It is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us.

As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.

Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.

Bingo, this is exactly what I was going to say. The Earth sure is fault-tolerant, we just might not enjoy what PIDs get the kill signal to repair the system.

Over a geological timescale, the Earth will cease to exist once consumed by the Sun.

Homo Sapiens would almost surely survive as a species. Humans are like cockroaches. It might be horribly nasty though, and definitely not something we should invite.

I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?

If that's Elon's position then he must have a huge load of cognitive dissonance if he still thinks prioritizing colonization of Mars is a worthwile contribution.

I'm rarely one to defend Elon, but that isn't cognitive dissonance, it's trying to have a plan B in face of reality.

He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.

Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.

I disagree. If we bring earth into a state where Mars looks like the better alternative, then we deserve to go extinct.

Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?

I've always thought of "saving the earth" as referring to the millions of intelligent and sensitive non-human lifeforms that we are currently obliterating. But I agree, the earth will continue to have life regardless of what humans do, it just won't include anything we currently know and cherish at the rate we're going.

I for my part also care about the thousands of species that are going extinct because of our behavior. I don't care tht much about the human species. It's our fault, we deserve to suffer. But the polar bear does not.

I agree. But to have an even small glimmer of hope of changing people's behavior, you need to sell the idea to them like successful companies do. Tell them how THEY're going to benefit.

As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.

I just hate when people refer to that specific part of his standup as anti-environmentalist. I think he didn't meant it like people are quoting him to approve destroying nature. The planet will be fine (c), sure, this stone rock will be fine. Humans won't be, animals won't be, plants won't be. We probably won't be able to exterminate all living things on Earth, and some plankton and bacteria will evolve into something new again. But again, current snapshot of "nature", the one we are all living in will be lost if it continued to be destroyed.

I feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.

Yup, with one addition

>> It'll still be running some code...

until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

There's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)

Indeed!

Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.

One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).

> it'll still be running some code.

This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.

The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.

there must be some science fiction series in which humans are called chaos monkeys!

Fault tolerance is a concept relative to a desired functional behavior. Relative to "everything should stay as-is", nature is not fault tolerant at all. But relative to "_something_ will keep existing and evolving" it is very fault tolerant. But that may not be the way we'd like.

This is backwards. Nature is incredibly fault tolerant, it's our systems that are disconnected from nature that are incredibly fragile.

Nature will be fine. It's us that won't be. Let's stop pretending that it's the same thing.