[NotAtWork]

We're watching a second family of mammals adapt and speciate a bunch of new winners in this domain of man, in in our own homes!

Even the human mass extinction has given life time to adapt, by way of crops, farm animals, pets, etc. We've even helped make sure that hundreds or thousands of species across many different kinds of life are 100% going to survive along with us if it's remotely in our power.

There are likely hundreds or thousands of other species like raccoons, pigeons, rats, jellyfish, various kinds of insects, etc that are going to thrive in our cities and continue to coevolve as parasites.

I'm not entirely convinced a human caused mass extinction is really all that much worse than other kinds, because we provide some guaranteed survival routes to animals that can coevolve with us, and be useful in some way.

[efuquen]

I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest?

The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.

[NotAtWork]

> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species

In what way?

The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior.

I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous.

Ed: A key word.

[schiffern]

>In what way?

Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]).

Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness.

Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2].

So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for.

Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system…

(of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems)

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7445/abs/nature11...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

[NotAtWork]

I don't think your evaluation of human ability to cultivate environments realistic.

The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us.

I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do.

There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.

No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy.

The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants.

The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests.

Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role.

Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.

[dredmorbius]

we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.

Only with the inputs of massive amounts of energy and additives -- fertilizers, pesticides, and cultivation supplied directly by humans (or our machines).

The energy intensity of modern ag is many, many times higher than of natural environmentments. Food production in the US requires ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced, in Europe it's closer to a 5:1 ratio.

A sustainable agricultural system would require that the output energy be greater than the input.

[kazagistar]

We have only been at it for so long, and barely gotten started in earnest. Plus... energy and additives are not "external" to the system: they are provided by a natural species in the system, us.

Yes, we do need to get to a point where we are not relying on expendable reserves to run the system. But it certainly is possible that we will engineer a better ecosystem (robot cultivators and solar panels included) that results in a more efficient net benefit for us.

[sk5t]

Mass agriculture works despite of our enormous ignorance of how the ecosystem works... you really shouldn't take our ability to manipulate corn or soybeans as indications that humans know how to create "relatively stable environments." We haven't and we don't.

[NotAtWork]

Neither of those were examples I cited, and I cited two other, specific examples.

I have the feeling you didn't read what I wrote.

[tedks]

>The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.

Why?

Humans don't even need animals. It's brutally cruel to enslave, torture, kill and eat animals the way we do. Humanity can be fine on its own.

Regardless of whether or not you like things like, say, hippos, or mosquitoes, or prairie voles, humanity does not need them.

Should we set half the earth aside for wildlife? I think it'd be better used by humans.

[gaplus]

You can't be serious. First of all, wildlife and the rich biodiversity of nature has its own intrinsic value without needing to be "useful" to humans. Second, we're constantly learning from other species and I doubt we're even close to knowing everything there is to know about them. Some of our best tech was inspired by wildlife (sonar, swarm robotics, aviation, the list goes on).

[pyre]

Let's be frank. I don't need you. So if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you?

Saying "I don't need animals so fuck them" is not a great attitude to have.

Not to mention that we do need plants/trees, and we'd find it difficult to keep them going without the biospheres that they survive in.

[lewaldman]

> Let's be frank. I don't need you. So if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you?

Yes... you should unless is someone that you care enough to risk abandon every loved one that you have by dying for a stranger.

I'm an extremelly pragmatic a-hole when we are speaking about eco-nonsense.

We will not change on time. We will destroy the planet. This is fine as we are, acording to Darwin, the current fittest animal in the planet.

So... what's the worst that can happen? We will be extincted by ourselves (carring several "not-good-enough-for-evolution" species with us... but, they weren't good enough so, who cares?)... and this my friend, is also fine.

And to close... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8HP1WzbDk

"The Planet is fine... we are fd" :)

[pyre]

"The Planet" is just a big ball of rock. People are usually talking about the ecosystems that exist on the surface of the planet when they talk about "destroying the planet." The play on words to say "don't worry, this big ball of rock will keep spinning" is tired and played out.

