I have no assumptions either way, and if they do happen to frequent HN the chances are actually better to get such questions answered here than anywhere else.
Karma grab? FWIW I offered to hand back in all my karma points because they are utterly meaningless but Dang wouldn't have it so please spare me the nonsense accusations.
HN was still free to write to, contribute and ask questions of last I checked, I don't need you - nor anybody else - to tell me what I can or can not do here, nor do I need you to try to put me in a negative light for trying to understand something better.
FWIW humanity has an extremely well developed skill called problem solving. We can do just about anything in the laboratory. But when scaling up those laboratory experiments we often find out that what we thought was a neg positive ends up being a net negative. Before we sink a few 10's of thousands of data centers onto the continental shelf I'd like to know the ecological impact, even if that has already been studied (which I'm actually not aware of).
See also: plastic, freon, lead (in gasoline) and a whole raft of other things that seemed like a great idea at the time but for which we did not have the long term predictions when they mattered most: at the beginning, mostly because people did not ask the right questions.
Scientists in the beginning of the previous century: "Plastics, they last for ever! yay!" and a hundred years later "Plastics, they last for ever! Oops!".
Anyway, the steady stream of quality answers in this thread proves you more wrong than I ever will but this comment reflects poorly on HN, me, and ultimately, on you.
Asking the questions here on HN instead of in a place where the designers are likely to read them makes it seem it's more of a karma grab than a reasonable "I have concerns" type situation that he really wants to do something about. Nor are random HN commenters very likely to have big, fact-backed contributions btw. It's just alarmism under the pretense of innocently asking questions.