I completely agree.
"Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species"
I completely agree.
"Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are."
It is a symbiosis. You make it sound like a parasitic relationship.
> "Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life"
Aren't most people do it for selfish reasons? (Money, feel good about yourself, ...)
Police protects us, for the money they get. Agriculture delivers us food, for the money they get. Water stations deliver us water, for the money they get. Touristic attractions give us joy, for the money. PETA, "saves animals", for the money. Youtube provides fun and education, for the money.
If these organisations didn't receive our money, will they still provide us with those things?
The only noble profession these days is a fireman, which don't get as much money as they are worth to the society!
Of course there are people that are genuine "good", that will help others just because they want it to, but most of the people do something, wanting something in return.
I don't agree with the parent poster that we should hate ourselves, but we aren't angels too ;)
What if money didn't exist, where would we be right now as a civilization?
As an example see the great oxygenation event. Where bunch of selfish green algea pumped waste product into the atmosphere killing almost all anaerobic life.
Then there is the carboniferous period where trees grew so much that due to lack of lignin breaking fungi they basically sucked out all CO2 from atmosphere causing global glaciation and killing themselves in the process.
Life has been crapping itself since the very start. We are no worse than others, however we have the chance to be better.
This platitude is actually interesting in this context. It connects multiple threads:
* One of the previous major extinctions was the Oxygen Holocaust [1], caused by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. It killed pretty much everything alive back then. And turned our Earth into a snowball to boot.
* This oxygen is a major contributor to CANCER, via free radicals etc. It leads to a faster (and more ruthless, more side effects) metabolism, enabling evolution of highly reactive creatures such as us.
* And trees, the "speaking organisms" under discussion, are one of the major producers of this highly volatile, carcinogenic O2 substance.
Tongue in cheek? Maybe. But hopefully no worse than the naive "humans are a cancer to the planet".
Self loathing of the human race needs to stop, there are an incredible number of hard working people making the world a better place one step at a time. Our impact on the world barely registers to past extinction level events. Humanity has just as much right to exist and be as any other species. If you don't like what we are doing, work to improve things.
Are you aware how many countless people have and do work to improve your quality of life, protect you, make sure you are fed and watered and provided with distractions like HN to complain about how awful we are.