The future of a living Earth

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Sy Borg
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The future of a living Earth

Post by Sy Borg »

From another thread where one of your Admins (ahem) has misbehaved again in going offtopic. So this is my reply to Jklint from the Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death? thread https://www.onlinephilosophyclub.com/fo ... &start=270.

At this stage I think all in the debate on that an another thread, including JKlint, Consul and Count Lucanor agree that life and, thus, humanity is part of the Earth, being tightly interwoven with its existing systems and creating many others.
Jklint wrote: December 28th, 2018, 6:56 pm
Greta wrote: December 28th, 2018, 6:26 pmYeah, I'd say the Earth itself is intelligent, sure. Just that, unlike most, I don't see it as this great mystical thing. Rather, it's just obvious because we can't logically be separated from the planet. Your bones can't be said to be intelligent but the whole of you can be.
We logically can't be separated from the umbilical cord of the planet, at least not at this time and perhaps never. The planet, however can certainly be separated from us; it doesn't need humans to be on it especially so as we exist as virtual destroyers of it.

Also, while it's true that bones like rocks aren't intelligent, the "whole of me" may be only because there's a single organ which provides the means to be so. The question is what contains the intelligence of the planet. Where is the brain responsible for supervising its processes?
Humans are not actually destroying the planet, as such, not as per your preferred definition of treating geology as paramount (as opposed to potentially foundational). The deepest hole ever dug was 11kms in Russia before the drill melted so we appear to be no threat to the mantle and core, 99% of the planet by mass.

What we are doing is simplifying natural systems and using the resources to create compressed, information-intensive human systems. The biosphere is reforming, as always, and continuing to become smarter. In geological timeframes not long ago the smartest beings on Earth would have been T-Rex, raptors and proto-birds. Later on it might have been other great apes, dolphins or canids. Now it's complex oddities like us. Intelligence appeared and it's proved to be effective in stable conditions.

We'll surely be outshone too and I think most people know who/what by. The Earth might be rendered too inhospitable for humans by humans in the medium-term or the Sun's heating will sterilise the surface in the long term, so above surface biology can only last so long. Intelligent machines, on the other hand, will presumably be less sensitive to environmental conditions. Hopefully by then the machines will have been imbued with enough nous to resettle elsewhere rather than maximising paperclips on a dormant planet for non existent customers - a scenario imagined in spirit by the writers of Red Dwarf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psidz_-s00c

Ok, I've rambled - there's no point being made here as things turn out, just perspectives and possibilities which people may or may not agree with.
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chewybrian
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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It's very much easier to imagine success on some other planet than on earth. The wildest sci-fi scenario could quickly become realistic as technology continues to improve exponentially, and the clean slate of the new environment allows great things to be done relatively easily.

We could send a fairly small craft with some seeds and frozen embryos (human and animal) and small machines to a far away planet. The machines could mine and build bigger machines and create a cozy home base for growing the humans. The computers and machines could feed and care for and teach the youngsters with holographic versions of the best and brightest real people.

What makes it so easy? The new population could be brought up in a culture of cooperation, rather than our tribal culture. They could be taught humility and conservation and conceivably create a sustainable situation in which humans could survive living with other humans in the long run.

The earth would be a stinking leper colony compared to what could be created by such methods. Maybe some day they could come back and teach us to be decent people.
"If determinism holds, then past events have conspired to cause me to hold this view--it is out of my control. Either I am right about free will, or it is not my fault that I am wrong."
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Brian, if the machines are advanced enough to nurture humans from embryo to well-adjusted adult, I wonder why they'd bother with the humans? Altruism? Pets? Diversity?

At some stage there may be attempts to populate bodies in the solar system with microbes to start things up. You need a good bed of bacteria in the soil for plants to grow. Whatever they put on Mars will have to be hardy little beasts!
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Greta wrote: December 29th, 2018, 9:00 am Brian, if the machines are advanced enough to nurture humans from embryo to well-adjusted adult, I wonder why they'd bother with the humans? Altruism? Pets? Diversity?
Because they have to follow their programming, of course. Making machines that can think for themselves might not end well...

Image

It's also possible that some well-chosen humans could be doing the nurturing by remote control.
"If determinism holds, then past events have conspired to cause me to hold this view--it is out of my control. Either I am right about free will, or it is not my fault that I am wrong."
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Remote control might have latency issues when the carers send instruction to look after a four year-old and it arrives for a child who's seven :)

Do you think we can maintain control over entities that are smarter than we are for too long? It would be a bit akin to cows keeping herds of humans.

If the scheme worked, a child born on another planet, raised with their stories of origin on Earth, would be akin to a second generation migrant told stories of "home".

