We Can't Destroy Planet Earth

http://www.hughhowey.com/we-cant-destroy-planet-earth/

by indigodaddy • 7 years ago

25 47 7 years ago

sixothree• 7 years ago

There is not much here to support his argument.

keldaris• 7 years ago

He isn't so much making an argument as stating a simple and fairly trivial observation. It's rather sad that hysterical alarmism has grown to such proportions as to even necessitate such observations.

My only objection to his thesis is that, if I was being pedantic, I could note that with a highly organized research and engineering effort, we could technically construct sufficient supplies of cobalt salted nuclear weapons to theoretically wipe out all organized human life on this planet if they were all launched at once. That's a purely academic counterpoint, of course, as no such supplies are likely to ever be constructed, let alone used.

everyone2• 7 years ago

Yeah, Ive made a note not the bother reading any of his books. He does not seem to do any research into his ideas.

perfmode5• 7 years ago

I like reducing poverty and war, because their reduction lifts the global economy and makes travel safer and more enjoyable

a tad bit self interested, no?

pmalynin• 7 years ago

And why is that an issue?

lumberjack• 7 years ago

Because a lack of empathy for other human beings is problematic, because it means that as soon as your self interest does not perfectly align with their well being you will think nothing of harming them.

matz17• 7 years ago

Yes, every concious goal/action is self interest.

perfmode5• 7 years ago

This is asserted without any evidence.

What makes you believe this to be true?

This seems to be a popular notion in some "western" thought but runs counter to many other intellectual and spiritual traditions.

rurounijones• 7 years ago

I am not worried about wiping out humanity. I am worried about wiping out enough humans thst our modern civilization crumbles and never recovers, relegating us to a single planet species forever.

We have fought against entropy to get this far using the relatively easily available resources. If we fail now those won't be available for future generations.

I want future generations to lead better lives than we do, not regress. I want them to live the optimistic sci-fi future, not the post-apocalyptic ones

zzo38computer• 7 years ago

Earth should not be destroy, and, I am not worried about wiping out humanity either; currently, it is instead too much humanity, but if later it is too not enough compared to another species then we can worry about it.

I decide to don't have any children. Therefore, we can try to reduce the future human population, in this way.

Causality1• 7 years ago

We can't destroy humanity. We can, however, destroy any hope that human or human-descended life makes it off this planet.

spodek• 7 years ago

Annoying pedantry.

Everyone knows "destroy the planet" means something like "decrease Earth's ability to sustain life, especially human society" as is clear from every context it's used. Of course there are edge cases, which amount to rounding errors.

Yes, people would communicate more effectively by speaking more precisely, but this post doesn't merit meaningful discussion.

rimliu• 7 years ago

We cannot destroy life either.

labster• 7 years ago

Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the judge.

nydel• 7 years ago

well-said & hear hear!

..excuse my not knowing where better to ask:

when i see a submission as what i would classify as "clickbait"-ish at hackernews, what is the right thing to do? is that what flagging is for?

a cursory search hasn't returned me a FAQ or anything & i'm relatively new to commenting. thank y'all in advance if there's such a document available to link to.

dmos62• 7 years ago

There's a link to the FAQ on the bottom of the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

781• 7 years ago

Not everybody is a scientist who understands that it's just a metaphor.

Majority of Britons believe climate-change could end human race. ... 54 percent of adults agreed that climate-change threatens our extinction as a species

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-britain-protests-climate-c...

cthalupa3• 7 years ago

It isn't necessarily just a metaphor. The idea that the human population being reduced to a tiny fraction of what it once was is totally survivable isn't undisputed fact. Us surviving times where there has been a narrow amount of human life have all happened when we were hunter-gatherers or at the very beginning of things approaching civilization. The vast majority of humans today are dependent on each other and technology. The climate is also different - the sun is warmer than the last time the green house gasses on this planet rose to their highest concentrations, and we know that runaway global warming can turn a planet completely uninhabitable for human life - just look at Venus.

Yes, there are plenty of scenarios where a small amount of humanity lives on and repopulates the world over time. It certainly can happen. But there's also plenty where we don't. The author doesn't bring up any accurate science to back up his claims, or make any real arguments beyond 'We've survived population bottlenecks in the past', so I'd say that 54% of Briton's are right - climate change is a threat that could cause extinction. It isn't guaranteed to, even unchecked... but the question isn't whether or not it's a guarantee of extinction for humanity, or a threat possible of causing it. And it certainly is.

matz17• 7 years ago

The more annoying thing is people saying "destroy the planet" instead of the more honest "made the planet uncomfortable for them to live"

baxtr• 7 years ago

As a tautology that might be true. We can’t destroy the planet, we “just” change its appearance and its composition. Will it be a great place to live on? Not so sure about many parts of it.

lalaithion• 7 years ago

To destroy the Earth:

https://qntm.org/destro

julienreszka• 7 years ago

ugly rant

Lowkeyloki• 7 years ago

Although I'm sure Howey is technically correct, I don't think what amounts to semantic quibbling is actually adding anything to the discussion.

