my quality of life. Goods might get more expensive, certain kinds of food products may become scarcer or disappear There might be more conflict "over there" because of water scarcity and famine. I may experience more political instability and degradation of some of the social fabric. But my day to day life probably won't change. However, if you talk about it from the perspective of the people who will actually bear the brunt of it, it's hard to see it as anything other than an unmitigated disaster.
Pessimism can be as toxic as unfounded optimisim when it's not strongly rooted in the reality of the situation. And to be clear. 1.5C is baked in at this point [1][2] and I suspect 2C is too but it's failed to obtain enough scientific consensus to get political buy in (for some reason scientific consensus in this space is extremely conservative). To me a realistic evaluation is that any "good news" there is is a drop in the bucket against the tsunami headed our way. Maybe we get lucky with fusion or some other scientific breakthrough. But I've not observed a pattern for humanity getting lucky in that way.
I also don't think it's demotivating to talk about it in real terms. For example, California's 2035 plan for fossil fuel cars is likely too little to late. It's better than nothing but also a lot can happen in 12 years to undermine that plan (it's also a pretty poorly thought out plan but maybe it'll work out well anyway). The US federal government is more lackadaisical about it with a plan to get to net zero by 2050. But you know what you don't hear politicians talking about? Net zero doesn't achieve any climate goals. Because we've been emitting so much CO2 for so long and will continue to do so for decades more, it's a runaway cycle. We would need to get to a substantial net negative to undo the warming that's baked in and to realistically try to avoid 2c. Lots of smart people are working on the problem. I think they've got the best sense of the urgency and import of the work and I don't think pessimism demotivates them as much as insufficient funding and legislative priorities.
> There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
> “Individually, in private, I don’t think I know of many climate scientists that think 1.5 C is possible (I could count them on a hand),” Glen Peters, a climate policy expert and research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, said in an email to E&E News.
I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're taking a huge number of species with us. That is after all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren rock.
I think extremism is obviously very clearly unhealthy by definition.
I have yet to encounter a single scenario in my entire existence wherein the fully-to-one-side-of-any-spectrum-you-might-imagine "extreme" point of view on how to solve any particular problem has been the best, most useful one (to my problem-solving brain, at least).
We humans tend to do this thing where, when we're presented with evidence that a previously-held position might be wrong or harmful, our opinions massively pendulum-swing the other way and we have a hard time finding clear, nuanced middle ground.
"Turns out sunlight gives you cancer, so stay indoors all the time! Avoid all sun exposure at all costs!," we say for a time. But no, it turns out that even though it is technically always doing harm to your DNA, sunlight is inescapably necessary for life and healthy immunological function.
Life is complicated, and extremes are simply shit for problem-solving.
Are you familiar with the Overton window? According to it, you will never see successful extremes because what is considered extreme changes before the world does. I think you can find plenty of examples of historical extremism that is now normal (and "healthy").
My use of the word "extremism" may have been slightly misleading; by "extremes" above, I don't mean "ideas or movements popularly considered extreme", but rather literal extremes in the space of possible solutions to a given problem.
Biodiversity is important insofar as it facilitates human flourishing. Flowery poetry about An Idealized Past doesn't have anything to say about that. Therefore, it is uninteresting.
And I'll admit that I'm exhausted by eco-nostalgia and eco-doomerism, which led me to comment dismissively. I understand how that can be off-putting and unpersuasive.
Yes, with all that implies. There may be other habitable planets in the universe but I do not care about them. I care about Earth because that is where I live. I don't think there is any meaningful trade-offs to be made between what is good for Earth the planet and what is good for humans.
That doesn't mean that I want Earth to be a hyper industrialized Forge World, but my reasoning is because that would not be a good place for humans to live.
I'm having a hard time responding in a way that meets the Hacker News guidelines. I don't want to attribute to you the implications (slavery, slaughter, environmental destruction, etc), because I have a hard time believing you actually mean that (or perhaps you thought I was only referring to the mineral aspect of the world and not the life that lives in it). I understand that you might object to slavery being implicit in your belief (because you make a special carve out for only humans mattering)- but understand that up until recently, in many cultures many people were not considered human.