I find people tend not to want to think much about the far future. It seems that the narrative ,"dreadful modern humans are destroying the good Earth" is deeply appealing to a species that veers between self-worship and self-flagellation. But is it destruction? Did humans ever really have a choice? At what point was the choice to be different available?
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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chewybrian wrote: December 29th, 2018, 7:17 am It's very much easier to imagine success on some other planet than on earth. The wildest sci-fi scenario could quickly become realistic as technology continues to improve exponentially, and the clean slate of the new environment allows great things to be done relatively easily.

We could send a fairly small craft with some seeds and frozen embryos (human and animal) and small machines to a far away planet. The machines could mine and build bigger machines and create a cozy home base for growing the humans. The computers and machines could feed and care for and teach the youngsters with holographic versions of the best and brightest real people.

What makes it so easy? The new population could be brought up in a culture of cooperation, rather than our tribal culture. They could be taught humility and conservation and conceivably create a sustainable situation in which humans could survive living with other humans in the long run.

The earth would be a stinking leper colony compared to what could be created by such methods. Maybe some day they could come back and teach us to be decent people.
No need to speculate, such a situation already happened here on Earth many millenia ago. Of course they were eaten by dinosaurs and quickly went extinct.
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Re: The future of a living Earth

Post by barata »

i think we will ( hehe ) live on moon or mars and reject this damn earth. ( hehe )
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Greta wrote:...But is it destruction? Did humans ever really have a choice? At what point was the choice to be different available?
I think your first question relates to your point, in the OP, about commonly used terms like "destroying/saving the planet". As you pointed out, we don't literally have the ability to do either of those things. I think the term is used as a shorthand for "making the planet less/more amenable to the comfort and survival of a large population of humans and as many other diverse species as possible."

Your second and third questions are interesting to speculate about. Could we imagine a species as successful as humans which, at the same time, doesn't have our human tendency to make the diversity of the world's ecosystems the victims of that success?

In the OP, when you say that we are "simplifying natural systems", I presume you mean that we are reducing diversity, mainly due to the fact that we require natural systems to be useful to humans if we are to permit them to survive? In a world as full of humans as this one, a species that we can't eat, or make use of in some other way, doesn't have great prospects for the future. In selfish-gene terms, chicken genes, for example, have been very successful in using humans to propagate them all over the planet by living inside of tasty chickens.
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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LuckyR wrote: December 30th, 2018, 3:03 am
chewybrian wrote: December 29th, 2018, 7:17 am It's very much easier to imagine success on some other planet than on earth. The wildest sci-fi scenario could quickly become realistic as technology continues to improve exponentially, and the clean slate of the new environment allows great things to be done relatively easily.

We could send a fairly small craft with some seeds and frozen embryos (human and animal) and small machines to a far away planet. The machines could mine and build bigger machines and create a cozy home base for growing the humans. The computers and machines could feed and care for and teach the youngsters with holographic versions of the best and brightest real people.

What makes it so easy? The new population could be brought up in a culture of cooperation, rather than our tribal culture. They could be taught humility and conservation and conceivably create a sustainable situation in which humans could survive living with other humans in the long run.

The earth would be a stinking leper colony compared to what could be created by such methods. Maybe some day they could come back and teach us to be decent people.
No need to speculate, such a situation already happened here on Earth many millenia ago. Of course they were eaten by dinosaurs and quickly went extinct.
The laws of probability suggest so. At various points humans who were actually nice must have appeared at some point. They would, of course, be doomed. We can see clearly the qualities that bring human success in today's survivors.
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Steve3007 wrote: December 30th, 2018, 1:17 pm
Greta wrote:...But is it destruction? Did humans ever really have a choice? At what point was the choice to be different available?
I think your first question relates to your point, in the OP, about commonly used terms like "destroying/saving the planet". As you pointed out, we don't literally have the ability to do either of those things. I think the term is used as a shorthand for "making the planet less/more amenable to the comfort and survival of a large population of humans and as many other diverse species as possible."

Your second and third questions are interesting to speculate about. Could we imagine a species as successful as humans which, at the same time, doesn't have our human tendency to make the diversity of the world's ecosystems the victims of that success?

In the OP, when you say that we are "simplifying natural systems", I presume you mean that we are reducing diversity, mainly due to the fact that we require natural systems to be useful to humans if we are to permit them to survive? In a world as full of humans as this one, a species that we can't eat, or make use of in some other way, doesn't have great prospects for the future. In selfish-gene terms, chicken genes, for example, have been very successful in using humans to propagate them all over the planet by living inside of tasty chickens.
You've pointed to the inherent potential conflict of interest between genes and their 'survival machines', the latter wants a good time while the former wants a long and fecund time.

