The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

[DSMatticus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_ ... n_Movement

Wow. The hubris there is staggering.

[ubernoob]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_ ... n_Movement

Wow. The hubris there is staggering.

Explain? Humans are successful because they terraform. Larger numbers = larger terraform. Am I wrong?

[Chamomile]

The notion that humanity could cause lasting damage to the actual planet has always been ridiculous. The only reason we need to worry about environmentalism is because a rapidly shifting environment poses a threat to our civilization, and in extreme cases the ongoing survival of our species. Regardless of what happens to our particular branch of the evolutionary tree, though, Mother Nature is going to walk it off in a hundred million years or so.

[DSMatticus]

Chamomile beat me to it. No matter how radical the projection for anthropogenic climate change you pick, the thing it actually spells doom for is human civilization. Nature will keep on turning.

[ubernoob]

Alright, that is much more sane than what I was expecting. I guess there are too many climate change deniers in my family. Agreed on all counts.

[nockermensch]

Alright, that is much more sane than what I was expecting. I guess there are too many climate change deniers in my family. Agreed on all counts.

Yep. All the "we're dooming nature!" arguments you read from environmentalists are bullshit. What we're actually dooming is our own chances to survive. Tardigrades will keep existing just fine no matter what we do. Finally, for contrast, compare our modest holocene extinction with what nature does when she's serious about genocide.

[DSMatticus]

I've never got the "extinctions are bad" thing - a world with whales and goats is not preferable to a world with just goats, especially when in 5-25 million years (the actual time it takes to recover biodiversity from a major extinction event) you're going to end up with gobafracks and whiskawollies which are entirely new organisms which have adapted to the environments and filled the openings created by those changes. There's nothing more natural than change, and the only reason to get worked up about it is the entirely human-selfish motivation that the environment as it exists might be preferable for us humans. You can't use environmentalism to justify misanthropy - environmentalism is only justifiable at all because of the selfish human desire to continue having a world which permits their existence.

[Chamomile]

I can basically guarantee there's more to it than just this because I never really looked into this topic, but something that does immediately leap out at me is that change begets more change. If whales die, the things that depend on them are also going to die. Things they depended upon will see a population explosion, which might kill other things, which might turn around and kill them. So because of this ripple effect there's the fear that humanity might be one of the casualties of the anarchy before nature stabilizes again.

[Username17]

I've never got the "extinctions are bad" thing - a world with whales and goats is not preferable to a world with just goats, especially when in 5-25 million years (the actual time it takes to recover biodiversity from a major extinction event) you're going to end up with gobafracks and whiskawollies which are entirely new organisms which have adapted to the environments and filled the openings created by those changes. There's nothing more natural than change, and the only reason to get worked up about it is the entirely human-selfish motivation that the environment as it exists might be preferable for us humans. You can't use environmentalism to justify misanthropy - environmentalism is only justifiable at all because of the selfish human desire to continue having a world which permits their existence.

This is the most fucking stupid argument I've seen in quite some time. Where the actual fuck do you think the genetic diversity of tomorrow comes from if not from the genetic diversity of today? If there aren't any ancestors of gobafracks today, there won't be any gobafracks in the future. Extinction is forever.

Yep. All the "we're dooming nature!" arguments you read from environmentalists are bullshit.

You're a moron. A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve, and no one would be remiss calling that world "dead" whether there were arcaea and protists hiding in crevices or not.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

You're a moron. A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve, and no one would be remiss calling that world "dead" whether there were arcaea and protists hiding in crevices or not.

-Username17

Still irrelevant on the long view and misses the point. Nobody should doubt that extinguishing human life is well within our grasp today. But "life"? The biosphere survived much worse than we can do. Thanks to evolution, as long as there's energy, archaea and protists will eventually evolve and refill whatever ecological niches that were wiped. (I know that the jump to multi-cellular organisms to a freaking long while to happen, but it happened).

And as regarding what you said to DSM, we know for a fact that the entire genetic diversity of today came from a single ancestor. So unless the argument is "the Sun will burn out before that can happen again", I'm not seeing it.

[name_here]

I am reasonably confident that it is beyond our present capacity to exterminate all multicellular life, and very confident we won't do it short of a major nuclear exchange. Historical evidence indicates that Earth can experience a 90% die-off of macro species and recover, so we have a great deal of room to fuck things up without turning into Mars/Venus.

Now, more likely and more worryingly, we might fuck things up enough that humanity is included in the die-off because our chain extinctions wiped out our viable food sources, but of course avoiding that is a stupid reason to wipe out humanity on purpose.

[DSMatticus]

Where the actual fuck do you think the genetic diversity of tomorrow comes from if not from the genetic diversity of today?

