The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

[Username17]

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.

This proposition is so incredibly absurd that it basically doesn't even deserve comment. But I will comment on it anyway, because it's hilarious. Exhibit A: Cellulase. It's an enzyme. It exists. It enzymatically converts cellulose to its constituent products, which are of course glucose molecules. It converts the most abundant organic molecule on the planet into a foodstuff as potent as granulated sugar.

You know what doesn't use that enzyme? Cows. Sheep. Chickens. Pigs. Humans. Hell, there are no known animals that produce that (except for certain kinds of termite, which produce a variant). Any animal at all could improve the efficiency by which they gather calories by several orders of magnitude just by harnessing that enzyme.

Organic cells aren't optimized within their own constraints. We can look at them with the eye of a designer and spot many ways to improve them. We don't know how everything in there works yet, but already we can see several areas of potential improvement. And as we learn more, we will find more areas they can be improved. Not "maybe," definitely.

Just for starters: speciation only branches, it never recombines. As designers, we could take two good adaptations from two different lineages and combine them to form something more optimized than either. Evolution will never do that (except with horizontal gene transfer which is limited almost exclusively to microbes).

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Horizontal gene transfer between plants or fungi isn't a thing?

[Grek]

A key thing to keep in mind when thinking about evolution is that it is staggeringly, stupendously, absurdly inefficient compared to a designer. If you need proof of this, compare a tree to a solar panel. Despite having over 2000 million more years to perfect the "get power from the sun" concept, trees lose hard in terms of energy per square foot of sunlight. Design kicks evolution's ass every time there is a designer to exist. Evolved systems only get into the top 10 at all when there is no designer able to make a designed system.

If you think this same advantage wouldn't apply to reproduction, you're kidding yourself.

[nockermensch]

Yeah, no. I find it easier to believe that there's something we don't understand yet that would cause a greater distribution of Cellulase to be a bad idea than that life on earth could be using a plentiful form of energy and just isn't.

Life adapted to eat gamma radiation in Chernobyl area. Richard Lenski's experiment showed a strain of E. coli evolving to eat citrate. Both events happened without human interference (Lenski was just watching the bacteria) in a timescale of dozens of years. So I plainly don't believe that the scenario is simple like Frank described.

I agree that we'll get eventually very good at reprogramming life and eventually even at making it from zero. But 4.5 billions of years of genetic programming rewarding "survival" tells me we can't do anything like an universal end boss for life (grey goo). In the course of our evolutionary story, Earth must have been covered by several types of "grey goo" already: When life was just starting and proto-life was still like "how do I sugar?" one guy happened upon a metabolic trick that was so nice in comparison with what everybody else was doing that it simply became the only game in town. Then of course different strains arose from it and the struggle resumed.

So we have more than one billion of years of fossil records without evidence of grey goo scenarios. I don't think this is an oversight. I think that after a certain point, we got simply too complex for a single kind of machine to absorb us all.

[nockermensch]

A key thing to keep in mind when thinking about evolution is that it is staggeringly, stupendously, absurdly inefficient compared to a designer. If you need proof of this, compare a tree to a solar panel. Despite having over 2000 million more years to perfect the "get power from the sun" concept, trees lose hard in terms of energy per square foot of sunlight. Design kicks evolution's ass every time there is a designer to exist. Evolved systems only get into the top 10 at all when there is no designer able to make a designed system.

If you think this same advantage wouldn't apply to reproduction, you're kidding yourself.

The solar panel doesn't have to worry about reproducing or fighting parasites and diseases (in fact, if you break a solar panel, it stays broken). It also don't have to worry about growing or finding a place with available light. If you put some kinds of solar panel in the shade, they won't even grow towards light!

So yeah, I don't think your comparison was fair. Trees aren't optimized for "getting power from the Sun". They're optimized for "surviving and passing their genes onward on niche X, all while getting power from the Sun".