When I look at nature I see entities everywhere that care about two things - gaining energy and releasing genetic information. It seems to me that, with more complex organisms comes an increasing shift from consuming energy to ever more keenly expressing, first genetics, then personality. I look at the dog and I see someone who's an interesting mix of food and relational obsession. It would seem to me that evolution has increasingly tended to shift entities from energy focus to relational. So the former was, in a sense, already being somewhat superseded.

Brains have essentially stolen control from the metabolic organs. Once metabolism was king, with nerve nets and simple brains acting as its humble servants. Then the brains needed ever more energy because they were so good at keeping metabolisms alive. Now there's humans, whose identity is entirely based on the brain, with the metabolism its servant. Then again, our brains would tell us that, wouldn't they? Yet the metabolism can override that "dominant" brain to have us writhing like worms in severe cases.

The shift from energy to information harks to your point about what all these hungry brains are going to run on if the metabolisms of nature are being broken down to simple things. I'm guessing microbes, fungi and insects processed into appetising forms for the rich, goop for the poor. Later on, digitisation is the dream. A rather cool image of a distant future painted recently by Michio Kaku:
Aliens in outer space, they don’t deal with flying saucers. That’s so 20th century. They digitise themselves — shoot their consciousness at the speed of light across an intergalactic laser highway, and if there’s a laser highway next to us, we are too stupid to even know it’s there. We don’t have the instruments capable of detecting a laser highway where billions of souls rocket at the speed of light throughout the galaxy.
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Greta wrote:At this stage I think all in the debate on that an another thread, including JKlint, @Consul and @Count Lucanor agree that life and, thus, humanity is part of the Earth, being tightly interwoven with its existing systems and creating many others.
Yes, I think we mostly agree life is part of the Earth, although our views differ on whether that relation is essential or accidental. I'll play it safe for now and will not endorse the statement about "creating many others" systems until I get to know exactly what you mean.
Greta wrote:Humans are not actually destroying the planet,
That's an important distinction I often make to nature lovers disguised as sustainability activists. After humanity is done destroying natural resources and making it hard for future generations, it will be our human habitat and our ways of living that will be in jeopardy. Large species of plants and animals might disappear, but the rest of nature, brute and indifferent, will be just fine and continue as it did before humans arrived. Interestingly, some environmentalists are actually more worried about turtles and rhinos than humans, which they would gladly wipe out of the face of the Earth.
Greta wrote:The biosphere is reforming, as always, and continuing to become smarter.
I have to cast doubt on that claim. Although we certainly have the potential, it seems that we are those remote hunter-gatherers with high-tech toys. Even the geniuses who designed them can be as stupid in their general views about the world as the consumers that have no idea how they are made of.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: The future of a living Earth

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Count Lucanor wrote: December 30th, 2018, 11:17 pm
Greta wrote:At this stage I think all in the debate on that an another thread, including JKlint, @Consul and @Count Lucanor agree that life and, thus, humanity is part of the Earth, being tightly interwoven with its existing systems and creating many others.
Yes, I think we mostly agree life is part of the Earth, although our views differ on whether that relation is essential or accidental. I'll play it safe for now and will not endorse the statement about "creating many others" systems until I get to know exactly what you mean.
The only space programs of the Earth before humans came from asteroid impacts.
Count Lucanor wrote: December 30th, 2018, 11:17 pm
Greta wrote:Humans are not actually destroying the planet,
That's an important distinction I often make to nature lovers disguised as sustainability activists. After humanity is done destroying natural resources and making it hard for future generations, it will be our human habitat and our ways of living that will be in jeopardy. Large species of plants and animals might disappear, but the rest of nature, brute and indifferent, will be just fine and continue as it did before humans arrived. Interestingly, some environmentalists are actually more worried about turtles and rhinos than humans, which they would gladly wipe out of the face of the Earth.
We are overcrowded so it's only natural that people would rather there be fewer of us. Their main concern is that the culling occurs far away.
Count Lucanor wrote: December 30th, 2018, 11:17 pm
Greta wrote:The biosphere is reforming, as always, and continuing to become smarter.
I have to cast doubt on that claim. Although we certainly have the potential, it seems that we are those remote hunter-gatherers with high-tech toys. Even the geniuses who designed them can be as stupid in their general views about the world as the consumers that have no idea how they are made of.
So far it has become smarter and smarter. Never mind the Neolithic leadership - it's the wheels turning beneath the corruption that keeps everything going that is intelligent. Also, in this I think we gain a clearer picture by thinking in terms of millennia rather than decades.
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