How is it possible for a dominant species to evolve on a planet to a point where it becomes (potentially) dangerous for all lifeforms on that planet?
Granted, we’re only here for a relative short amount of time. But still, with all the knowledge we have today we should be able to create a better tomorrow.
I mean, let us be honest, what’s the ultimate goal of life in general? Just look at just about every other lifeform on this planet. They spent their entire life making sure that there will be a next generation to come, and so forth.
Now this all works fine, and has worked fine for billions of years, aslong as you play by the rules. The rules ofcourse being there to seek some sort of balance so that no single factor or entity gets the upper hand in the game, because that would just ruin the game for everything/body else. Right?
So, what do we do? :smack: We evolve ourselves right out of the game, barely get to read the rules before we throw them out of the window and start rampaging along. wtf?
Who gets to decide for me what the goals are, and what the rules are?
Trouble is, everybody has their own idea of what a “perfect” or “better” world is defined by.
We’re still working that out amongst ourselves. It’s taking longer than we thought.
If you’re worried about the increased harvesting and use of natural resources (food, fish, wood, minerals, oil, etc.), mankind cannot “kill” all life on the planet, even with nuclear war. Life in general is more resilient than that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t poop in our own nest, but there are no “rules” that makes a wolf “seek balance” with it’s habitat. Lack of food/prey does that. Further, a wolf won’t care if the some other species goes extinct. Only humans care about that right now.
To be clear, I am speaking in scientific terms. If you want to delve into the realm of philosophy, then that’s another story. However, you seem to be talking about observable phenomena, so I think science is our best tool for dealing with that.
Why can’t people have the same opinions as I do, and follow the same rules that I find acceptable in my personable situation, even if their situations are vastly different from mine?
It is a mystery.
You seem to be ascribing an awful lot of deep thinking to the non-human organisms. Every living thing on this planet is locked in a nonstop struggle to grab the biggest slice of the resource pie and to avoid being killed by rivals, predators, pathogens, parasites, the environment, or bad luck. The only rule is to perpetuate your own gene-line before you die. Produce offspring who can compete as well as you or provide a competitive advantage to closely related individuals.
Anything that looks like “balance” is a temporary equilibrium between forces that feel, at best total indifference towards each other, and are more likely deeply invested in destroying each other for personal gain. Lions don’t kill every antelope in sight, not out of a sense of reverence for the ecosphere, but because chasing and eating antelopes makes them sleepy. If they could use guns, they’d eat everything, then starve. Shit, even plants are out to kill.
The human mind is, seemingly, unique in its ability to both conceive of ways to fully exploit the world around us, and to recognize the potential for self-destruction that such resource exhaustion would cause. Sometimes, we don’t figure it out fast enough, see Easter Island or the Dust Bowl. Don’t worry about the Earth or the other critters, worry about us. And, really, barring a global thermonuclear war or some kind of sci-fi super bioweapon, I doubt we even have the capacity to extirpate ourseves; more likely we’d just knock the standard of living back to the stone age.
Ok, fair enough, the main point I was trying to make is:
We evolved over the years as part of a system(life as part of evolution in a planetairy ecosystem) that has brought us to a point where we are, to some degree, no longer affected by this system. Agreed?
So the next questions could be, why is this and more importantly, what are the implications of this on the long term?
Seems to me that we evolved beyond the grasph of nature but we still play a major part in it. Just appears to me as a recipe for disaster.
Conflict forces adaptation and change. Those life forms that can handle the stress get to survive and ‘make sure there will be a next generation.’ This is the entire history of the evolution of all species on this planet.
The second paragraph is just happy-hippy nonsense. Earth in Balance, Wisdom of the Naural World, until Man (bad, bad, man!) comes along and upsets the balance of Nature. This supremacy of the natural world is identical to the Garden of Eden mythology. Until Man had sinned the world llived in harmony. It’s bullshit.
Just like every other lifeform on the planet, we are always looking for ways to survive, to exploit, to kill something and eat it.
There is no “why” in the philosophical sense, only in the explanatory sense. We are no longer affected by SOME parts of the system because of opposable thumbs, good vision, language, omnivory, and a big brain. But our apartness or insulation from “nature” is largely illusory. Without our exceptionally complex societies, we can do little better than we did in the stone age. We are also mostly helpless, in the short run, against a serious natural disaster, like an asteroid impact or Deccan Traps-size eruptive event, which could screw up things quite severely for us.
The things that make us smart enough to have the ability to screw with the world in large enough ways to screw ourselves over also make us smart enough to see the trainwreck coming and do something about it beforehand or fix the mess afterwards.
So what you’re basically saying is: there’s absolutely nothing special about us when compared to other lifeforms on this planet. We don’t need to worry about anything bad possibly happening, nature will ‘take care’ of us like it has done with everything else. Sounds scary.
I don’t really care all that much about life in general, and would gladly trade all the rest of the life in the universe for humanity. That’s the team I play on. Other life is only worthwhile in as much as it contributes to human comfort, continuity, advancement, knowledge, and production.
That being said, I’m a supporter of the environmental movement, because I think humanity would be screwed without a rich and diverse environment full of other life.