[Grek]

Not having to worry about parasites or diseases is a feature, not a flaw. With nothing edible inside a solar panel, it has no natural predators. The only reason we still have plants is because nobody has created a self-replicating solar panel and released it into the wild.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, no. I find it easier to believe that there's something we don't understand yet that would cause a greater distribution of Cellulase to be a bad idea than that life on earth could be using a plentiful form of energy and just isn't.

Hey, do you know what a carnivore is? A carnivore is an animal that doesn't develop energy from the sun, doesn't eat any kind of plants and therefore does not get nutrients from all that plentiful food source.

Now, is it more likely that there is something we don't yet understand that would cause using those food sources to be a bad thing? Or is it just that many life forms on earth do not use plentiful forms of energy?

By the way, stop talking about life on earth doing X. 1) Some life on earth does use cellulose for energy, just most of it doesn't. 2) Life on earth doesn't collectively accomplish things. Whether or not some other life forms are doing something has little to no effect on the evolution of other species they don't interact with. If nothing was using cellulose, that wouldn't make tigers any more likely to eat cellulose.

[Chamomile]

Anything that happens in the next half million years is happening right now.

Basically yes. What you're not grasping is that we don't have a goddamn clue what's going to happen in the next half million years. The threshold past which something ceases to be a credible threat to the environment is not the point at which it becomes significant on an evolutionary scale, because it seriously doesn't matter that the sun's boiling away the oceans is going to take like 800 million years and that's a long time even in evolutionary terms. It's still a credible threat because the sun is already expanding and we have no reason to believe it won't continue to do so.

Grey goo, on the other hand, does not exist. It's not that it exists but hasn't been released, or that it doesn't exist but there's a process known to create it and that process is happening. It just doesn't exist at all. The "threat" of grey goo is made under the assumption that grey goo will actually exist at some point, and given our society's consistent failure to predict what the future's going to be like even half a century in the future, there's really not any reason at all to think that it will.

If a technology is considered to be 50 or more years in the future, odds are actually pretty good that it will never actually exist.

[DSMatticus]

Not having to worry about parasites or diseases is a feature, not a flaw. With nothing edible inside a solar panel, it has no natural predators. The only reason we still have plants is because nobody has created a self-replicating solar panel and released it into the wild.

There are a couple things you're missing there:
1) A self-replicating solar panel is gibberish. Self-replication is not magic! You have to have the materials around you to build a copy of yourself, you have to have the tools to acquire those materials, you have to have the tools to build the copy using those materials, and you have to have the tools to survive (and power yourself while) doing this in every environment you wish to replicate in. Actual solar panels use materials shipped in from mines all over the world and are manufactured using machines many times larger than they are. Plants, on the other hand, are completely self-sustained and manufacture copies of themself out of dirt and water. We already know that when we want to manufacture nanobots correctly, we'll do it with desk-sized nanofactories because having the nanobots do it themself is wildly inefficient. Self-replication is inherently stupid. As an amusing aside, nature beat us to this revelation with the wildly successful ant. You've probably heard of it. But point is, you don't get to claim design beats evolution at self-replication because global logistics and manufacturing are awesome. That's just stupid.

2) Edible is a term that does not mean anything except in the context of a given organism or biosphere. Things are edible because "those organisms you're talking about don't eat them." Evolution is highly interdependent, and designed organisms can just get lucky and not have predators by virtue of not having evolved alongside them. That's not a testament to the power of design, and it can happen in nature any time two previously separated ecosystems meet - see Native Americans and European diseases.

Could we build better self-replicators? Almost certainly. Does that mean we can build a perfect universal self-replicator? Does the fact that we can build a car faster than a horse imply we can build a car which goes $TEXAS fast and outruns its own headlights? Does the fact that we can build a car faster than a horse which uses materials dug out of the ground in very specific locations and is manufactured in huge facilities by huge pieces of equipment requiring huge sums of energy and then runs off fuels dug out of the ground in other very specific locations which are brought to it from all over the world by a massive logistics network mean we could build a self-replicating version thereof? The answer to all of those is no, it does not follow at all. There are genuinely less reasons to believe in gray goo than there are FTL travel, because someone has at least shown that the math on the Alcubierre drive works out even if we haven't got any interesting experimental results yet.