Well, there are two ways to read your stupid:
1) You don't actually know where genetic diversity actually comes from and think every bit of genetic information is unique and irreplaceable and once lost is lost forever. Fun trivia: advanced eyes (i.e. capable of imaging, not just detecting the presence/absence/intensity of light) have evolved independently several times. Evolution reinvents the wheel all the time.

2) You don't understand anything about past major extinction events, how incredibly severe they were (50% of all animal species on the planet have been wiped out just shy of half a dozen times), and how amazingly fast biodiversity recovered from them (the Permian-Triassic killed 90% of all existing species and biodiversity recovered in about 30 million years - that number is, by the way, very much debated and I am picking the most favorable for you), and as a result you are under the deeply mistaken impression that humanity is a credible threat to the existence and recovery of complex life on this planet.

A world without macro organisms is nothing like impossible to achieve

Please explain how, keeping in mind that human civilization actually has to be around long enough to see the process through to its completion. I think the closest you'll get is massive nuclear armageddon, and I'm honestly skeptical even that could truly compete with the devastation of the Permian-Triassic in extent or longevity of harm.

[Username17]

DSM, does the fact that a couple hundred years is a very much shorter time period and allows a lot less generations worth of trial and error than a few dozen million years completely escape you? Evolution is a powerful method for problem solving, but it's one that is inherently unreliable. Flippantly saying that evolution has solved problems in the past and therefore is going to solve specific problems in the future is a gross misunderstanding of how things work on every possible level.

Please explain how, keeping in mind that human civilization actually has to be around long enough to see the process through to its completion. I think the closest you'll get is massive nuclear armageddon, and I'm honestly skeptical even that could truly compete with the devastation of the Permian-Triassic in extent or longevity of harm.

Wat.

Why the fuckity fuck would you think human civilization would have to survive long enough to see the process to completion? If you release some sort of gray goo catalyst, it'll keep catalyzing destruction long after you're not there to see it working. If you dust the lands with plutonium, it'll stay poisonous for tens of millions of years. Chlorofluorocarbons keep breaking up the ozone layer for years after their release, dioxins have a half-life of several years, radiation sources can stay toxic for millennia, and heavy metals literally don't ever stop being poisonous.

You seem to believe that the Earth is some sort of self regulating entity that is going to move back to a life-friendly equilibrium sooner or later. There is no reason to believe that to be the case. It's entirely possible to imagine scenarios in which we get, for example, runaway greenhouse effects like we see on Venus and when the surface temperatures get to 500 degrees and no liquid water exists, I feel that it is patently obvious that all macroscopic life as we understand it will cease to exist. Humanity will naturally die off well before the seas actually boil, but our not being here won't really stop the temperature from continuing to rise.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

DSM, does the fact that a couple hundred years is a very much shorter time period and allows a lot less generations worth of trial and error than a few dozen million years completely escape you? Evolution is a powerful method for problem solving, but it's one that is inherently unreliable. Flippantly saying that evolution has solved problems in the past and therefore is going to solve specific problems in the future is a gross misunderstanding of how things work on every possible level.

Swing and a miss. The reason life on Earth survived those massive extinction events is not because they occurred slowly enough that organisms were able to evolve alongside them. That would imply a relatively constant biodiversity, where new species entered the fossil record as quickly as they left them. The actual evidence (which is overwhelming and irrefutable) points to a very real and very significant drop in biodiversity, and that tells us there are a bunch of species (in at least one case, as many as 90% of all existing ones) that simply had their evolutionary lines ended. Poof. Gone. Generations upon generations upon generations of exhaustive trial and error disappeared in the blink of an eye (relatively speaking). And somewhere between 10-30 million years later, the biosphere had recovered it and once more filled all those empty niches with new and exciting organisms. And all of those new and exciting organisms passed through the bottleneck of the 10% that had survived.

Edit: Mass extinctions kill lots of things, but until they kill all the things (and you demonstrate how they're supposed to kill all the things), they aren't actually a threat to sustaining Earth's life or biodiversity. Because the surviving generalists will respecialize and you just end up with a new biosphere. For the record, one of the reasons the Permian-Tirassic has such a delayed recovery is specifically because of millions of years of environmental hardship and instability, and then finally things settled down enough for biodiversity to explode once again. The system we've got has demonstrated its resilience and adaptability time and time again, and suggesting humanity will finally get it right is an amazingly nontrivial claim.