[vlasev]

I think the person is confusing needing animals for food versus needing animals in general. We certainly don't enslave and eat ALL animals.

[tedks]

I think you're misrepresenting my argument, which isn't "actively perpetuate harm on non-humans", but rather "let's build a world with mostly humans via the most humane way possible."

>if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you?

Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces.

But as to your question, that depends. Do you think anything sentient has some sort of right not to suffer, or do you generally prefer a world without sentient suffering? If so, it'd be morally consistent to help me, and it'd also be morally inconsistent to eat meat or consume animal products in general.

As a vegan myself, I'm generally opposed to actions that perpetuate the suffering of sentient life. However, this only applies, critically, to life which exists. I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer.

So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct. I'd honestly rather use that space and resources for humans than animals. I care about humans more and I generally think a world with more humans is more interesting and diverse (information-theoretically) than a world with more animals than humans.

We need oxygen, not trees. Algae makes most oxygen. As a matter of self-preservation I'm okay with algae; we can eat them anyway so it's a useful symbiosis.

[imanaccount247]

>Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors

Please avoid insulting people with PTSD by promoting the absurd misappropriation of "triggers".

>1/4 women has suffered sexual assault

That is not true. Repeating made up figures that have been debunked for decades makes it very hard to take you seriously.

[pyre]

> Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces.

Many men (or gender-fluid people) are raped/molested too. Why is your focus so intensely on women when talking about something that should be common all rape-survivors?

Also, first you say:

> I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer.

Then you go on to say:

> So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct.

Having no moral obligation towards action (actively supporting a species) doesn't imply the a moral obligation towards the opposite action (actively 'destroying' a species).

[tedks]

>Many men (or gender-fluid people) are raped/molested too. Why is your focus so intensely on women when talking about something that should be common all rape-survivors?

Because women are excluded from tech communities more than men.

Try not to make everything about yourself.

[theworst]

I'd like to sidestep the moral argument for a moment.

One major assumption in your argument is that there wouldn't be unintended consequences. I think humanity should either stop increasing the population or should place a great emphasis on space colonies. Repurposing earth resources from animals to humans is just delaying the inevitable point where human consumption outstrips resources available.

[pyre]

> Repurposing earth resources from animals to humans is just delaying the inevitable point where human consumption outstrips resources available.

Don't worry. The 'market' will find a way. Just place your faith^Wtrust in the 'market' and all will be well!

[PavlovsCat]

If most people thought like you, I'd rather see an Earth without humans than an Earth with just humans.

[jerf]

In the next 200-300 years, I consider it highly likely that either A: humankind's population will shrink enough to satisfy all but the wildest econaut's dreams or B: biodiversity will incomprehensibly explode as we start tinkering with genes directly. We may fancy ourselves masters of the process and ecologists may decry it as being "unnatural", but in the end it really won't be. Evolution will be as functional as ever, even if the link between genes and reproduction becomes more complicated. Indeed if anything it threatens to become far too functional for our likings.

In the grand scheme of things, the idea that setting aside "half the planet" will somehow fix, well, anything is really quite a parochial viewpoint. We either won't need to because biodiversity will be getting along just fine, or we'll be setting aside a great deal more than "half"....

[bane]

I always think it's useful to think of species, like humans, less as an individual organism, and more of a menagerie. The human menagerie stretches from gut bacteria all the way to elephants, with homo sapiens lodges somewhere in the middle of the bunch.

[frandroid]

We're approaching an ecological collapse that will wipe us out, too.

[NotAtWork]

What, specifically, do you think is going to collapse in the ecosystem that not just kills billions of humans, but actually poses an existential threat to humanity?

To be an existential threat, there have to be less than 5 million humans left (in my mind, at least, and this is probably a really high figure to be 'existential'). This means whatever you propose has to be at least 99.9% deadly.

To put that in perspective, that's three viruses each as deadly as ebola at its worst (~90% deadly) striking humanity one after the other. /That/ would leave ~5-10 million humans alive.

So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?

[dredmorbius]

"Existential risk to humans" tends to be at the outer range of my own fairly pessimistic set of scenarios, but several global warming situations could run that far out.

