It would be highly convenient for us to stop pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to keep climate stable for food production. But we're incapable of even that, even though technology to get rid of most fossil fuel use exists.
replyWhen this is the status quo, I'm not very hopeful of humankind's general capability to control the nature in ways that ultimately benefit us.
The article clearly spells out why this wouldn’t be in our favour: functional ecosystems provide services to humanity that we need, and those ecosystems need biodiversity to effectively provide those services. The idea that destroying these systems is “more convenient to us” is very flawed
replyThere must be myriad unintended consequences that would come with dumping a whole bunch of water into a desert though? It feels like there's an awful lot of hubris in thinking we could accurately predict all the changes that would cause and know it would have a net positive outcome.
replyIf there are, we should have figured them out by now, since that is the story of California during the 1840s. People redirected a bunch of water to turn the desert into a treasure. Kinda literally, since shortly after they found gold, which destroyed all the positive economic change that was brought.
replyOr take the Netherlands, that used to be a lot of water and now it is a lot of flat land.
If the Sahara wasn't dry, what would be the knock on effects of losing the dust from it that lands in South America?
replyThe dust, sand, and soil from the Sahara that lands in South American is an enormous source of nutrients and fertilizer for the Amazon rainforest. It would certainly cause vast changes in how that whole ecosystem operates and the impact it makes in other parts of the world.
replyThe knock on effects of those changes to one of the most important and diverse ecosystems on the planet cannot possibly be completely predicted beforehand.
The behavior you're describing has already brought us close to the planetary boundaries of our own existence in the last century or two. Plenty of second order effects to our actions.
replyi think this is a dumb take that does not withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.
replyThat's conjecture.
replyFor all we know the universe could be teeming with life, in whatever shape or form. And since we see the first signs of life about 500 million years after the plant was formed, there's a good argument to be made that life doesn't need much more than a stable energy gradient and some basic building blocks to get started.
Agreed. There are just too many unknowns. Certainly about how life started here(if indeed it did start here). But even more so about what's out there. There's so much we don't know even about the planets and moons in our own solar system, let alone other star systems. It's only recently we've become able to detect exoplanets in significant quantities at all, and we've still only scratched the surface really. And what we know about those planets is very limited. For most of them we don't know much except their distance to the star and estimated size. For a handful we have some information about their atmospheres, usually only enough to narrow it down to a couple of equally plausible models. It's hard for me to imagine us being able to conclusively detect life on an exoplanet. I think the best we'll be able to do in the next several decades is say we're pretty sure a planet's atmosphere contains chemical compounds for which there's no known abiotic origin. But there will be so much uncertainty there in terms of possible unknown abiotic origins that it would never feel conclusive.
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