If you release some sort of gray goo catalyst, it'll keep catalyzing destruction long after you're not there to see it working. If you dust the lands with plutonium, it'll stay poisonous for tens of millions of years. Chlorofluorocarbons keep breaking up the ozone layer for years after their release, dioxins have a half-life of several years, radiation sources can stay toxic for millennia, and heavy metals literally don't ever stop being poisonous.

Some of those are not actually reasonable threats either because they are dubious (I've never really bought into the gray goo apocalypse - evolution has been exploring the limits of tiny, self-reproducing machines for the entire history of life on earth, and the results are not promising) or things we are not in any danger whatsoever of doing (... is plutonium dusting a thing we're doing?). Many of them are certainly threats to human civilization. But I've never seen any compelling argument for how humanity is in danger of rendering the planet uninhabitable through any of them.

Runaway greenhouse effects will be the death of life on Earth, and there is a very real chance that humanity will trigger a mass extinction event with one such effect. But the IPCC have run the math on that, and anthropogenic warming lacks the weight to cause a Venus-scale, "end of all life as we know it" shift. It's just not a thing we can do.

[Chamomile]

I can see how we might hypothetically end life on Earth if we all got together and decided that this is a thing we wanted to do, and then spent all our time sowing Plutonium dust into the Earth and sprinkling it across the sea and laughing and choking while Earth dies forever. But I'm not seeing how we could end up either killing all of the things or dousing significant parts of the planet in permanently poisonous material. Even if every major population center on the planet ended up dunked in something that made it permanently impossible for anything to ever live there, there's still a whole bunch of land that's perfectly safe, not just for life hypothetically but for things that are currently living there right now. I don't especially see how radiation or plutonium are likely to present a threat to, say, coyotes under any circumstances. What accident, war, or disaster would cause them to spread far enough to be much of a deal to global biodiversity?

[ubernoob]

What accident, war, or disaster would cause them to spread far enough to be much of a deal to global biodiversity?

I think Frank actually answered that question.

If you release some sort of gray goo catalyst, it'll keep catalyzing destruction long after you're not there to see it working. If you dust the lands with plutonium, it'll stay poisonous for tens of millions of years. Chlorofluorocarbons keep breaking up the ozone layer for years after their release, dioxins have a half-life of several years, radiation sources can stay toxic for millennia, and heavy metals literally don't ever stop being poisonous.

You seem to believe that the Earth is some sort of self regulating entity that is going to move back to a life-friendly equilibrium sooner or later. There is no reason to believe that to be the case. It's entirely possible to imagine scenarios in which we get, for example, runaway greenhouse effects like we see on Venus and when the surface temperatures get to 500 degrees and no liquid water exists, I feel that it is patently obvious that all macroscopic life as we understand it will cease to exist. Humanity will naturally die off well before the seas actually boil, but our not being here won't really stop the temperature from continuing to rise.

-Username17

Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology. Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this). Turning the earth into venus by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.

No, these things will probably not happen during your lifetime. That does not mean that they are foreseeable extensions of current technology though.

And yeah, obviously all these scenarios pretty much kill off the human species. But it is totally possible for us to kill off everything else that matters as well through nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, or just fucking continuing on the current path (see: climate change time scales vs the time scales required for evolution to create diversity).

Now, the climate change/terraforming thing where we totally do kill off more species than mutation and evolution can replace means that we can slowly strangle the earth to death until we no longer are able to live on it. And we can do it in such a way that it really does turn into venus. This is possible.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/ ... even-a-bee

For fucks sakes, we're half way there.

[DSMatticus]

Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology.

No, it really isn't. If you want a real life example of gray goo and what we know it can do, look here. They're very tiny, very complicated machines running a program that looks like while (true) { replicate() }. They are put under evolutionary pressure to be able to replicate in as many environments using as many materials as possible. And yet... they haven't taken over the planet. That isn't to say technology won't be able to solve the problems evolution failed to, but there's currently no reason to believe that there exists a viable universal self-replicator. It's entirely possible that it will stay forever in the realm of science fiction.

Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this).

Nuclear armageddon would represent a mass extinction event for many reasons - brute force devastation of huge swaths of land, nuclear winter, and radiation everywhere. But we're not going to cover the entire planet in hellfire, impact winter/volcanic winter are things life has already survived, and there are organisms alive today that get to straight up flip off cancer and other harmful effects of chronic radiation poisoning. The ingredients are all there for there to be survivors who would take up the mantle of creating a new biosphere as soon as the smoke cleared.

Turning the earth into mars by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.

The loss of an ozone layer would likely spell doom for human civilization (it would kill a lot of our agriculture) and a mass extinction event, but there's no reason to believe it would kill all the things - it probably wouldn't even be the most serious extinction event we'd ever had.

