Don't be ominous. Just say things or refrain from posting.

Please name a better alternative, I'm very curious.

A system that prices in cost of negative externalities is better than what we have now. A system that caps how much wealth a person can have is a better system that what we now have. A system that prevents the exportation of pollution is a better system than what we have now.

These are opinions and I understand not everyone has these same beliefs.

One where people don't travel very much.

What are the alternatives people rather avoid considering?

Not the OP, and this is probably not what they were thinking of, but from the point of view of the planet's ecosystem, eliminating the humans that keep introducing species where they don't belong (or at least drastically reducing their population) would be the most effective measure.

You first?

Also, what is that babble about "the planet's ecosystem" being better off by eliminating humans? If you really want to see it as a whole - the Gaia hypothesis - then humans are part of it just like flies and ticks and mosquitos and birds and whales. All play a role, some spread diseases to others while they feed yet again others. Removing humans from the equation is just like Mao's decision to get rid of the sparrows which ate some of the harvest in that the balance will shift until a new equilibrium has been reached. In Mao's case it killed tens of millions of humans, removing humans will result in the death of hundreds of millions of other species.

We are in the midst of a great extinction event. It’s the only extinction event caused by one species. We are quite bad for the planet’s ecosystem and things like factory farming of cows and pigs cause great suffering. Having far fewer humans on the planet would be a great benefit to other species and to humanity.

Dont worry! With AI powered robotics it’ll only take a tiny fraction of humans to create many times more ‘impact’!

We're not in the midst of a great extinction event and even if we were it would not be the first one caused by a single species. Probably the first one was caused by the appearance of Cyanobacteria some 2.7 billion years ago which started to make use of sunlight through photosynthesis. A few hundred million years later the produced oxygen started seeping into the atmosphere and boom, nearly all anaerobic life on the planet was wiped out.

We are part of the ecosystem no matter how much you try to deny it. The planet will abide, humans most likely as well. If you want to call for fewer humans on the planet - something which seems to be the future anyway since births are rapidly declining almost everywhere - that's fine but realise you're just following others like Malthus who did so before. Malthus was proven wrong many times over, you will be proven wrong as well since if there's one thing humans are good at it is adapting to a changing environment. If it gets colder humans adapt, that's how we made it through the series of glaciations. If it gets warmer humans adapt, that's how we made it through e.g. the Roman and Viking age warm periods.

Ok, it’s the first mass extinction event caused by a single species in the last 1.99 billion years. We are shitting all over the planet. It’s not a matter of warm or cold but of toxifying the entire planet. It’s a matter of what type of environment we want to live in. Merely existing is dehumanizing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Sorry if that wasn't obvious, I wasn't proposing it, I just wanted to come up with an example of a solution that "no one would seriously consider".

There's no such thing as introducing species where they don't belong. Ecosystem are dynamic, several other animals serve as vectors for transporting species from a place to another. There's no such thing as a long term static equilibria where godess gaia looks like a Jehova's witnesses book illustration. This is an incredibly cultish and misanthropic position.

This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.

Natural boundary crossing isn't rare; it's the mechanism that built much of the biosphere. Every fucking oceanic island on Earth, Hawaii, the Galápagos, New Zealand, the Mascarenes, was stocked entirely by organisms that crossed open ocean or sky without any help from us.

The entire South American primate and caviomorph rodent lineages (everything from capuchins to capybaras) descend from African ancestors that rafted across the Atlantic on vegetation mats roughly 40 million years ago.

When the Isthmus of Panama closed (~3 million years ago), North American placental mammals poured south and drove a large fraction of South America's endemic fauna—native ungulates, many marsupial lineages—to extinction.

Yeah. Some species get crowded out, maybe we should avoid that in a lot of cases, but is not the capital sin western people have been brainwashed to believe it when they replaced their christianism with new age Gaia worship. Species get extinct, eco-systems change, sometimes it is worth preventing that, in other, who fucking cares?

Rare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?"

The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture.

Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.

Probably something about walls or methods used by political systems that built walls.

Not having cats is an option that is not seriously considered.

Dogs are even worse. Make them shit in your own backyard please.

If you are a city dweller please do not keep “pets”, it’s bloody ridiculous, thank you.

Yuo must be fun at parties.

We've been keeping pets as a species for considerably longer than we've had cities. It's basically an ingrained part of how we react to animals now.

In dwarf fortress you can have dragons as pets. Never got there, tho I think I will train dogs in my current fortress.

Sadly not known to breathe fire, but on the plus side, less likely to burn your house down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogona

Beyond that, longer than we've had the written word.

Domestication of animals might be the single greatest achievement of humans.

Aren't cities older than writing?

You seem to think humans keep cats as pets, which indicates you've never lived with a cat before.

Cats have standards that prevent that person from getting hired as a servant.

Keeping an animal that defecates indoors and allowing it contact with food prep area is obscene.

Obscene is the right word because it's quite manageable in health terms, it just feels bad to you.

I defecate indoors. Should I not be allowed bear food prep areas?

I am certain you don't step in the toilet bowl and walk on your countertops after.

Children?

Children was their hands, diapers get changed, and rarely get on countertops.

Do you live in the American continent? Look at the skin tone of most people you find in the streets. Go to a library and try to find out what was the average skin tone in your region 600 years ago. Compare both.

Thinks have been spreading for quite a while. Migratory species are older than ourselves. Jet stream can carry spores over oceans. World commerce is older than you think. Wars and migratory movements has always been a part of our civilization.

>World commerce is older than you think.

I'm aware that trade networks long precede recorded history, and potentially precede fully-modern humans. The fact that you can have homsapien admixture (eg: homo sapiens + denisovans) far, far outside of Africa is proof enough for that.

The time scales did use to be different, and speeding things up as much as possible does not seem to be a good thing.