The most substantive thing I can suggest is to read Hegel's master slave dialectic, and consider the upshot- that by viewing others as only being instrumental, you inhibit the development of your own consciousness.
You're right that I do reject your implication of extending the ethics of human slavery to non-human life and granting it shared tenant owner rights to the Earth. I find it surprising that you struggle to respond to this idea because it is not a fringe one. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it is the predominant View held by humans on this planet about their relation to the natural world.
As an aside, I also reject your claim that slaves were historically considered subhuman on factual grounds. For most of human history slaves were considered humans and subjugation was justified simply as a matter of having the might and means to do so. In a historical context, the idea of slaves as subhuman is primarily a New Philosophy developed in
the Antebellum South.
> I find it surprising that you struggle to respond to this idea because it is not a fringe one. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it is the predominant View held by humans on this planet about their relation to the natural world.
I think you are correct that this is the predominant view held by humans, but it doesn't mean it is justified. It is hard to dispute it quickly without invoking something like god, which is something I am uncomfortable doing. What I can do is start with something like Descartes's meditation. Without his ability to invoke god, we are left with the paradox of the world being ultimately unknowable. Likewise if you start from the idea that there is a real world. At best, you become committed to the paradox that we are living within our own imaginations somehow embedded in our brains. From any other starting point, at some point in our reasoning we are led to a deep paradox, which seems to be a defining aspect of our consciousness. Ultimately, the world is unknowable and the best we can do is be honest, humble and do our best with what we have.
That leads me to why I reject what we both consider to be the predominant view held by humans. If we trust natural history, we can see that the mammalian anatomy has been conserved for at least 65 million years. Mammals adapted to all kinds of environments, grew large, grew small, etc, but fundamentally, the mammalian anatomy remains the same (even the whales have essentially the same anatomy as any other mammal). As long as the physics of our world remains constant, function is determined by structure. That means that the same functions that underlie our experience underlie other mammals. The only major difference with humans is that we grew out a section of our brain (the neocortex), which gives us greater ability to visualize, synthesize the input from our senses, develop speech, and interrupt other parts of our nervous system (i.e., like using meditation to quiet the mind, dampen the response from the amygdala, etc).
With that understanding, it seems deeply wrong to subjugate other consciousnesses. It seems like instead of having a "tenant owner rights" view of Earth, we should view ourselves as gardeners cultivating the planet out of a sense of beauty and love that coincides with helping ourselves and other creatures.
That is one thing I am deeply committed to. Humans exist as the most exquisite and beautiful branch of life and are the greatest care-givers on this planet. We not only give of our bodies like the other mammals to nurture, and develop groups to care for individuals, we also care so much that we care about truth, and continue to grapple with it even when it seems out of reach.
> because you make a special carve out for only humans mattering
Your relating of an anthropocentric ethics to support for slavery does not make sense to me. What does the previous horrors of human slavery have to do with our relationship to non-humans?
Only? No. Mostly? Yes. For at least a couple of reasons.
Because we humans seem to be the only creatures that have ever existed that have even been able to pose the question of what makes Earth "important". That level of consciousness is special and worth protecting and expanding at all costs. It's more special and magically generative than any other creature that we know to exist or previously exist.
Because Earth without us is a dead man walking. The complete extinction of all complex life on this planet is already baked into the future as the sun expands and boils the oceans in 0.5-1 billion years. It seems to me exceedingly unlikely that any other spacefaring civilization will emerge after us if we fail. Even if you think other forms of Earth life are more "important" than us, the continuation of our human civilization is the only chance this other life has at having a longer existence (on other worlds) than this baked in timeline.
That is a very reasonable stance, and I appreciate it being articulated. Baked into it is an appreciation and respect for life and consciousness, which I respect.
Biodiversity & ecosystems seem obviously existentially important to the long term survival of humanity. Even if we're not sure what exactly would kill us (first) from acidifying the oceans, killing all the trees, melting the ice-caps, & killing most wild mammals.
The enormous risk we've created against there being a human future. I for one hope for a sustainable flourishing, and find any other avenue not merely uninteresting, but actively malicious & evil. Global gaian awareness is absolutely required, or you are just a primitive wild mammal.