Now, the climate change/terraforming thing where we totally do kill off more species than mutation and evolution can replace means that we can slowly strangle the earth to death until we no longer are able to live on it.

Assuming by 'we' you mean life in general, no. Even if through our efforts we managed to reduce the biodiversity of the entire planet (which, without understating the percentage of the planet used in agriculture, is still considerably larger than that) to a tenth of what it was before we wiped everything out, then... that would be an extinction event completely in line with the ones this planet has already bounced back from (and quite quickly).

There are two ways for humans to destroy the biosphere in any permanent fashion:
1) Destroy all complex life in one go. A sudden, massive environmental shock that leaves nothing more sophisticated than bacteria or a clump of bacteria alive. This is a big enough reset button that even if complex life could recover, it'd sure as fuck take a long enough time to be considered a genuine harm to the planet. Yes, you have to get the oceans too.

2) Render the planet genuinely uninhabitable - vaporize all the water, freeze all the water, blow away the atmosphere, whatever. This is even better than 1, because there's almost certainly no way for complex life to bounce back from this no matter how long you give it. But the good news is this isn't a widely accepted possible outcome of even the worst case anthropogenic climate change scenarios. Oh, sure, we can kill ourselves off. We can kill ourselves off superhard. But we won't even take all extant animals with us, and we'll leave behind a planet suitable for those creatures to recreate the biosphere. The thing that will turn us into Venus will be the sun, and we can do no more than die putting drops in the bucket.

[Chamomile]

Grey Goo is an actual endgame of nanotechnology.

I will grant you that this one could hypothetically be a problem if the technology shakes out the way we expect it to. However, saying that humans might hypothetically have the power to destroy all life on Earth someday is not the same as saying we have that power right now. I have no doubt that as technology advances, we will continue to create more and more destructive weapons, and sooner or later one of them will be able to destroy life permanently (and possibly destroy the entire planet). It also strikes me as quite plausible that as a side effect of industrial practices or scientific experimentation we eventually create some super pollutant that kills everything and spreads on its own. But that's not what's being referred to when people say "we're dooming nature!" Remember that the original comment Frank was responding to is claimed that the "we're dooming nature" crowd is wrong, but they're not right if we could doom nature someday hypothetically. Hypothetically wolves could evolve intelligence and be the ones to create grey goo. Quick, kill all the wolves, just in case.

Massive amounts of radiation everywhere is an actual endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons (all it takes is one nuclear capable country to start this).

Who's going to nuke Canadian wilderness? The Amazon rainforest? In the event of nuclear war, how many nukes are even going to land on places like South Dakota? Even if every population center from New York to Wichita gets nuked, there will be still be more United States territory that isn't irradiated than territory that is. Not that the United States will be a thing anymore. Life will keep on trucking in the three-fourths of North American wilderness barely, if at all affected by nuclear radiation, and in an evolutionary heartbeat the irradiated areas will be habitable again. Unless you can give me a good reason that nuclear war would lead to nuclear carpet-bombing of barely populated wilderness areas, a MAD situation won't necessarily even spell the end for humans as a species, it certainly won't be able to compete with extinction events that have happened in the past.

Turning the earth into venus by destroying our ozone layer is something that humans have been happily doing for the past two hundred years.

Did you know the Ozone Hole is actually shrinking? Not only is the ozone layer regrowing, it's actually regrowing faster than we were destroying it in the first place! By which I mean it will only take 70 years to repair 200 years of damage. Considering the relative rapidity that the ozone layer recovers, I find it unlikely that human civilization would survive our own ozone depletion long enough to doom the planet even if we went right back to using the same methods that originally caused the problem for some reason.

[Username17]

Torture Garden is my favorite Naked City album.

I will grant you that this one could hypothetically be a problem if the technology shakes out the way we expect it to. However, saying that humans might hypothetically have the power to destroy all life on Earth someday is not the same as saying we have that power right now.

Actually, yes it is. Those are pretty much exactly the same thing, and in any case are wholly interchangeable from a policy standpoint. We're talking about life on Earth, which operates on a geological scale. A thousand years, even a million years is basically an eyeblink. Anything we do a century or a thousand centuries from today is essentially indistinguishable on a geologic scale from things we are doing today or things we did two hundred years in the past. The big asteroid that struck the Earth and ended the reign of dinosaurs has been "precisely" dated to 65.5 +/- 0.3 million years ago. Meaning that we are pretty sure it occurred somewhere during a six hundred thousand year period.

To give you an idea of how fucking long that is in human terms: that single event has been dated to a precision of between "when the apes touch the monolith in 2001" and "fifty thousand years after the projected end of the Warhammer 40K Alpha Marine plan." At the scales we are talking about, everything mankind has ever accomplished in history, as well as everything we can imagine mankind ever accomplishing in the future is all pretty much happening "right now."

