Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology

Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by qayxc on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @05:27AM (#27759136)

> What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal?

Something like 90% of Earth's surface is outright deadly to humans: about 71% is covered in water, in which humans cannot survive; then there's deserts (both hot and cold) as well as high mountains, which also don't allow for human habitation without technology.

But it's not just geological features. There's also deadly diseases, lots of predators (humans wiped them out completely in most of their habitats), weather and poisonous plants.

The average urban human wouldn't survive long in nature. Heck, there's a good chance they would catch a serious disease just from drinking contaminated water from a pond or a small brook.

> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?

For hundreds of thousands of years there's only been very few of us. In pre-argicultural times, no more than 10M humans lived on the planet [0], probably even almost going extinct in the wake of the Toba supervolcano event 70000 years ago. Indeed several genetic bottleneck events have been identified (ice age, weird cultural shifts [1]) suggesting that the survival of our species wasn't a sure bet throughout history.

[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/internat...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25770088/

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by FridayoLeary on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @10:11AM (#27761317)

I don't know if that's what GP meant. Elves also suffered from the ravages of cold, famine seas etc. It's just that in general they were tolerated and treated infinitely better by the natural world then humans. And almost anything else living, actually. But the truth is, even in Tolkiens world, Nature is hostile to all living things. Arda conspires with time to sap the powers of even the mightiest of the Lords. It kills countless elves. So your interpretation of "nature isn't kind" is clearly wrong.

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by Juliate on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @06:11AM (#27759372)

So, it's more about adaptation than "kindness".

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by qayxc on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @06:19PM (#27766398)

It even goes both ways: most species change their environment to better accommodate their needs (beavers dam rivers, termites build mounds, forests modify the soil and create their own microclimate, etc.).

So it really is a complex system of adaptation to external conditions, modifying inanimate aspects of the environment to meet our needs and interactions with other species.

Human technology and -activity is not unmatched in scale (cyanobacteria are still the champions - completely remodelling Earth's atmosphere), but no other other species had the means to do it so quickly. We seem to strife for a mixture of artificial (houses, streets, technology) and versions of nature that we're fully in control of (from fish tanks and zoos to parks and gardens).

This need to "tame the land" even extends to other parts of the universe, hence the concept of "terraforming", even though adaption even if by artificial means would be much less complicated, quicker and "more natural".

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by NL807 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @09:03AM (#27760635)

And that's the secret sauce for every species that made it so far.

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by ModernMech on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @09:31AM (#27760897)

But Nature also has given us everything we need to survive. Just because it's also deadly doesn't mean it isn't kind. Compare the Earth's hostility to Mars. Despite all its dangers, Nature seems downright cuddly by that measure.

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by merpnderp on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @10:55AM (#27761826)

Nature didn't give us anything. Our DNA evolved to take from Nature.

No buffalo walks up to a lion and gives itself up, the lion evolved to take, brutally and with often needless cruelty.

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by ModernMech on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @11:39AM (#27762313)

That there's anything there at all to take is the point.

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Re:Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology by jasperry on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @11:26AM (#27762175)

This argument might be missing the distinction between humanity as a species and individual existence. No doubt humanity has thrived, but most individual human lives face significant struggles and hardships. We are here because we've been able to adapt and survive in relation to the rest of nature, but nature doesn't make it easy for us, and everybody dreams of having it easier. We continually fantasize about having greater power to protect ourselves from nature.

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