For what it's worth, I am not advocating some sort of primitivist disease-ridden Utopia where bears roam by my door. I am saying that we have utterly destroyed huge swaths of the animal kingdom and maybe should try not doing that.
I completely agree-- and, upon re-reading, it wasn't entirely fair of me to cast your comment as representing an "unhealthy extreme", so I'm sorry about that. That's what I get for trying to make a nuanced point hastily!
People can differ but philosophically I find it distressing if our own comfort means obliterating virtually all wilderness.
More worryingly, though, we are dependent on the natural world and its diversity. And even things like "the world we have now but with less meat in our diet" or "the world we have now but it's easier to walk, cycle, or take public transportation to work" would be an enormous improvement.
Just look at google earth photos anywhere. Its all just large patches of farmland. Only exceptions I've found are Africa, deserts and far north/south. Pretty soon Africa will probably be all farmland as well.
But remember, Malthusianism was proven wrong, because we're not starving. Nature is driven to the brink, but we're not starving, so go ahead and make yet more people.
I think there is use in looking much further back. If we are looking only 30 years (or even 300) we are not looking back to where the decline started, only at that recent point of the decline. The issue with this to me is setting a bad 'target' to aim for for conservation.
Say 30 years ago the fishery was at 80% depleted, and today it is 95% depleted, then conservation looking only 30 years back could decide to stop (or more likely lose political will) at that 80% mark.
In the (excellent) What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill discusses some ways of considering and weighing values on different lives, one of which was counting neurons. I don't have the book in front of me, but from my notes at the time:
>There are 8 billion humans and 135 billion farmed animals, but in total humans have 700 million trillion neurons while farmed animals have in total only 20 million trillion. Still, there are maybe 600 trillion wild fish, which collectively have 12 billion trillion neurons. And that isn't even counting nematodes.
This is why I always find pastoralists ridiculous. They fantasize about us returning to nature, thinking that you can swap out factory-farmed cattle with wild buffalo and support the same population.
Any greener way to eat involves a hard move away from animal agriculture altogether towards more veg-heavy diets, or mass death.
As always, people with Malthusian/Thanos ideas are cordially invited to go first.
Analogies almost universally accomplish nothing but creating arguments unrelated to the topic. Usually this is because, when we think of an analogy, we change something critical without explaining why we've changed it. In this case, the article compares living animals to living animals, while you have changed one side to a non-living material. The phrase "by that logic..." is a big red flag that this category of analogy is about to follow.
You may certainly argue that mass comparison among living organisms isn't useful or at least interesting in the context in which the article discusses it, but you haven't done that.
I'm on a deep strange trip into the differences between "animated" and "inanimated" entities with only the loose idea of "emergent phenomena" to "guide me" on this winding road
For all the intelligence individual humans exhibit, humanity as a whole behaves indistinguishably from a slime mold [1]. If we treat humanity as an organism where individuals humans are cells, then the behavior of the organism is to just spread mindlessly across the planet and extract resources until they're exhausted and it dies off. It seems that there's a phase transition happening at scale where all the internal complexity of human society is reduced to a very simple behavior.
Animals in general are only a tiny sliver of life on this planet. What most people think of as 'nature' i.e. large animals that a child can name are vastly outweighed each by worms, molluscs, bacteria, insects, and of course -- by a couple orders of magnitude -- plants.
Thanks for that. Now can we please break down the arthropods into spiders and non-spiders so you can alleviate my fear that spiders rule over us on this planet.
My fear of spiders is valid- all I'm saying. There must have been some bad shit in our history to instill such a fear into us..
"Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture."
I feel woefully disconnected from the natural order in this day and age. There is so much variety and beauty out there that we remove for the sake of maximizing material utility. Even in bovines, I recently learned that there is a lot diversity, but we hardly ever see it: the diversity is contrary to the maximizing.
I feel that humanity has the power, to both solve our problems and preserve something of nature, to even make use of it, if only it were valued enough.
I can only speak to my own experience, but buying a bit of sheep grazing land and slowly nursing it back has brought me great joy. The field is full of flowers and even has ground nesting birds, where before there was only close-grazed rye grass.
