Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmitriid 2885 days ago
It's easy: you, yes you, will starve. It's that simple.

Biosphere is an intricately interconnected system, largely self-balancing and self-correcting. If you take humans out of the equation, that is.

A bee pollinates a flower that feeds a rabbit that feeds a fox that feeds a worm that feeds a flower for the bee to pollinate. Remove one factor and the whole thing collapses. "All for want of a nail". It's slightly more complicated than that, but unfortunately not much.

Once you've overfished to extinction and created desserts out of forests, there's not much time that you can keep your cows alive or salmon farms running.

1 comments

...except making new kinds of fish, or making meat in factories, or bioengineering crops that don't need bees.
We are not anywhere close to having any of that at required scale.

And when we do, it will be nowhere near existing biodiversity for a long-long-long while (if ever).

And we are also nowhere near doing that at scale from scratch. We need existing living breathing species to do anything.

And even then it's a problem when "new kind of fish" ends up destroying a different kind of fish [1] etc.

I won't even go into how bees are needed for so much more than just crops.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farmed-and-danger...

Where do you think that new kind of fish would come from if not from finding and adapting exicting genetic materials? We don't even have proper understanding of how our body works and we have been looking at it for a long time. We are naive to think we can invent ourselves out of a vacuum. In all likelihood the current progress of humanity is leading us to a local minimum.