[Username17]

I find it easier to believe that there's something we don't understand yet that would cause a greater distribution of Cellulase to be a bad idea than that life on earth could be using a plentiful form of energy and just isn't.

That's stupid. Evolution doesn't work that way. Mutation gives you random tools, selection non-randomly removes things from your toolbox. Evolution causes you to adapt to your environment, but only if any combination of the random mutations you've inherited add up to something that is "good enough" to survive. Otherwise, you just go extinct.

Guinea pigs aren't a better, stronger, or better adapted creature because they lack the enzyme that liquifies pus. In the wild, when they get serious infections they just fucking die. And as a result, when my pet guinea pig had a serious infection I had to squeeze the pus out of her abscesses like tooth paste. This is not because evolution creates perfect matches for their environment, it's because evolution is a cruel and fickle mistress that tries a really tremendous amount of random bullshit and murders everything that isn't "good enough."

What you're not grasping is that we don't have a goddamn clue what's going to happen in the next half million years.

No, we actually have many clues. We don't know for certain. Indeed, the distant future is pretty damn murky. But the question was not "Do you think it is probable that we will wipe out all life on Earth in the near future?" or even "Do you think that any particular technology is going to wipe out all life on Earth?" The question is merely whether you can see a possible path from what we are doing now to the extermination of all macroscopic life on Earth. To which the answer is, of course, yes. There are many.

There are genuinely less reasons to believe in gray goo than there are FTL travel, because someone has at least shown that the math on the Alcubierre drive works out even if we haven't got any interesting experimental results yet.

Yeah, that's a good one. Because the math on the Alcubierre drive says that it can be used to move planet sized objects (and indeed, is much easier to design on that scale), and that when it is turned off it creates an antimatter explosion out of whatever happens to be around. So from a pure math standpoint it seems entirely possible to blow up the planet, hit Earth with another planet, or hurl the Earth into the Sun. All of those things sound like pretty final solutions to macroscopic life existing on Earth.

So again and still: the original question was whether it was possible for humans to end life on Earth. The answer is Yes.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The question has never been if humans can wipe out life on Earth because, as I mentioned a while back, we are indeed capable of doing so right now if we actually started trying to wipe out life on Earth. The argument you responded to was a criticism of the "we're dooming nature" crowd, and in for those people to be right, we have to be doing something now which is actually dooming nature now. Evolutionary timescales do not matter. If you are talking about something which might hypothetically happen in the future, you are talking about how we might be dooming nature someday (or maybe not), which is not the same as "we're dooming nature."

[Username17]

The question has never been if humans can wipe out life on Earth because, as I mentioned a while back, we are indeed capable of doing so right now if we actually started trying to wipe out life on Earth. The argument you responded to was a criticism of the "we're dooming nature" crowd, and in for those people to be right, we have to be doing something now which is actually dooming nature now. Evolutionary timescales do not matter. If you are talking about something which might hypothetically happen in the future, you are talking about how we might be dooming nature someday (or maybe not), which is not the same as "we're dooming nature."

If researching an Alcubierre drive, which is a real thing we are really doing, ultimately leads to making them and then accidentally vaporizing the planet, then the proximal cause of the destruction of the planet was "researching the Alcubierre drive." And thus, we would be dooming nature right now by any possible sane definition of the term.

I think there are better ways to prevent that end state than "kill all humans," but your assessment that the people saying that it is possible that the things we are doing today are dooming nature tomorrow are wrong is obviously incorrect. It is in fact entirely possible that all macroscopic life on Earth will be terminated in any of several end states brought about by technology, and any and all of them would, when and if they come to pass, be the result of things we are doing today.