112 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread> The heavyweight champion is that furtive denizen of parks, meadows, and forests throughout the Americas, the white-tailed deer. It accounts for almost 10% of the total biomass of wild land mammals.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
That is not how I read your source. It seems to be plants, then bacteria, then everything else.
nice one, journalism
Surely if we're going by weight then the bacteria rule the earth, right?
Looks like plants outweigh it all by a lot.
"They can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains. It is estimated that 6–8% of Earth's land surface is covered by lichens. There are about 20,000 known species."
I really love conversations that can include phrases like this.
Edit: searches
I was able to pull this up quickly because I remembered they used a Coke can specifically, which helped zoom in quickly despite the noise in the search results.
> What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? How much volume would they take up and what would they look like?
And remember that the images have mouse over text.
Here's another question... if I drank a spoonful of HIV, would I get HIV? Would it even survive my stomach acid? I suppose it depends on whether it found its way into my blood, right? Or would mere exposure to the mucous membranes in my mouth be enough? You can't, as far as I know, transfer HIV by kissing, but maybe if there was lots of it?
Meanwhile "virion" is the term to refer to the virus particles, so I suppose the most precise/pedantic way to say it would be "all SARS-CoV-2 Virions"?
I don't think that level of precision is needed for this discussion, except as a "proof of concept" of sorts.
I only have influence over my local area. New York has seen an incredible environmental rebound. There are dolphins here again.
Globalism is designed to make me feel responsible for poor decision making worldwide, and I reject that.
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[59] Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
I have no idea.
So we use 1/3 * 0.38 * 0.29 = 3.6% of Earth's surface for farming crops and 7% for cattle. Most of that is fertilized every year, and then the surplus fertilizer is flushed to rivers and seas and ends up in the oceans fertilizing algae there. [3]
Basically we're all in the food chain, it doesn't matter where you add the new nitrogen - it goes everywhere.
[1] https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ [2] https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/earth.htm [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/nitrogen-fertiliz...
EDIT: there are also negative effects, so it's not so simple. I'd still estimate that the global biomass should increase over time.
Given the lemma "life will thrive in a comfortable environment" it should thrive more when the environment is better.
What about a simple cumulative effect.
How is this shocking? It should be obvious. Who is shocked, the scientists or us uneducated peons?
It's bad enough when journalists inject marketing-level emotional words into news stories, now peer-reviewed academic journals have to stoop to this?
From Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty
https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/
""" In 1623 it was reported chat Ireland was exporting 20,000 tons of pilchard annually.4 To pm this figure in perspective, it is over four times the toal landings for all species from the Irish Sea in 2014 and is exceeded today only by the individual open-water catches of mackerel. horse mackerel. and blue whiting Even if this figure is m exaggeration it gives some idea of the scale of shoals. However, It was not to last. The pilchard began its decline in the middle of the eighteenth century and by 1795 the Baltimore fishery was spoken of in the past tense. After thh, shoals of fish continued to appear, albeit intermittently. well into the nineteenth century. An appearance off Kilmore Quay in County Wexford in 1835 was the first in living memory and 'people did not know their value and there was no means of saving them and great quantities were used as manure'. In 1879 the Baltimore Company was wound up after a number of unsuccessful years and then fell into a terminal decline. The pilchards didn't disappear entirely but subsequent appearances resulted in catches being dumped or used to fertilise fields because demand was nor there to actually eat them. Today, there is no targeted fishery for pilchards and their occurrence in Irish waters is sporadic and of no commercial signifieance. """
Plastics in every source of water, rapid global warming, acidification of the ocean. There’s not a whole lot of good news about the health of the Earth ecosystem and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does).
Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through worse before. It's the people who are fucked.
It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard of and that will just end up on the list of species to have died, which is quite full of things we human did not cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame it as keeping our own life support system running.
It is a funny punchline. That's why I say it's a great joke. But let's not read too much into that.
