We need to better price in the cost of destroying ecosystems-- think like we're doing with the carbon pricing, but much broader in scope. Basically what the "E" in "ESG" should stand for, if the system made sense. And we need international, cross-party alignment on this.

I'm not extremely optimistic on our ability to do what it takes.

You could kill all life on Earth, then there'd be no mass extinctions after that. You could put all animals in zoos and maintain their populations at a constant level but that's not a 100% guarantee. Best way would be to continue advancing human society so that we reach a state of such abundance that no one on Earth needs to put undue pressure on wild populations of animals while at the same time achieving a mastery of the natural world that would allow us to avert any major disasters that might befall the Earth such as asteroid impacts, coronal mass ejections, super volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, rogue black holes, and the death of the sun. Look sharp, we've got a lot of work ahead of us!

You're assuming that almost all of those wild animal species won't be extinct by that point?

I'm talking about future mass extinctions. The hard fact of life on Earth is that species die, we've had several mass extinctions (defined as >75% of species going extinct) but there is always a background extinction rate. That background rate is conservatively estimated to be 130 vertebrate species every 100 years. The reason people are saying we are at the beginning of another mass extinction event caused by human activity is because we have apparently accelerated that rate. I say we are at the beginning because as it stands about 1% to 2% of vertebrate animals that were present throughout human history have now gone extinct. We have a fair ways to go before we hit mass extinction levels but there are a significant number of species that are threatened or endangered. The confounding issue is that we are studying this problem and also have been mitigating it for at least 50 years if not longer if you count less organized attempts at conservation.

Personally, I don't think we are going to continue to increase the rate of extinction as long as we continue to modernize the rest of the world. As people are lifted out of poverty they have more time to spend worrying about their environment and the animals that inhabit it. The best thing we can do is to make sure that no one on Earth lives in poverty that requires them to cut down and burn wood for fuel and heat, make sure they have fertilizer so they can get the best crop yields out of limited land without having to slash and burn wildlands, have access to refrigeration so they don't waste l3% or more of the food they grow, and have proper infrastructure so they can manage their waste water and garbage disposal without polluting natural water ways and the land surrounding urban centers.

The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

How do we know material abundance (I’m assuming that’s what you mean) “is the way”? Perhaps that’s not what you mean but it’s not an unreasonable way of describing contemporary zeitgeist.

A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up.

IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics.

It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines.

But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.

If you think there are very long term existential threats we can’t protect against without massive technological advances, or if there might be existential threats we don’t know about yet, you probably don’t want a relatively static society regardless of how internally stable and comfortable it seems to be. We probably need to up our game a lot to even be safe from existential threats we know about, like asteroid/comet impacts. And what about supernovae? And what about stuff that might be even less frequent that we don’t even know about?

I guess what I’m saying is that optimizing for stability and comfort almost certainly is at odds with optimizing for longevity. Unless we eventually have some good reason to think that we’ve discovered all the long-term existential threats and are protected against them.

Human civilization is only 6,000 years old. Worrying about supernovae and comets is really jumping the gun. Our biggest danger -- by many orders of magnitude -- is ourselves.

Everything I said applies just as well to existential threats caused by humans!

I won't stand in your way if you want to live in a commune in the woods foraging for roots and berries. It's your life so do what you want with it. I prefer living in a heated house with modern amenities like smokeless lighting and clean drinking water.

Do we need to stop? The other 6 seem to have worked out ok

"Do we need to stop something called a 'mass extinction'" is certainly a take.

Just like a fire is part of a forest's ecosystem it's possible that a mass extinction is part of the Earth's natural lifecycle and is beneficial in the very very long term

Are we happy, however, with anything that's beneficial to Earth's long term natural cycle if it happens to come with our own potential / likely extinction? (or at least a very heavy hit to the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed).

I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend as opposed to the environment in and of itself. It's my enjoyment of the environment and the wonder of its variation that is something valuable to lose, but it's loss is also an existential threat to, basically, me and all those I care about in the universe.