Yonatan Zunger posted an especially pessimisstic bit about global warming in April of 2013. In particular he noted:

_The last big spike like this was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Average temperatures rose by 6C over a period of 20,000 years -- which is enough to look like a giant, sharp spike on the history-of-the-entire-planet graph...._

_When the biota of a planet get rewritten, the creatures that require the most delicate maintenance die first. This tends to mean really big creatures, that rely on large supplies of their foods; apex predators, which rely on the entire food chain beneath them; and "canary" species like many frogs, which are very sensitive and tend to be the first to die when something is going wrong. Historically, the cutoff for "large creatures" (that tend to not survive extinction events) seems to be in the ballpark of 20 pounds; things bigger than that just require the ecosystem to be too healthy._

IPCC's estimates call for a global rise in temperatures of anywhere from 2-6°C, (3.6 - 10.8 °F). First thing to realize is that this is an average rise. Which means that in some areas (mostly over oceans, with higher albedo and greater thermal mass) it will be lower, and in others (mostly inland regions) it's likely to be much higher. Overland temperatures much over 49°C (about 120°F) are problematic as they tend to rule out much plant life. Above about 65°C (about 150°F), many forms of animal life cannot keep themselves cool, even in the shade. The result would be potentially large areas of land in which life would literally cook to death.

Even if we don't go that far, there are a number of other challenges humans face, all of which tie back to population, resource consumption, and overflowing pollution sinks.

If you think of systems layered on top of one another, you've got the global financial system, global, regional, national, and local economies, governmental systems, social systems, infrastructure, and more, layered on top of ecological, biological, meteorological, oceanographic, and other systems. Disruptions of lower systems will propogate through higher ones.

Disrupt enough human systems and things start to fall apart. The claim by numerous authorities in the Collapse space is that the collapse of Western Civilization isn't something that's going to happen, it's something that's happening, and likely will be for some time. There are definitely global trends which have been pointing downward for some time, many since the 1970s, some from before that.

Both the Arab Spring and the Ebola outbreak are examples people point to. Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere gives a capsule summary of the dynamic of the wave of global revolutions which started in 2009. The original essay coves the basics: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/newsnight/paulmason/2011/0...

The Ebola outbreak is being exacerbated by numerous factors -- perversely, both lack of technology and its presence are playing a role. Many people, living close to their limits, with few resources, in crowded conditions, but with access to transportation (both ground and air) have created conditions for the disease and facilitated its spread. Lack of literacy, ineffective communications, and other factors are also at play. Airplanes could transfer the disease around the planet in under a day. Nightmare scenarios have it breaking out, not in New York or London, but in Kolkata, Manilla, Cairo, or Sao Paulo.

The CDC predicts as many as 500,000 cases (of a disease with 70-90% mortality), I've seen projections far above that, though from less credible sources. Much of this depends on how rapidly exponential growth takes off, and when, if ever, inhibitory effects start slowing the spread.

Where things get interesting though, for ... interesting values of interesting, is when you consider the systemic effects of disruption.

In her letter to President Obama, Liberia's President Sirleaf gives one small example of this:

With blanket travel bans, border closures and interactions on vessels berthing at our ports, this has become more than a humanitarian emergency. In a country that has barely emerged from a 30-year period of civil and political unrest, with the presence of a large youthful(mainly unemployed)population, some of whom were child soldiers-this health emergency threatens civil order. What is even more heartbreaking is that we are unable to reopen our basic and secondary health facilities because terrified health workers, who have watched colleagues die, are afraid to return to work.

That is: disease has disrupted transport, which means commerce, which means civil unrest.

At a global scale, breakdowns in one portion of a globalized system (finance, trade, energy, raw materials, gas, water, food) could lead to a domino effect in others. David Korowicz's "Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse" takes a look at this: http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1....

While it might not reduce the total population to 5 million or fewer, it could well disrupt systems to a level that modern industrialized economies simply could not function. Which might be a pretty big deal in some areas.

