h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The discussion points for this are:

1) All human actions are ultimately selfish
2) all leaders are ultimately dependant on conflict for their leadership.

What think you on those points and, is human existence in anyway beneficial to the ecology they exist in?
I.e. given our history, is our environment better off without us?

If it helps, think of youself as a detached alien viewer looking at the earth and deciding on whether the current human infestation needs to be curtailed.

Is there a tick box for the don't knows ?

If so, Tick !

Good night

Surely this is not an ethical question at all.

Having evolved to the point where we can control evolution and the environment it is more a question of whether we will ever be clever enough to escape this planet or control our population at a sustainable level.

On current form I have my doubts and somehow fear that the battle in the end will be between us (H. Sapiens) and evolution (Gaia if you will) where, if we win, we loose!

turvy

Of course all human beings are selfish, and frankly amazingly arrogant to think they have made the slightest bit of difference to the enormous ecosystem that they live in. The Earth is a self-regulating equilbirium; it has been for night on 4 billion years, and a mere blip on geological timescales is not going to disrupt it.

I, for one, do not give a damn how much carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere (not that I believe in the greenhouse effect anyway) or how much we overfish cod stocks. This planet has shown damn well over the past couple of years (tsunami, New Orleans) that it is quite capable of wiping out human exitence whenever it wants: anything we change in the biosphere, atmosphere or geosphere is merely fringe activity. THe human race has miserably failed to get any sense of perspective of this planet and its place upon it.

My belief is that we should consider ourselves damn lucky to exist on this planet at all and that we should celebrate our luckiness to the utmost. How dare we have the arrogance to suggest that we should be the extinguisher for our species, when 99% of ALL the species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct, and certainly not wiped out by their own means.

B

"If it helps, think of youself as a detached alien viewer looking at the earth and deciding on whether the current human infestation needs to be curtailed."

I'd be far too busy laughing my alien a*se off

Where's Captain Kirk when you need him???

This thread starts on one, or possibly two false premises.

"All human actions are ultimately selfish.
I don't believe that. Examples are too numerous and too obvious to even begin to list. But I will anyway.

If I tip a bartender at a bar where I go often, I may well have a selfish motive in that I'm building up goodwill and hoping that I get paid back somehow in the future. But if I buy a Big Issue from someone on the street who I've never seen before and might never see again, and I tell them to keep the change, there's no possibility of a selfish intent there if I have, for instance, no religious motive (storing up treasure in heaven/performing a mitzvah/the scriptures told me to be kind to people) or I'm not doing it just to give myself a warm fuzzy.

Either way, there is no denying the existence of doing something 'out of the goodness of one's heart', with no selfish intent whatsoever. You can try to argue with me til the cows come home on that one - I will never accept that it's not so because I've done it and I know what it feels like. Or rether, what it doesn't feel like, because if it's done for no selfish reason you are hardly even aware of doing it and get no pleasure from it. Pleasure suggests that you are doing it to get something from the action.

"all leaders are ultimately dependant on conflict for their leadership."
I'm going to need more explanation on that one before I try to debate it.

BH you sound a candidate for join me's random act of kindness
http://www.join-me.co.uk/

No.

Hopefully bird 'flu will wipe us all out, and we can leave the in the capable legs of the s

Every creature that has ever lived on this planet has been ultimately selfish, down to the last bacterium. Why should they live and we don't? We wouldn't have oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn't those selfish little f***ers, and I think they might have a more lasting effect than we do.

I could give a long argument about this, but instead I'll just counter the first two points.

1) What do you base this on? If it is due to such a thing as genetics(ie that book by Dawkins) well then that is true for all the other species. There has been many instances of human self sacrifice and utterly selfless actions.

2) Say what?

I want to live. and I'll kill every mother one of you if you try to get in my way

See you lost me at the point where you mixed detached viewer and ethics. Does a rock care?

I can't see that we're looking at a particularly useful ethics system if you're ruling a huge chunk of human behaviour as deserving of extermination.

Alright, admittedly I did not read all the above posts... I read the first few. I found this while trying to catch up on backlog so I'll be brief so I can get back to it.

The problem is not mankind, it is our particular culture. By that I mean the cultures who believe, in one way or another, that the world was made for mankind to rule and conquer.

We belong to the world, the world does not belong to us!

When we can accept that we are just another biological species and that, globally speaking, the "human element" is not at all relevant we will stop destroying the world.

I agree it's not universally human to treat the environment as some sort of endless storehouse of goodies that we can take from and pollute. It's very much part of our Western/Christian culture with our idea of a transcendant God. I know many of us are now atheist but our culture developped within the Judeo/Christian context. The earth for a long time has been viewed as something to just uncaringly exploit.

I could only merely scratch the surface, but last year when I visited Austrlia I learnt a little of Aboriginal beliefs. Most recent estimates suggest they may have been in Australia since well before modern man reached Europe. Traditionally they seem to endow every aspect of nature with a spiritual significance and so lived in better ecological balance with their environment. Even so it is thought that they hunted to extinction certain animals, but compared to our culture that is small potatoes and nothing out of the ordinary in terms of Darwinian eco pressures.

I don't really think it's a question of 'deserve', that's far too loaded. We are a product of evolution like any other creature. And it's really a question of whether we can use our intelligence to see what behaviour is really in our interests.

To add to that... The reason "tribal life" is ultimately less destructive than ours (which includes cultures with religions outside of Judeo/Christian religions, they live the same as us in the west do essentially. The differences are trivial) is because we all feel that our way of life is the best way and the way mankind was meant to live and we decided that we had to help all other cultures "see the light" and adopt our totalitarian agricultural lifestyle.

(Wow, what a run on sentence! Sorry if that's worded poorly.)

I would say that humans are no different than other animals in our relationship to our surroundings. Other animals will also just take what they can, and perhaps wipe out other species in the process. The only real difference is humans are more efficient, we can use many different food sources and are able to move around if we lose them. Most animals will die out if they saw off the branch they are sitting on, humans can move to a different branch.

As for noble savages, they have some of the same problems. They tend not to be as destructive, as they are more vulnerable to changes in the enviroment. I'm sure there are many tribes who did not "live in pact with nature" and therefore died out. The people of the Easter Island and the Anazsasi for example. I could say a lot more about this, but I will stop here.

we are here!
we here to stay!

unless some one here has found transport to another like planet(s)!

all we're saying give humans a chance!

I'm with GB on this one... Unfortunately when Man does eventually wriggle his infected species off this the big problem is how much damage will he have inflicted?

We are doing better than the 'alleged' asteroid that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. At least that left a blank canvas. All we are leaving is pollution and millions of miles of sterile concrete and tarmac...

So long and thanks for the fish... Oh! and sorry for wiping those out too, and really ruining the by destroying the lungs of this .

Must go now, and watch man's slow demise...

Like most natural disasters, the bird flu will probably hit the poorest hardest in developping countries with little or no access to anti viral drugs, and compromised immune systems from poor diets. And they also often live in much closer proximity with their hens.

Just like earthquakes hit the poorer countries hardest with less money to build earthquake resistant buildings. And Aids affects developping countries harder with less money to buy anti Aids drugs.

Natural disasters aren't particularly good at hitting the rich West in the same proportion as they hit other cultures.