Not to mention that of course one of the easiest ways we could end up killing all macroscopic life on Earth is by ushering in a runaway greenhouse scenario - which is not merely a question of research but actually an accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the air until water vapor and dying plants keep the process accelerating on its own. That scenario simply requires us to be fracking faster than the carbon cycle can handle things for an unknown amount of time - something which we are literally doing right now.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

Back to the original VHEM topic, it requires too much voluntary participation. If I had my way, I'd rather enforce the requirement of Parenthood Licenses based on psych and background evaluations. I know, it's unfeasible, stupid, and would only end up being twisted into serving the interests of The Few, but a misanthropist can dream.

[nockermensch]

The question has never been if humans can wipe out life on Earth because, as I mentioned a while back, we are indeed capable of doing so right now if we actually started trying to wipe out life on Earth. The argument you responded to was a criticism of the "we're dooming nature" crowd, and in for those people to be right, we have to be doing something now which is actually dooming nature now. Evolutionary timescales do not matter. If you are talking about something which might hypothetically happen in the future, you are talking about how we might be dooming nature someday (or maybe not), which is not the same as "we're dooming nature."

If researching an Alcubierre drive, which is a real thing we are really doing, ultimately leads to making them and then accidentally vaporizing the planet, then the proximal cause of the destruction of the planet was "researching the Alcubierre drive." And thus, we would be dooming nature right now by any possible sane definition of the term.

I think there are better ways to prevent that end state than "kill all humans," but your assessment that the people saying that it is possible that the things we are doing today are dooming nature tomorrow are wrong is obviously incorrect. It is in fact entirely possible that all macroscopic life on Earth will be terminated in any of several end states brought about by technology, and any and all of them would, when and if they come to pass, be the result of things we are doing today.

Not to mention that of course one of the easiest ways we could end up killing all macroscopic life on Earth is by ushering in a runaway greenhouse scenario - which is not merely a question of research but actually an accumulation of carbon dioxide and methane in the air until water vapor and dying plants keep the process accelerating on its own. That scenario simply requires us to be fracking faster than the carbon cycle can handle things for an unknown amount of time - something which we are literally doing right now.

-Username17

Dude.

We could, today, start building rockets to fly to the nearest asteroid large enough to cause K/T event, part II, electric boogaloo, land there and start pushing it towards Earth. If you think that's not enough and it has to be ALL THE LIFE, search for an asteroid large enough that the impact liquefies a sufficiently large part of our mantle that the entire planet becomes lava. It wouldn't even be complicated: Just newtonian physics plus enough rockets and in 40-60 years we extinguish life on earth.

But this isn't an interesting result, and tying it back to original discussion, it's not conductive to good politics. When you say that researching the Alcubierre drive could lead to the end of Earth you sound like the morons that said the LHC would create a black hole and do the same. More worryingly, you sound like the fucking anti-spirals. Couple "new technologies can lead to catastrophes in an ever increasing scale" with your "whatever happens in 700,000 years to the future is happening now" and a space-faring race would be completely justified into preemptively nuking sentient life-forms it stumbles upon.

What enviromentalists should be very worried about is about human civilization, because that is the fragile thing. Have enough catastrophes brought by global warming / fracking / assorted human stupidity and people will lose confidence on their leaders and start listening to the Ron Pauls / religious lunatics / luddites of the world.

[Chamomile]

If researching an Alcubierre drive, which is a real thing we are really doing, ultimately leads to making them and then accidentally vaporizing the planet, then the proximal cause of the destruction of the planet was "researching the Alcubierre drive." And thus, we would be dooming nature right now by any possible sane definition of the term.