Now wiping out all life on Earth would be pretty difficult. There are creatures at the bottom of the sea, and some of them can and do survive in water that is eighty degrees. Obviously, it's going to be fairly difficult to kill off all the creatures when some of them have two kilometers of water shielding between them and anything you are doing, when some of them never see the Sun, and when some of them survive in extremes of heat and cold that are frankly ridiculous.

But it's pretty easy to imagine creating a chain reaction that simply gets worse and worse on its own without any further involvement from humans. Greenhouse is the simplest, because water vapor is a greenhouse gas. If surface temperatures rise to the point where water vapor increases substantially, the heat trapping effects of the atmosphere will increase in a vicious cycle that will put more water vapor into the air and trap more heat until the oceans have boiled away. That is a thing that can happen. Venus is right over there, and totally a real place. There are vent worms that can live at 80 degrees, but no Earthly macroscopic organism can live in an environment where water is a gas.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The reason grey goo doesn't back up the "we're dooming nature" argument has nothing to do with how long it'll take us to invent it. The reason is that grey goo does not, in fact, exist. It is not implausible that it might exist someday, but "we might someday destroy life" is not the same as "the things we're doing right now pose a credible threat to ending life."

[Username17]

The reason grey goo doesn't back up the "we're dooming nature" argument has nothing to do with how long it'll take us to invent it. The reason is that grey goo does not, in fact, exist. It is not implausible that it might exist someday, but "we might someday destroy life" is not the same as "the things we're doing right now pose a credible threat to ending life."

Anything that happens in the next half million years is happening right now. That is how long geological timeframes actually are. If you think it is possible that research into nanotechnology we are doing today will, over the course of the next five thousand centuries, result in the capability to produce something capable of destroying all life on Earth, then the argument is over. You believe that we are capable of doing something, and indeed are currently doing something which "could" result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth. Today's research is tomorrow's capabilities, but both of those things are equally "current" as long as today and tomorrow are less than five hundred millennia apart.

Now personally, I think that it's possible that nanotechnology research will produce at least the ability to create a grey goo doomsday scenario in a lot less than five thousand centuries. It seems plausible that it could do so in only a handful of centuries. After all, everything we've accomplished in the field of nanotechnology has occurred in the last fifty four years, barely more than half of a single century. Which means that any discussion of whether it is possible for things humanity does today to result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth is basically retarded. Of course it's fucking possible.

-Username17

[Draculmaulkee]

While we don't have enough nuclear weapons to atomize all of Earth's surface, nuclear fallout affects an area much wider than the original blast radius.

[nockermensch]

Anything that happens in the next half million years is happening right now. That is how long geological timeframes actually are. If you think it is possible that research into nanotechnology we are doing today will, over the course of the next five thousand centuries, result in the capability to produce something capable of destroying all life on Earth, then the argument is over. You believe that we are capable of doing something, and indeed are currently doing something which "could" result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth. Today's research is tomorrow's capabilities, but both of those things are equally "current" as long as today and tomorrow are less than five hundred millennia apart.

Now personally, I think that it's possible that nanotechnology research will produce at least the ability to create a grey goo doomsday scenario in a lot less than five thousand centuries. It seems plausible that it could do so in only a handful of centuries. After all, everything we've accomplished in the field of nanotechnology has occurred in the last fifty four years, barely more than half of a single century. Which means that any discussion of whether it is possible for things humanity does today to result in the extinction of all macroscopic life on Earth is basically retarded. Of course it's fucking possible.

-Username17

Who would knew that the anti-spirals were actually right? Cultures cannot be trusted.

[Maj]

While we don't have enough nuclear weapons to atomize all of Earth's surface, nuclear fallout affects an area much wider than the original blast radius.

I still don't think that matters.

Gray goo is about as likely to happen as Jesus showing up for dinner.

[nockermensch]

Nanotechnology began as an incredibly hopeful field. We have nanomachines working around us right now and they're called cells. Check the protein translation animation here, to see what I'm talking about. I read enough about genetic programming to figure that evolved algorithms look baroque and unreadable, but end being crazy good on what they're set to do. So there's a good chance that the machines we call cells are by now the most optimized forms for the physical and chemical constraints of doing complex work on that scale.

So in the event we ever develop a replicator on cellular scale and release it in the wild, I'd be willing to bet that the nearby lifeforms will evolve to predate or parasite it before the replicator can become any kind of danger to life in general. In the best scenario, grey goo will simply become part of an ecosystem. In the worst one, it'll be extinct.