For sure! And if a meteor is heading our way, I’ll be on the top of that hill with my Louisville Slugger.

I just think we shouldn’t pretend that we’re being altruistic.

I think the argument is not that mankind preventing a mass extinction event is unnatural, but rather that mass extinction events seem both natural and necessary for the rise of new life forms, and as such are "neutral" rather than bad events (except from the perspective of mankind, which would be rendered extinct). So it can be argued that you are not necessarily making a "favor" to Earth's ecosystem.

Personally, who cares? I think I and probably most of humanity if given a choice between the survival of the human species and the birth of some philosophical new species that may never even exist, we choose humanity every time. Going even further if given the choice of humanity over any other existing species we choose humanity. I see no issue with this choice either, we are a part of nature and Darwinism built us to want to survive and spread.

This is really a non issue to start with - once space settlement really gets going, we will spawn many more spacies, as the various groups go farther apart and evolve/modify themselves and all the life they took with them.

It could even result in funny situations where one of them encounters a clearly alien beings with totally different physiology, culture, appearance and language - only ot find they are just another branch of life originating from Earth. :-)

This statement reminds me of the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great read if you like SF and have not read it.

Thanksy I'll check it out!

Other places where you can see this concept is the Orions Arm hard SF universe or the old Imperium Galactica RTS. :)

> This is really a non issue to start with - once space settlement really gets going, we will spawn many more spacies, as the various groups go farther apart and evolve/modify themselves and all the life they took with them.

I'm unconvinced. We are firmly in the realm of thought experiments, of course, but I think all this would do is produce changes within local maxima, the reason being that even while adapting to new living conditions, evolution only has so much to "work with" from within the local maximum given by the existing human body.

In contrast, a mass extinction event looks closer to pushing a big reset button, radically shaking up existing lifeforms and giving other struggling species their chance at the limelight. Maybe even species that right now are microbes or invertebrates, but that -- should mankind, mammals and birds go extinct -- would evolve into dominant lifeforms, filling the vacated niches in the ecosystem.

Maybe the species which by our continuing existence we are potentially preventing from becoming dominant is the species that would have successfully colonized the solar system and beyond, instead of us. Not a variation of humans under new conditions, but a radically new species unrelated to us.

> Personally, who cares? I think I and probably most of humanity if given a choice between the survival of the human species and the birth of some philosophical new species

Well, whoever claims to care about doing "good" to Earth's ecosystem (as opposed to admitting it's only about mankind's survival) must necessarily care about this kind of arguments.

It's not a "philosophical new species", I can point to one species you really care about and which owes its existence to a mass extinction event (or maybe more than one): yours.

Right, but humans are here now. We are not going to willingly endure a mass extinction event for another species to thrive in our place.

I don't disagree. I'm all for our species surviving. But let's not delude ourselves, like the initial comment did, that we are doing this for the good of the planet. It's for us. This is valid, sure. But it's not the good of the ecosystem or any such thing.