This is indeed correct. But again, the deal with the future is that we don't know what will happen in it. We don't know if grey goo will ever be a thing, and in fact it isn't even very likely, because even our best guesses about the future usually turn out to be wrong if we're predicting anything past 25 years in the future. Look for predictions of the future from anywhere before 1978 or so, and you'll find that basically all of them are dead wrong. Sometimes hilariously so. What you're advocating isn't caution, but a paralyzing fear of the unknown, that anything which we don't know for certain isn't dooming all life on the entire planet should be treated as though it is dooming all life on the entire planet. The argument you're making now applies just as well not only to things like the LHC, but also to literally anything new. The latest smartphone could lead to extinction of life on Earth. A newborn child could lead to extinction of life on Earth. The evolutionary path of wolves could lead to extinction of life on Earth. If your only argument is panicking over the Butterfly Effect, you don't have an argument.

And as has been stated repeatedly, people have run the numbers and global warming will kill us before we can put enough pollutants in the atmosphere to hit the critical mass that'll turn us into Venus.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Cham, what exactly do you think Frank is advocating?

[Chamomile]

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

You're a moron.

This is what I think Frank is advocating. He's thrown in with a very specific crowd making a very specific argument, the argument that humans are destroying the Earth right now, which is separate and distinct from the argument that we hypothetically have a capability to pose a threat to the Earth if we're incautious (or go crazy and start plutonium dusting stuff). The fact is that if we keep doing exactly what we're doing right now, while the odds are very good that we will destroy our civilization and possibly wipe out our entire species, odds are abysmal that Earth will be less biodiverse 30 million years from now as compared to now.

[Koumei]

I dunno, the "turn the planet into Venus where the water itself traps heats in and boils everything more and more" only requires that we keep filling the air with certain gases, and so far we seem pretty okay with doing precisely that.

That bit doesn't involve people going from theory to practice in building the FTL thing, then going "Whoops, lol" and Earth being annihilated. It just potentially requires "stay on target" (depending mostly on whether we can do enough damage to trigger the chain reaction before we do enough damage to wipe ourselves out).

Can I make a dangerous assumption here that those arguing from the point of view of "Nah, we can annihilate ourselves no problem but we can't wipe all life out" aren't positing that this is something we should actively work towards? Because if someone is saying "We shouldn't kill humanity, but the water bears don't give a fuck" then we agree on the important bit.

[DSMatticus]

I have no idea how "here are two untested theoretical technologies, one of which is slightly less implausible than the other" turned into "ah-hah! The trump card I've been looking for all along!" There are a great many reasons to believe the Alcubierre drive won't pan out at all, let alone be weaponizable. We know general relativity permits the Alcubierre drive, but we also know general relativity can't be the whole story because quantum mechanics is a thing, and there are a lot of active debates about, if the effect even genuinely exists, how long you can keep it up before it collapses on itself (and the destructive nature of the Alcubierre drive is a function of how much other matter you can expose it to before it collapses, so its stability is absolutely relevant to such concerns).

Could humanity deliberately destroy all large, complex life on Earth at some point in the indeterminate future? Almost certainly, but VHEM/environmentalists don't actually have a monopoly on the bold idea of not doing that. "Let's strap rockets to the moon for a round two" is something pretty much everyone agrees is a bad idea and we are in no danger of ever actually doing it.

Could humanity accidentally destroy all large, complex life on Earth at some point in the indeterminate future? Well... how optimistic are you? We certainly won't pull it off with anything we're doing now, and it's not really clear how we eventually would.

Does the conversation we're having look now have much to do with what started it? Well, it started with the point that worrying about extinctions and pushing the standard environmentalist concerns for nature's sake is stupid, because the things we're doing that environmentalists worry about will have no noticeable lasting impact on Earth's biodiversity even if they kill us the fuck dead. Misanthropy on behalf of environmentalism is stupid because environmentalism only means anything insofar as a movement for preserving the human friendly status quo. And it's become an argument about the feasibility of sci-fi doomsday scenarios. So no. No it does not.

I dunno, the "turn the planet into Venus where the water itself traps heats in and boils everything more and more" only requires that we keep filling the air with certain gases, and so far we seem pretty okay with doing precisely that.

