I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.
There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.
Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).
The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.
Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.
(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)
We can certainly avoid the worst of it - but entirely is more dangerous than none.
For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice.
One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenario is something we should be using our unnatural gifts to avoid.
Arguments based on how natural something is is highly subjective and not really worthwhile imo. Replace natural with what we're actually trying to discuss: As a species we want a stable environment that requires the least effort to survive in. Individuals have additional traits they want from the environment but that's all subjective. Things that most people consider natural are usually things that have a large data set to demonstrate their stability.
That type of thinking will ruin the second planet just as much.
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?
Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.
I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.
I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.
Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.
If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.
That doesn't make it okay.
You're still taking essentially a static view of a dynamic system, because you're looking at too small a timescales. What we see as "natural balance" is essentially a freeze-frame of nature. The equilibria we see aren't stable - they're just very slow to changing. Everything is evolving and in a constant war with each other at every level - from microscopic to macroscopic. Nature itself doesn't care about the environment as we see it today[0].
The problem with humans boils down to what makes us truly special: intelligence and socializing enabled us to evolve a meta-organism of society at rates many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Language and writing lets us propagate knowledge and technologies between generations, and intelligence lets us problem-solve and simulate in mind space - pruning the solution space quickly and in an efficient way, over evolution's directed RNG.
Point being, no other organism can respond with the speed at which we evolve our societies and technologies. That's why we disrupt the ecosystems and the climate. We're too fast for nature.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event is a good example. An evolutionary leap, leading to most life dying off, only for new and more complex forms to eventually take its place. But as it is with life, whatever comes after a mass die-off isn't the same thing that was there before.
Human industralization is that sort of a problem - rather then a slow multi-generational change in equilibria, we're looking at rapid change which simply wipes species out (because if you can't have a generational change, you can't have any evolutionary adaptation).
The domestication of dogs for example is something humans definitely did to the native biosphere - dogs don't exist today without us. But it took at least 20,000 years to do. Not 300.
We didn't come out of a void. We are a natural evolution too, with the only difference being that we reached this stage before other animals. Since we are disrupting our ecosystem, we are living proof that either:
- this ecosystem we are in is not function according to your definition - or functioning ecosystems do not maintain balance
> The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.
Ecosystems are constantly being disrupted and have been long before humans evolved. Wind can carry the seeds of one plant into another ecosystem where it suddenly dominates because it has no "natural predators". Birds can fly over an ecosystem, defecate and drop an entirely foreign species into another ecosystem.
Cyanobacteria are even attributed as the reason for one of the first mass extinctions [0]. Is that a sign of a functioning ecosystem?
> Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.
Viruses and bacteria actively mess around with the DNA of other organisms in order to render them susceptible or make them carriers. Nature has been messing with itself long before we ever learned how.
We are in no way special in this universe or in our actions. We are just copying what we see in nature.
[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...
Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds?
"If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? "
Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes ethical discussions. Nature just is and everything in it trys to adapt. Some prosper, some die out. Now with our technology we disrupted quite a bit, but why must we understand everything we do, when nature aparrently does not either?
With research like this, I am more worried, what things like this, does to us. To maybe get to the point, where new babys are created in a laboratory and the less successful experiments goes to the bin. All for Evolution.
Now I am grossed out by that thought. But from a philosophical point of view, I have to ask myself: "who defines that this is bad?"
Maybe this gets us to the stars, so life can spread, in case earth life gets vanished, by a big asteroid. So maybe it is ethical to do all we can, to get there? To preserve life itself? (humans are not at all adopted for space, radiation, zero g etc., so CRISPR?)
(well no, I don't think it is ethical to do by all means, but I do think ethics are subjective and the next generations might have different ethics)
edit: had to translate it, but: we also have knotweed and people complain, but I actually like it. And I do not see it dominating, just a spot here and there, just like nettles.
Species come and go all the time. Globalisation just made it a lot faster. So there will be imbalances and local system collapsing and temporary a dominating species etc., but alltogether the diversity of species will be increased, with fast global exchange. Because there are more candidates to fill a niche.
Local established ones still have a home bonus. Their DNA is adopted to the local climate and soil, unlike the invaders. They won't vanish anytime soon.
The thing really threatening diversity are monoculture fields with pesticides.
If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.
If you want to see some good examples of this, check out some terrarium channels on youtube, there's some really cool, perfectly balanced ones people have had going for years.
The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.
You're right, life does push through, but personally, I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings.
And so do most things, that first example likely has at least a dozen species of songbirds, a bunch of shrubs and herbacious plants. That second example has two species, maybe some rats or crows if your lucky.
The thing is, ecosystems don't stand alone, they're all connected and the collapse of one leads to the collapse of the neighbouring ones and so forth.
If you actually look through the published literature.on various ecosystems around the world, we have a very shallow level of knowledge. We don't understand fully the complex connections between everything and the research that does keep coming out keeps showing how much we've vastly underestimated how much our actions have impacted things.
Even things like the ecosystems in our own body's. The microscopic organisms that have been found to even play a part in things such as our decision making and moods.
The human body itself functions as an ecosystem, all our body systems, our cells, our organs, all function independently and cohesively to make everything that is you.
The earth itself functions the same way. The ecosystems, and all life, including humans, are the cells and organs that make up all life on Earth.
Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.
Humans really don't understand the potential consequences to changes we make to the genetic code. We have a vague idea, but we really are.delving mostly blind into this. If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level?