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by mikec3010 2861 days ago
Pollution is undesirable on earth because it causes us harm from which we can't escaoe or reverse.

The idea of "polluting" spacetime makes no more sense than humans "polluting" the natural organization of air molecules by displacing them by existing, or polluting the natural distribution of entropy by making decisions.

It's just bringing politics into a place where it doesn't belong.

2 comments

Pollution, by definition, is something that causes harm:

"the presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance or thing that has harmful or poisonous effects."

I have no idea why you have this idea that polluting is some politicized term.

Pollution is intimately tied to politics because most inhabited property is owned, which means it's regulated by some governmental systems having varying degrees of regulation and penalties for pollution. I have no idea why that has to be explained to you.
Being able to point towards a subset of pollution which is regulated does not necessitate the entirety of pollution as regulated/political. Pollution isn't defined by political fiat.

Your argument also doesn't hold considering that in the case we're talking about right now, the vast majority of spacetime is not inhabited nor is it regulated by anybody. Yet we're still able to talk about pollution because pollution in no way is tied towards a politicization of the conversation.

One could even go so far as to say you've polluted the conversation by including this "but you're making it political" distraction.

You admit space is uninhabited. Your unnecessary and petulant copy/paste of the definition of pollution includes the words "poisonous" and "harmful". Which isn't possible to do to an uninhabited area. I have no idea why you keep forcing such a contrived idea, other than to draw in a political "bad humans, always polluting" message. Anyway I'm done with this silly conversation. Have fun
Much of our terrestrial pollution took place in "uninhabited areas" which decades later became inhabited. Your comment is reminiscent of 19th and early 20th century attitudes toward pollution.

It's true that it isn't a problem -- until it is.

I'll acknowledge that harm and poison require a reference for where the harm is done, but I don't think it requires human interaction necessarily.

We are able talk about harm being done to insect populations or coastlines or any other inanimate objects. Again, humans, and their politics, aren't necessary.

I don't find my quoting of the definition as being petulant. I was wanting to frame the conversation around a shared definition of the word rather than asserting requirements.

Putting "pollution" in quotes was to substitute it for "waste", or byproducts, or side effects, that may or may not be undesirable for some species somewhere and somewhen.