[Skybird]

[quote=UnderseaLcpl]
Believe me, I see your point of view and skybird's. Amazingly,I do have a great appreciation for natural beauty.
Nonetheless, progress continues, more or less imperfectly, and it cannot be stopped because the people who drive it are primarily concerned with...well, progress.

Is it progress when it causes the destruction of the basics of ongoing survival? I would argue it is exactly the opposite - the prevention of progress.


Assuming you have children, would you oppose exploitation of the seas if it kept them from starving or living in poverty?


Must we have so many children, and let man multiply uncontrolled and beyond any population size that could be fed by renewable ressources?

Lenin once said electricity plus socialism is communism. Aldous Huxley wrote electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control is democracy, and wealth; where as electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control is misery, totalitarianism, and war.


Humans are but machines engineered via evolution (read; enivironmental adaption) to ensure the survival of the DNA that manufactured them. The theory of evolution says as much, and though it may have some (percieved) flaws, it infallably promotes the most effecient species.


But we are beyond genetic evolution/adaptaion - we now have casued chnages in the envrionment going aso fast that genetic adaptation and evolutionary selection does not function the way it did, for us: it is too slow. we will not adapt by chnaging our bodies. Our tool is our intellect and reason. Our means for adaption are sciences, and technology. In us, evolution has won the ability to start reflecting about itself. we are no longer unfree to just follow the paths of nartural selection: we can make choices in our evolutionary design that lower levels of evolution are not capable to make, and we can adapt to environment that way that natural selection alone would have left beyond our reach.

We can chose, and we can be aware. This is what changes it all to former evolutionary stages. You say we are doomed to act and behave the way you outline above. I say: we chose to be like this and do like that - we are free to chose different as well.


Spiritual? What better mechanism could be employed for creating order in a universe where (as far as we know) the only "universal" force is entropy. All major religions believe in a "higher order" including my own. Of course, that argument presumes many things, for another thread or PM discussion perhaps.

Let'S bypass this, before it all gets nasty again.


In terms of Earth's history, evolution happens, and we, as humans, do not possess the means to halt it. In fact, we are enigineered not to.
Crueller extinctions of species and biospheres have been comonplace for hundreds of millions of years. It could be argued that such competition has been around for more than 1 billion years.

See my answer above. In the end, evolution is just a thought model of human mind. It serves it'S purpose like Newton's physics serve pool players. But modern physics showed us that beyond a relatively shallow, rough level, it means almost nothing.


The ultimate point is that humans are far too efficent to subscribe to ecological conservation as a whole. The purpose of life; all life, is to replicate and create order to some degree. Those forms of life that are capable of creating more order and therfore reproducing more successfully eventually eliminate the need for those that have failed.

But human community have been very effective in survival where they were aware of ecological conservation. they became ineffective in their ability to survive where they lost that awareness.


It is ironic to me that champions of nature are opposed by the very force they presume to champion.

Even more ironically, mankind presents the greatest threat to that natural order, whilst Mankind's capacity for rational thought and appreciation for other members of his own species as well as others provides the greatest hope for ecology.

that will depend on what we chose. See above.


But, the time is not now. Science has not progressed so far as to eliminate the competition for resources that all life has faced for all of its' existence.

Onhe could point at the fact that evolution goes beyond the individual and the species, but also forms systems and supracontexts that we call eco-systems. Evolution has designed them to allow a dynamic, fluctuating balance that can comensate huge desasters of global scale as well as fluctuations in predator-prey-relations. Seen that way evolution formed ecological systems of species that formed in such ways that they do not take more from the ecosystem than what they give, and can be compensated, and natural fluctuations off the ideal norm get compensated as well.


The idea that mankind and nature can co-exist without damaging each other is purely in the realm of science fiction, due to the laws of nature and the law of conservation of mass and energy.

Nah, theat lnk is absurd. The idea that mankind could survive without learning to coexist with the nature that it so far damages - that is whyt I wouold call science fiction. Nature will outlast us, promised. Not the other way around!


There is no balance, only progress of mankind. And even if there is a balance, we are not there yet. So you must choose; preservation of a natural system that will eventually wipe itself from existence anyways, or preservation of mankind's progress which may or may not save said system.

Seen in the light of my replies you will understand that I consider this part to be Quatsch.