[m_mueller]

Here's a hint: 12 to 16 degrees of warming spaces out over 100 to 1000 years (why so unprecise? because we haven't got a good grasp of the incredibly complex machine with lots of explosive outcomes we're currently toying with - we can only infer from our best models, and the more precise they get, the worse the predictions become). That's 4 to 8 degrees because of our own greenhouse gases and an estimated additional 8 degrees from runaway warming effects that are getting triggered somewhere between +2 and +6.

Hint: That's 12 to 16 global average temperature increase. Ice age was only 4 degrees colder than now. 12 to 16 creates a desert planet. If I had to bet what brings humanity at least to the brink of extinction, it would be this.

There's basically one way out that's still realistic: Creating a more reflective atmosphere. But we only have one shot at this. I'm afraid that when +4 degrees already create utter chaos from rising sea levels, hurricanes, landslides and the following mass migration, the one shot won't be aimed well - it will be done by politicians pressured by screaming masses.

[pdonis]

> 12 to 16 degrees of warming spaces out over 100 to 1000 years

Where are you getting those numbers from?

[dredmorbius]

IPCC expressed in Farhenheit. 12°F == 6.7°C.

[dredmorbius]

I don't know, I haven't been following the IPCC closely.

However their latest executive summary is here:

http://report.mitigation2014.org/spm/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-fo...

"Without additional efforts to reduce GHG emissions beyond those in place today, emissions growth is expected to persist driven by growth in global population and economic activities. Baseline scenarios, those without additional mitigation, result in global mean surface temperature increases in 2100 from 3.7 °C to 4.8 °C com- pared to pre-industrial levels10 (median values; the range is 2.5 °C to 7.8 °C when including climate uncertainty, see Table SPM.1)11 (high confidence). The emission scenarios collected for this assessment represent full radiative forcing including GHGs, tropospheric ozone, aerosols and albedo change. Baseline scenarios (scenarios without explicit additional efforts to constrain emissions) exceed 450 parts per million (ppm) CO2eq by 2030 and reach CO2eq concentration levels between 750 and more than 1300 ppm CO2eq by 2100. This is similar to the range in atmospheric concentration levels between the RCP 6.0 and RCP 8.5 pathways in 2100.12 For comparison, the CO2eq concentration in 2011 is estimated to be 430 ppm (uncertainty range 340 – 520 ppm)13. [6.3, Box TS.6; WGI Figure SPM.5, WGI 8.5, WGI 12.3]"

[pdonis]

Didn't that number (which is the extreme upper end of the predicted range for the most extreme scenario the IPCC considered, and so not really the right number to quote anyway) get lowered in the AR5, to something like 4.8 degrees C?

[grondilu]

5 millions is fairly conservative, considering our species may have already experienced a bottleneck of less than 100,000 individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans

[NotAtWork]

My number is high partly to account for humans being more spread out.

A lot of our bottle necks occurred at times before we really spread out all over the place.

[schiffern]

>So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?

One possibility: global warming, war, and desperate overexpansion of agriculture causing complete terrestrial desertification.

[NotAtWork]

> One possibility: global warming, war, and desperate overexpansion of agriculture causing complete terrestrial desertification.

I'm considerably more worried that a giant space rock is going to come turn my continent in to a pool of molten rock.

[saalweachter]

I agree that we as a species can probably survive nearly anything.

Derailing, I think it's also pretty reasonable to worry about events that will only wipe out 99.9% of humanity. Statistically, I'm probably dead in such a case. Probably everyone I know is dead. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that I probably can't expect more than a fifth cousin to survive if 99.9% of people are dead. I don't even know any of my fifth cousins.

[baddox]

What data suggests that? The data I've seen (and I'll admit I have no relevant expertise and therefore little more than intuition on what sources to trust) seems to suggest that climate change will likely impose costs on humanity in the tens of billions, but that those costs are probably quite low in the grand scheme of things. I certainly haven't seen any data to suggest a credible threat of significant human population decline, much less human extinction.

[pyre]

If the infrastructure that we have collapses there will be mass starvation. Probably more so in 1st world countries than in places where people are basically hand-to-mouth.

[baddox]

Why would the infrastructure collapse?