A stream of linguistic organization laying out multiple steps in order to bring about some end sounds exactly like a process which is creating a “plan” by any meaningful definition of the word “plan”.
That goal was incepted by a human but I don’t see that as really mattering. We’re this AI given access to a machine which could synthesize things and a few other tools it might be able to act in a dangerous manner despite its limited form of will.
A computer doing something heinous because it is misguided isn’t much better than one doing so out of some intrinsic malice.
This is a phenomenon I call cinetrope. Films influence the world which in turn influences film and so on creating a feedback effect.
For example, we have certain films to thank for an escalation in the tactics used by bank robbers which influenced the creation of SWAT which in turn influenced films like Heat and so on.
> Gang leader Robert Sheldon Brown, known as “Casper” or “Cas,” from the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, heard about the extraordinary pilfered sum, and decided it was time to get into the bank robbery game himself. And so, he turned his teenage gangbangers and corner boys into bank robbers — and he made sure they always brought their assault rifles with them.
> The FBI would soon credit Brown, along with his partner-in-crime, Donzell Lamar Thompson (aka “C-Dog”), for the massive rise in takeover robberies. (The duo ordered a total of 175 in the Southern California area.) Although Brown got locked up in 1993, according to Houlahan, his dream took hold — the takeover robbery became the crime of the era. News imagery of them even inspired filmmaker Michael Mann to make his iconic heist film, Heat, which, in turn, would inspire two L.A. bodybuilders to put down their dumbbells and take up outlaw life.
> we have certain films to thank for an escalation
Is there a reason to think this was caused by the popularity of the films and not that it’s a natural evolution of the cat-and-mouse game being played between law enforcement and bank robbers? I’m not really sure what you are specifically referring to, so apologies if the answer to that question is otherwise obvious.
Maybe this is why American society, with the rich amount of media it produces and has available for consumption compared to other countries, is slowly degrading.
The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.
> if you’re a fantasist thinking we should be living in a Bronze Age utopia.
Bronze Age people were smart enough to live in places with easy access to fresh water, so they're demonstrably wiser than whoever came up with this proposal.
This is a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between total exploitation of the biosphere and poverty. Nowhere did I say that European development should have been minimized. I simply said the example of European development was not a good argument for attempting to transform the environment of the American West.
Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.
I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.
Assumptions:
#1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.
#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.
#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.
#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.
#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.
I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.
As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.
There are bad examples of land use like agricultural monoculture and suburban lawns but if you compromise with nature it can be a thriving ecosystem albeit one designed to benefit humans.
It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.
Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.
But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.
Then use that as one of the four critical parameters.
E.g.: You might believe that some variability in conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out the subset of the parameter space with that amount of variability.
But we literally don't know the variability. Unlike the numbers of stars in the universe or the number of planets, which we have some statistically board observational evidence for, we have no such statistical evidence for the development of high energy microbiology. We have 1/1 examples. And we don't know if that's because it was inevitable and the eukaryotes have just outcompeted everything else or if it was exceedingly rare. It could be a coefficient of effectively 0 on the whole the thing.
The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.
It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.
In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.
Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.