Okay, so humanity won't be eliminated. But there will be a dramatic increase in death and suffering and overall quality of life will be drastically diminished except for those already in the top 1% of wealth. How does that distinction change the overall discussion or the importance of fighting climate change?

phreeza• 7 years ago

In the time before the hydrogen bomb there was discussion that such a device may ignite the atmosphere. If we managed to somehow do that, it may do the trick.

perfunctory• 7 years ago

You don't have to worry about wiping out all of humanity to worry about climate change. Impending human suffering is reason enough to worry. "Climate is an existential threat" is obviously a hyperbole. If somebody doesn't understand it, too bad.

What I don’t like is when we exaggerate and undermine our good intentions.

I don't see how that undermines anything.

Creationer• 7 years ago

Climate change will benefit some countries according to Stanford:

https://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php

Russia: +419% to GDP. Hmmm....

jaredklewis• 7 years ago

A lot of complaints here about "semantic quibbling" and the like, but I found Howey's principled relationship with language refreshing.

Today, we get bombarded with an endless stream of clickbait that routinely stretches words to the very limit of their meanings and beyond. In politics especially, double speak is now the standard. "Fake news" probably isn't fake. A "Clean Air Act" bill probably isn't about clean air. The "middle class" probably isn't really in the middle. "Job creators" probably aren't creating jobs. And on and on.

Why shouldn't we all strive to use words in a precise, straightforward way? Why embellish our argument when the plain truth is already horrifying enough?

everyone2• 7 years ago

It is apparently possible that runaway global warming (the very kind we are currently initiating (perhaps irreversibly initiated already)) could render Earth like Venus. The sun is hotter now than the last time the clathrates got released at the Permian–Triassic extinction event. This is not espoused much by mainstream climatologists but real non-crank climatologists have work supporting the fact that it is possible. Steven Hawking even publicly brought this up.

furgooswft13• 7 years ago

Steven Hawking even publicly brought this up.

And was rebuked for it.

https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk...

Even in the absolute worse case scenarios we'd expect to see a temperature increase of around 10C, which is nowhere close to Venus levels. Also he threw in "raining sulphuric acid" just to make it sound even more apocalyptic I guess.

Earth becoming Venus is not even a "less likely" to happen scenario, it's a completely implausible scenario even if 100% of humanity dedicated itself to releasing all carbon into the atmosphere as quick as possible tomorrow just for kicks.

Prominent scientists like Hawking publicly making such groundless and hyperbolic statements IS hurting case for action against climate change, and that's exactly what this article is talking about.

jordanbeiber• 7 years ago

Is the author claiming that the complete destruction of planet earth and all human kind is what the environmental debate is about?

For me it’s about my grand children not ending up in Mad Max or Blade Runner.

That would truly suck... for them.

In both these scenarios the earth is around, humans are living and pretty much everything else is dead or dying.

You can always argue that whatever takes place within the boundaries of this universe is a natural progression. My bother is that we as a species know a lot of things, probably more than anything that ever lived on earth, still we keep doing obviously stupid things at scale.

This makes my computer say “no”, and it’s hard to rationalize as natural progression, considering this accumulation of knowledge.

My program tells me to do what I believe is best for my offspring and this seems rather natural to me.

cthalupa3• 7 years ago

The universe will collapse into a single black hole.

Basically no one believes the Big Crunch theory is likely to be accurate these days, which is what I imagine he is referring to here - but it's also inaccurately stated even for that theory, because the laws of physics are so different when the universe becomes that compact that the properties that allow black holes to exist are incredibly different. Not all singularities are black holes, and indeed, the universe would not condense into a single black hole if the Big Crunch were true. If he's not talking about the Big Crunch, I have no idea what he could mean, since there's no conceivable theory in which all of the matter ends up collected in one big black hole otherwise.

I know astrophysics and climate science are very different fields, but someone writing about how Thing X but not Thing Y is actually an existential crisis, some basic understanding about the ultimate fate of the universe would be nice.

It turns out that planetary life is a downhill chemical process if you have sunlight and liquid water.

All evidence we have is that life, or at least intelligent life, is quite rare. We don't understand abiogenesis, either. Between these two things, acting like it's a given that we'll have life in short order if we have sunlight and liquid water is absolutely silly.

I have a short story in an upcoming anthology inspired by this point. The third entry in the fantastic WASTELANDS series by John Joseph Adams will have a story by me about a place where our worst case scenario has already happened. (If you want to read my solution for how to wipe out all of humanity, check out WOOL and the Silo Saga. Spoiler: it ain’t pretty)

Oh. It's just a long form advertisement for his writing.

As others have pointed out, no one is really arguing about whether or not humanity might survive in some shape or form in these scenarios, but it wouldn't be anything like modern civilization. Our entire modern way of life ceasing to exist is plenty existential, and there's no guarantee that if we were reduced to a population of 2000 or so again that we would survive. See again the fact that as far as we can tell, intelligent life is incredibly rare - if intelligent life can keep hitting the 'restart' button when they fuck things up, we'd probably see evidence of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy.

xaduha• 7 years ago

Biggest changes will be geopolitical driven by humanitarian catastrophes. It's very much in the interest of the Western World not to allow it to happen.

rtkwe• 7 years ago

Sure, if we're taking 'existential threat' literally it's probably not in the sense that it won't end all human life on Earth. If we take it a little looser though it is a big threat to modern civilization and that will be pretty difficult to restart just because we've mined so many of the easily available energy sources and resources.

We Can't Destroy Planet Earth

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