| I think it's crazy that we keep finding discoveries like this, and yet everyone continues acting and going about their way as if we now know everything. The world's an incredibly complex place. Who's to say the consequences of harvesting these nodules are necessarily negative? If we're just finding out new details about them, how can you possibly assume you know how removing them will affect the environment? Epistemologically speaking, we know very little, while we erroneously believe ourselves to know all. Kind of like how so many will assert with unshakable confidence that human activities are causatively responsible for the bulk of climate change, when we don't even have an exhaustive list of the factors influencing it, let alone the ability to study whether the observed associations are merely correlated or causative (you need to isolate all confounding variables and have robust experiment design, including controls, to establish causality). We don't even have true mastery over human-made systems (Rowhammer, speculative execution attacks were possible for many years before any human brain had ever conveived of such a possibility), how can anyone possibly have enough intellectual arrogance to assume we understand how human activity will affect ecosystems we barely even know about the existence of? And to be clear - I'm not arguing that companies should be allowed to start harvesting these, nor am I arguing that human activity is not the primary contributing factor to climate change - just pointing out the juxtaposition between the immense cognitive hubris and the infinite scope of how much about reality we don't even begin to have an understanding of. Some points I would argue are that our education system is gravely flawed, our understanding of the world is dangerously shallow, and the level of self-awareness that we, collectively, as a species, have about these shortcomings of ours is dangerously low. We ought to be ceasing much of what we waste our time with and figuring out ways to organize society to perform much more robust research, not confidently making knee-jerk assertions about the impacts of proposed activity we've never studied in an ecosystem we've barely even seen, let alone studied. That includes assertions both supporting and opposing such activity. |
It’s ok to err on the side of caution, because as you point out, we’re nowhere near being able to holistically understand these complex systems.
Yes, it would be better to completely understand the problem before digging in, but that’s not near term, but the destruction of this habitat is.