> I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend

I never thought I'd see a real-life version of the legendary Churchill quote.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-prepositi...

It didn't start that way, but I feel that attempts at profundity require adherence to such rules, and so I edited it thusly.

> I care about the environment insomuch as it's upon what our very lives depend as opposed to the environment in and of itself.

I mean, sure, but that’s largely what got us into this mess.

So recognizing that periodic fire is part of the natural cycle is one thing, and purposely igniting every tree you come across is quite another.

I don't really care about the other later phases of Earth's natural lifecycle - I kinda like this one. So much so, that I'm going to be investing in the other ones at all.

Now if only that was the kind of short term thinking humans were afflicted with.

Life on Earth probably has one (~maybe two) very very long terms left before Sun vapes it all. Also, since all under-your-feet fossils and minerals are basically depleted, the chance for another technological civilization after ours is vanishingly small.

I guess it depends on if your definition of "intelligence" includes a basic self-preservation clause.

The dinosaur equivalent of zeroonetwothree would disagree if he hadn't suffocated on sulphur-laden air a few years back.

Sure, if “humanity disappears from the universe” is an acceptable outcome.

Not to mention the potential for long, painful decline for humans alive at the end.

I don't think the long painful decline for humans at the end is an avoidable thing.

Eventually there will only be iron stars around in the universe, and it will be exceedingly difficult to increase the entropy of the universe with them

By that point, any remaining people likely won’t be recognizably human, so I’m not overly concerned about that. Plus, that’s billions of years off.

Climate damage that begins to kill off my great-grand kids (probably through water wars or similar), who I could conceivably see born, is a very real possibility.

Without other planets to examine, we have no way of knowing whether this is survivorship bias.

Is life truly that tenacious or are we incredibly lucky? Perhaps best not to tempt fate if the latter.

No, let's get rid of humanity.

Let’s transition to renewables and sustainability instead.

Depends on how you define ok. If you define "ok" as "life will continue on the planet", then yes, it will work out ok... if you define it as "humans will survive" then we can't be so sure.

If by “worked out ok” you mean where life on earth is reduced to little more than weeds and it takes millions of years for the complex ecosystems that support humanity to reemerge, then yeah, it worked out just fine. We would definitely go extinct after a long period of decline and suffering, but let’s not worry about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Effects_and_r...

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for the earth approach 1.

Well, there is the slight matter of how we weren't around for the previous N mass extinctions. I would say the possibility of us, or at least our civilization, going extinct warrants action.

don't have kids, and vote

What a great way to remove everyone who gives a shit from the next generation.

well, don't let republicans have kids is for thinking privately, rather than posting on the internet.

But Republicans are the ones having kids. The GOP leads democrats 2:1 among people with kids at home. https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmout... (PDF page 10)

Sampling by telephone is a terrible methodology.

538 gives Monmouth University an “A” in its ratings of pollsters: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings. I think they know what they’re doing.

(This October poll also nailed the actual 4 point spread in the congressional popular vote.)

That’s great, but you can get that without getting blue parents. I have a small sample of red parents but a large sample of blue parents in my circle and they don’t answer unknown numbers. I realize this is anecdotal.

Most people don’t answer unknown phone calls, but the ones who do answer the phone don’t skew more red or blue compared to the folks who don’t: https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2017/05/15/what-low-resp... (“Telephone poll estimates for party affiliation, political ideology and religious affiliation continue to track well with estimates from high response rate surveys conducted in-person, like the General Social Survey.”)

Pew is of course the gold standard in polling organizations.

Your linked article discusses how telephone methodology has numerous significant flaws.

> The finding that a low response rate leads to substantial bias on some topics (e.g., volunteering) but not others (e.g., partisanship or religious affiliation) underscores the importance of having high response rate in-person surveys, which make such knowledge possible.

The above quote is saying “we can’t get accurate detailed demographics via phone” but using positively-oriented PR speak to do it. This is another way of admitting “in detail our demographics do not match the underlying population.” This could mean that their blue skews young, their red skews old, or their blue skews uneducated or vice versa, etc.

