It seems to me to be incredibly arrogant to be reasoning starting from humanity as saviors of life in 500 million years.
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.
I’m not sure it is arrogant. Arrogant would be saying we have some divine right or special capacity that places us at the center of this.
I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.
We don’t necessarily deserve this role.
I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.
But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.
If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?
To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.
I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.
Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people."
> my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities.
Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.
Agreed, I suspect we are closer to being on the same page than it originally seemed.
I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there.
It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested.
Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement.
One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.”
The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems.
You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds.
To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently.
You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc.
I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.
It's just stupid Nihilism in an attempt to seem cool. It's putting lipstick on the pig of just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem. There's a lot of money in ignoring the problem, so a lot of pressure by certain groups to do so.
Well if someone other than humanity wants to step up and save life I’m sure we would be okay with it but my dog still spends his time licking himself and my houseplants are not especially active so I think it’s up to us.
500 million years is longer than the time it has taken to evolve mammalian life. Assuming that no other intelligent species would ever evolve is pretty crazy, it's only taken us 200 million years. If that's an average, we could be looking at 1 to 3 other intelligent species developing on this planet alone.
It has not taken 200m years. It has taken 4.2bn years.
Every other species today has had the same 4.2bn years.
In 4.2bn years, we’ve had one successful draw of a species with sufficient intelligence born into an environment with sufficient incentives to tackle this problem (that we know of).
Saying another 1 will happen in time to thwart the pending extinction event strikes me as an aggressive gamble, let alone 3.
It has actually taken over 13 billion years if we're being pedantic. But that's not the point.
What we need to consider is the level of complexity life will be able to sustain after our annihilation. How long did it take to get to humanity from the last time life was at that level of complexity? Much less than 4.2bn years, since we likely will not be reducing life to the level of one single living cell.
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.