The IPCC ran that math, and that is not a thing anthropogenic climate change can do. "Runaway climate change" isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It's a number of different effects that all trigger at different breakpoints, and the Venus doomsday cycle (vaporizing the oceans creates water vapor which traps heat which vaporizes more of the ocean which creates more water vapor which traps more heat which oh hey everything's dead) isn't one humanity can kick off. That is the inevitable fate of our planet, but you have the sun to thank for that.

It is possible to start a feedback loop that will render most, if not all, of the planet uninhabitable for the not-quite-as-clever-as-they-thought monkeys who started it off. Humanity's situation is actually quite precarious and dire.

[Username17]

First of all, do none of you assholes understand tail risk? The fact that something is "very unlikely" or "of unknown probability" doesn't mean that it can't happen or that the risks are discountable. Arguing that the people who warn of risks of destroying all life on Earth are wrong on the grounds that such a risk does not exist, is flippantly retarded. Those risks exist. People who talk about those risks are not wrong to do so.

Now personally, I think the chances of humanity saving life on Earth are actually somewhat greater than their chances of destroying it. Humanity could divert a giant asteroid headed for the planet or put up a solar shield or something. Risks aren't one-way, and more science seems to be better at solving future problems than less. But the risks of coming to a bad end and having it be humanity's fault are nonetheless real. And people are not wrong to discuss those risks.

The IPCC ran that math, and that is not a thing anthropogenic climate change can do. "Runaway climate change" isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It's a number of different effects that all trigger at different breakpoints, and the Venus doomsday cycle (vaporizing the oceans creates water vapor which traps heat which vaporizes more of the ocean which creates more water vapor which traps more heat which oh hey everything's dead) isn't one humanity can kick off.

That's not what the IPCC's findings mean. At all. There is a threshold where the Venus doomcycle starts. There is some point where it hits the point of no return rather than eventually returning to a life supporting mean. And if and when the Earth hits that point, if humanity has caused the temperature to be even one degree higher, then the world will end when it otherwise would not have and it will be humanity's fault.

The IPCC does not predict the Earth going into a Venusian deathcycle within the limits of their projections. But their projections also only go decades into the future, not centuries or thousands of years, which is the timeframe an actual doomsday scenario would take.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

And if and when the Earth hits that point, if humanity has caused the temperature to be even one degree higher, then the world will end when it otherwise would not have and it will be humanity's fault.

I'm pretty sure you have more than one post in this thread arguing for a definition of now five hundred thousand years wide. And that's funny, because using your definition of now the CO2 we put in the atmosphere will disappear with us. See, liquid water removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Earth still has its oceans, and nothing humanity does will boil them. All of the CO2 we're forcing into the atmosphere will eventually come back out, and it turns out that this eventually is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The amount of hydrogen we'll lose to space while returning to normalcy is negligible, so when the sun eventually starts boiling away the oceans in a billion years the amount of help we'll have offered is somewhere between jack-shit and fuck-all.

When people talk about the dangers of runaway climate change, they're talking about things like arctic shrinkage releasing deposits of short-lived greenhouse gases. That is an effect that may very well carry itself to completion if initiated (humanity is doomed), but it does eventually stop and the gases get pulled out of the atmosphere (the biosphere is not).

[Username17]

Carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean is not a good thing, and could very plausibly lead to the deaths of a lot of marine organisms, which in turn could release a lot of carbon in the form of methane - which is considerably more powerful as a greenhouse gas. We could see a very large and very dangerous greenhouse bump somewhere between a thousand and five thousand years after we stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The shit could really hit the fan in a way that was definitely our fault many centuries after the last of us is dead.

Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum fixed itself in about 120,000 years. A warming period that is considerably faster or larger than that one, which we are quite likely looking at right now could very plausibly exceed whatever Earth's homeostatic mechanisms are and just spin out of control until everything is dead. That is a real thing that can really happen.

-Username17