The article is from 5.5 years ago when they were just transitioning from landline polling to cell phone polling. Call spam has increased significantly since then.

Pew was founded in 1990 to do telephone research so of course they were going to defend it, but 2017 is when questions were just starting to be asked about it (in the context of a shift to mobile).

That doesn't necessarily mean that those kids will also be republican. Young people continuously move more to the left.

After all, the jokes about no politics at Thanksgiving has a lot to do with much more conservative old people having different ideas than the youth

> Young people continuously move more to the left.

And then to the right as they get older. A surprising number of British politicians on the right were Marxists in their youth.

Same for Gen-X in the US: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/20/cherie-wes...

> Now, though, there is no confusion: Generation X is safely Republican. One model from 2014 measuring only white voters through the 2012 election shows those born in the mid-to-late 1960s being the most Republican-leaning of all, more so than the older Boomers and Silent generation.

Page 10 of this document doesn't say what you say it does.

PDF page 10 (page 2 of the cross tabs) asks “would you rather see republicans or democrats control the house.” 64% say republicans or lean Republican, versus 29% that say democrats or lean democrats. 6% say no lean or not sure.

Among other issues, that number will change sharply depending on who's in the White House.

Woke kids are radicalizing their parents!

I want a clean planet so future generations can enjoy it.

The P-word. No on wants to say the P-word and demand ZPG worldwide.

How can population be the issue when a tiny subset of individuals and organizations account for virtually all of the environmental changes?

Overpopulation isn't truly the actual problem. It's merely a symptom of that "tiny subset of individuals" having been allowed to monopolize and mismanage most of the resources and manpower of planet Earth unto themselves as their playthings. Sadly it's a symptom that seriously complicates the matter.

Who manages their limited resources better, a prosperous Japan or a developing Vietnam?

I say "don't have kids" half-heartedly because I actually want them. But I also understand that having them is perpetuating the system which got us here in the first place. You're kidding yourself if you believe otherwise, the way developing nations are coming up should be more than enough evidence of that. If it comes between living rich but destroying the environment, and living in poverty (or really even just less-rich) but keeping nature preserved, people will choose the former every single time.

If you want kids and don't eventually have them purely for this reason then you'll regret it doubly.

The more conscientious people who have kids should at least maintain the number of conscientious people in the world (so I believe anyway, potentially romantically incorrectly).

Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).

Idiocracy hypothesis says otherwise. The least educated and intelligent have the most numbers of offspring.

In which case 'the conscientious minority' must continue to breed to at least slow the rate of the declining percentage.

And, thankfully, geniuses randomly and repeatedly arise amongst them.

We can disincentivize it substantially by replacing tax benefits for having kids with tax burdens for having kids, promoting family planning and making contraceptives free and easily accessible as possible, making childbirth and childrearing as expensive as possible, etc.

> Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).

[Citation needed]

I've encountered several examples of people who were raised pure humanist/materialist and became one stripe or another of religious later in life, including

- Simone Weil (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil)

- my father, raised by an atheist and agnostic, was an aggressive atheist until his college years when he became a deist (he further converted to evangelical Christianity while in medical school).

- Bruce Greyson, raised a pure materialist but became vaguely spiritual and inclined towards dualism after decades of studying NDEs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greyson)

It may not be common to start off atheist and become theistic, but it does happen.

My sister is a born again Christian, so it's not true for her either, but it's definitely true for her kids.

Imma keep working on em though ;)

Global birth rate per persn has been dropping for decades. Absolute global birthdate has been pretty stable for 30 years.

Incredibly massive decrease in GDP. It'll happen regardless.

end capitalism and establish especifist anarchism

there's no technology solution that comes fast enough in an economic growth at any cost technocracy. graeber/wengrow already did the legwork on finding alternatives to be possible without needing to undo discovery of agriculture or unwind to smaller societies.