Pessimism can be as toxic as unfounded optimisim when it's not strongly rooted in the reality of the situation. And to be clear. 1.5C is baked in at this point [1][2] and I suspect 2C is too but it's failed to obtain enough scientific consensus to get political buy in (for some reason scientific consensus in this space is extremely conservative). To me a realistic evaluation is that any "good news" there is is a drop in the bucket against the tsunami headed our way. Maybe we get lucky with fusion or some other scientific breakthrough. But I've not observed a pattern for humanity getting lucky in that way.
I also don't think it's demotivating to talk about it in real terms. For example, California's 2035 plan for fossil fuel cars is likely too little to late. It's better than nothing but also a lot can happen in 12 years to undermine that plan (it's also a pretty poorly thought out plan but maybe it'll work out well anyway). The US federal government is more lackadaisical about it with a plan to get to net zero by 2050. But you know what you don't hear politicians talking about? Net zero doesn't achieve any climate goals. Because we've been emitting so much CO2 for so long and will continue to do so for decades more, it's a runaway cycle. We would need to get to a substantial net negative to undo the warming that's baked in and to realistically try to avoid 2c. Lots of smart people are working on the problem. I think they've got the best sense of the urgency and import of the work and I don't think pessimism demotivates them as much as insufficient funding and legislative priorities.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129912
> There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-will-li...
> “Individually, in private, I don’t think I know of many climate scientists that think 1.5 C is possible (I could count them on a hand),” Glen Peters, a climate policy expert and research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, said in an email to E&E News.
We need not spend all day tearfully mourning how Earth once was, yet we also clearly shouldn't tarmac the whole thing and turn it into a Costco.
It is very possible to embrace industrialized existence while acknowledging the importance of, and promoting, biodiversity.
I think extremism is obviously very clearly unhealthy by definition.
I have yet to encounter a single scenario in my entire existence wherein the fully-to-one-side-of-any-spectrum-you-might-imagine "extreme" point of view on how to solve any particular problem has been the best, most useful one (to my problem-solving brain, at least).
We humans tend to do this thing where, when we're presented with evidence that a previously-held position might be wrong or harmful, our opinions massively pendulum-swing the other way and we have a hard time finding clear, nuanced middle ground.
"Turns out sunlight gives you cancer, so stay indoors all the time! Avoid all sun exposure at all costs!," we say for a time. But no, it turns out that even though it is technically always doing harm to your DNA, sunlight is inescapably necessary for life and healthy immunological function.
Life is complicated, and extremes are simply shit for problem-solving.
That doesn't mean that I want Earth to be a hyper industrialized Forge World, but my reasoning is because that would not be a good place for humans to live.
I'm having a hard time responding in a way that meets the Hacker News guidelines. I don't want to attribute to you the implications (slavery, slaughter, environmental destruction, etc), because I have a hard time believing you actually mean that (or perhaps you thought I was only referring to the mineral aspect of the world and not the life that lives in it). I understand that you might object to slavery being implicit in your belief (because you make a special carve out for only humans mattering)- but understand that up until recently, in many cultures many people were not considered human.
The most substantive thing I can suggest is to read Hegel's master slave dialectic, and consider the upshot- that by viewing others as only being instrumental, you inhibit the development of your own consciousness.
As an aside, I also reject your claim that slaves were historically considered subhuman on factual grounds. For most of human history slaves were considered humans and subjugation was justified simply as a matter of having the might and means to do so. In a historical context, the idea of slaves as subhuman is primarily a New Philosophy developed in the Antebellum South.
I think you are correct that this is the predominant view held by humans, but it doesn't mean it is justified. It is hard to dispute it quickly without invoking something like god, which is something I am uncomfortable doing. What I can do is start with something like Descartes's meditation. Without his ability to invoke god, we are left with the paradox of the world being ultimately unknowable. Likewise if you start from the idea that there is a real world. At best, you become committed to the paradox that we are living within our own imaginations somehow embedded in our brains. From any other starting point, at some point in our reasoning we are led to a deep paradox, which seems to be a defining aspect of our consciousness. Ultimately, the world is unknowable and the best we can do is be honest, humble and do our best with what we have.
