The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987)

Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by x3n0ph3n3 on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:26PM (#10077280)

If humans had never invented agriculture, we would have never gone to space and invented ways to track and prevent catastrophic asteroid impact. Plenty of non-human species will benefit from that, but I don't think this is a result the author predicted given this was written in 1987. IMHO, that trumps all of the ills mentioned in the paper as now we are talking about the future existence vs non-existence of the human race.

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by PeterWhittaker on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @09:58AM (#10079186)

we would have never gone to space

Interesting conclusion. Can you elaborate how you got there? Did you perhaps fall victim to the "no free time" fallacy, that somehow agriculture gave us more time for leisure, study, etc?

Diamond writes modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers - and this in land that is marginal, since we farmer-society-types have pushed them there.

A more intriguing line of argument might have to do with settled communities, etc.

Regardless of your line of argument, please ensure you do not succumb to survivor bias (because we got here this way we could only have gotten here this way, because no hunter-gatherer society got here, none can).

I look forward to rigorous reasoning.

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @11:34AM (#10079732)

Obviously, because most of us are neither hunters nor gatherers today. One modern farmer can feed 10's of thousands of people. Those people can specialize e.g. engineer, astronaut, teacher.

Hunter societies could never, ever have become this productive. There's just no leverage there. And ultimately, the local environment has a strict limit on supporting apex predators (hunters), which is orders of magnitude smaller than the environment 'tamed' and groomed for agriculture.

The whole hunter-is-better argument is silly, from a civilization point of view.

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by PeterWhittaker on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @02:32PM (#10081182)

I don't believe anyone has argued hunter-is-better. The question is whether or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the article.

They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough to tell.

But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable.

After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18 centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries before that.

Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded them, and you might be on to something.

Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by x3n0ph3n3 on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @04:56PM (#10082139)

I don't think it has to do with available free time, but the ability to stay in a single place and build large machines.

How exactly would a nomadic tribe be able to build the infrastructure required for space travel?

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by pavel_lishin on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:37PM (#10077318)

I don't think we've invented a way to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts yet.

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by x3n0ph3n3 on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:46PM (#10077341)

We've definitely designed them and done most of the difficult research. [1][2]

Even though it's not fully realized, it's an entirely likely and plausible outcome of agriculture.

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-defl...

[2] http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission....

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Re:The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) by nine_k on Monday August 17, 2015 @10:51PM (#10077359)

I suspect that detonating a few nuclear warheads at the right point relative to an asteroid would evaporate enough matter from its surface to change its course without breaking it into small uncontrollable pieces.

This is, I suppose, well within means of current space technology, provided that we have enough time, e.g. several years or at least many months, to get the rockets to the asteroid.

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