Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Comevius 1684 days ago
The industrial revolution ended up destroying most of our biosphere. It started an extinction event, a rapid and irreversible climate change making our planet hostile to life.

Other than that it went swimmingly.

2 comments

And yet people are better off than ever, with more people having been raised out of abject poverty than anyone could have imagined at the onset of the industrial revolution.

Yeah there’s an extinction event but it isn’t entirely the industrial revolution to blame since people have been driving animals into extinction for thousands of years starting, at least, with the megafauna extinctions.

It’s sad but organisms have been getting out competed, and reshaping the atmosphere and climate, for billions of years. We can pretend humans are some anomaly and that we aren’t part of nature but that isn’t the case. This extinction event will give rise to new organisms that will fill new niches just like every other one has.

Each human revolution is not necessarily worse. See this list:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~cpd/history.html