That leads me to why I reject what we both consider to be the predominant view held by humans. If we trust natural history, we can see that the mammalian anatomy has been conserved for at least 65 million years. Mammals adapted to all kinds of environments, grew large, grew small, etc, but fundamentally, the mammalian anatomy remains the same (even the whales have essentially the same anatomy as any other mammal). As long as the physics of our world remains constant, function is determined by structure. That means that the same functions that underlie our experience underlie other mammals. The only major difference with humans is that we grew out a section of our brain (the neocortex), which gives us greater ability to visualize, synthesize the input from our senses, develop speech, and interrupt other parts of our nervous system (i.e., like using meditation to quiet the mind, dampen the response from the amygdala, etc).
With that understanding, it seems deeply wrong to subjugate other consciousnesses. It seems like instead of having a "tenant owner rights" view of Earth, we should view ourselves as gardeners cultivating the planet out of a sense of beauty and love that coincides with helping ourselves and other creatures.
That is one thing I am deeply committed to. Humans exist as the most exquisite and beautiful branch of life and are the greatest care-givers on this planet. We not only give of our bodies like the other mammals to nurture, and develop groups to care for individuals, we also care so much that we care about truth, and continue to grapple with it even when it seems out of reach.
Your relating of an anthropocentric ethics to support for slavery does not make sense to me. What does the previous horrors of human slavery have to do with our relationship to non-humans?
Because we humans seem to be the only creatures that have ever existed that have even been able to pose the question of what makes Earth "important". That level of consciousness is special and worth protecting and expanding at all costs. It's more special and magically generative than any other creature that we know to exist or previously exist.
Because Earth without us is a dead man walking. The complete extinction of all complex life on this planet is already baked into the future as the sun expands and boils the oceans in 0.5-1 billion years. It seems to me exceedingly unlikely that any other spacefaring civilization will emerge after us if we fail. Even if you think other forms of Earth life are more "important" than us, the continuation of our human civilization is the only chance this other life has at having a longer existence (on other worlds) than this baked in timeline.
The enormous risk we've created against there being a human future. I for one hope for a sustainable flourishing, and find any other avenue not merely uninteresting, but actively malicious & evil. Global gaian awareness is absolutely required, or you are just a primitive wild mammal.
More worryingly, though, we are dependent on the natural world and its diversity. And even things like "the world we have now but with less meat in our diet" or "the world we have now but it's easier to walk, cycle, or take public transportation to work" would be an enormous improvement.
Seriously, there are so many trees. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Edit: I looked up the numbers, and one quarter of the earth's land is covered in forest.
The same percentage as twenty years ago.
https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area
People who live in cities might actually believe claims like this.
Say 30 years ago the fishery was at 80% depleted, and today it is 95% depleted, then conservation looking only 30 years back could decide to stop (or more likely lose political will) at that 80% mark.
>There are 8 billion humans and 135 billion farmed animals, but in total humans have 700 million trillion neurons while farmed animals have in total only 20 million trillion. Still, there are maybe 600 trillion wild fish, which collectively have 12 billion trillion neurons. And that isn't even counting nematodes.
Any greener way to eat involves a hard move away from animal agriculture altogether towards more veg-heavy diets, or mass death.
As always, people with Malthusian/Thanos ideas are cordially invited to go first.
Have a look: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Seems like Earth belongs to plants, bacteria, fungi and so on.
You may certainly argue that mass comparison among living organisms isn't useful or at least interesting in the context in which the article discusses it, but you haven't done that.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-...
The best survival strategy for any species is to be useful to humans
"Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines"
Gerardo Ceballos et al., PNAS (2017)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1704949114
open access, almost 1k citations.
have a nice read.
https://images.app.goo.gl/2CBG9Se4vPB1jaMY9
Animals in general are only a tiny sliver of life on this planet. What most people think of as 'nature' i.e. large animals that a child can name are vastly outweighed each by worms, molluscs, bacteria, insects, and of course -- by a couple orders of magnitude -- plants.
My fear of spiders is valid- all I'm saying. There must have been some bad shit in our history to instill such a fear into us..
"Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture."
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline
"Over the last 1.5 million years, the mean mass of hunted mammals decreased by more than 98%. The evidence points toward one main culprit: humans."
https://ourworldindata.org/large-mammals-extinction