Are you legit saying, "I don't know if extinct-ing most of the species on the planet will wipe us out. It might. That seems like a worthwhile hypothesis to test empirically!"?
When the dice are that loaded, you throw them at your own peril.
When they're that loaded, you keep throwing them because it's more profitable at everyone's peril.
Sounds like you agree it's not certain but you're exaggerating the risk to scare people who don't understand risks. It might be appropriate to yell during a Greenpeace march but I would rather have intelligent discussions than just yell slogans at each other. It's like a parent telling their teen "If you don't wear a seat belt, you'll die in a car crash." It's obviously not true but dying in a car crash is so bad that it's worth telling a lie to increase the chance of saving their life. That's what the parent would desperately yell at them as they run off with the car keys, but not if they want to develop an independent person who can make complex decisions for themselves.
There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something.
Is it really that hard to extrapolate from the specific case to the general? If we get this one wrong, we're dead. Even the possibility makes it incumbent upon us to tread exceptionally carefully.
EDIT: This, "Hey, now. Let's have a rational, skeptical discussion about this" is a disingenuous tactic, in the first place. If we played that game, we'd still be debating whether or not rising CO₂ levels are dangerous, as they crossed the 500ppm threshold. We know, for practical purposes, that this is coming, unless we change course. We know the consequences of its happening. But we're still somehow dithering, apparently in order to convince trenchant outliers who have identity-level investments in being trenchant outliers, that they're wrong. That ship will never sail.
"Oops. Yeah, I guess that was a bad idea after all," is not an reasonable response to an existential threat.
"You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something."
Have you checked out the self-driving car threads recently?
Nope. That's not what they're testing. They're testing whether or not the thing even works — which necessarily includes "doesn't kill people", sure. But that's not the specific thing being measured; it's a consequence of the system not being ready yet.
Your argument is more like, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent to see how many people it kills", versus, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent for safety and efficacy" (phase I and II, respectively). We aren't specifically screening for deadliness; we're trying to determine the therapeutic index of the agent, and get a baseline on its side effects (which, yes, may include death).
It's a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.
All that aside, it's fundamentally disanalogous, anyway, because the populations in chemo clinical trials are already sick, and have given informed consent. Dude walking down the street getting smoked by a Tesla that thought he was a wall, not so much.
> There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the
consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.
You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
Since you can't see the fault in your analogy, I'll tell you. People have already tried that and we have biology that tells us what would happen without those things. So we know the answer without having to test it again. It's not comparable to continuing to change the environment the way we are, which is something we don't know the effects of.
Ecosystems are massively interdependent. There is necessarily an inflection point where an ecosystem is so depleted that it can't carry itself any more, let alone us. That's called "collapse" and it tends to be permanent.
Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.
Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.
The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.
We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.
I understand that it _might_ and that that would be a pretty bad thing. So there is a risk, but why do you think it's so certain?