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[Teneb]

Anthrocentric environmentalist; We should keep the world safe and abundant so that we don't fuckin' die.

I like this, i’m using it.

In environmental ethics, this is generally called "conservation ethics". Sometimes "shallow ecology", though that sounds a bit perjorative.

Though I guess what Descan said is probably more useful when you're in a discussion with people who don't believe we're fucking the planet. Given that they likely won't have read the wiki page on environmental ethics, and will just associate "conservation" with all those irritating people trying to stop them building orphan-meat factories in the rainforest.

But those factories are just so profitable!

[Egan_BW]

Know what's profitable? Not fuckin' dying.

[Dunamisdeos]

My doctor recently told me I have high blood pressure and today I had shooting chest pains.

You're a panda in a very tight suit. Maybe loosen the buttons a bit.

[Hanslanda]

But... But Hugo Boss!

[Dunamisdeos]

But... But Hugo Boss!

I got to talk to the personal secretary to the CEO of Hugo Boss once, because the guy had apparently ordered a book.

She was really nice.

[Tack]

Man the people who are paid to have the best phone manner are usually super pleasant to talk to. I know it's their job but still, it's really nice.

In environmental ethics, this is generally called "conservation ethics". Sometimes "shallow ecology", though that sounds a bit perjorative.

I guess a truly 'anthocentric' person would be perfectly happy with the world having five species, if one was humans and the other four were perfectly tailored to provide us with adequate nutrients and oxygen.
Whole habitable worlds packed with moss krill n' lentils. Except it'd be Google HyperMoss^tm.

I personally enjoy a beautiful ecology filled with charasmatic megafauna, and possibly even seperate cultural geographical ecologies, but that might be from growing up in the land o' the marsupial.

[Tack]

fuck

[Reelya]

Badass Biker Baby

[Descan]

Nah, we're not smart enough to know every single thing what in the natural world might hold something we need. Best to keep it all as best we can manage.

[Egan_BW]

All of life is machines. Most of the machines we use are technology, but life beat us to it and is probably better at the whole thing in general. So disregarding the natural world is like throwing out a bunch of nicely optimized blueprints for random, potentially useful stuff without even looking over all of it first. The fact that living things grow here is the most rare, valuable thing on this little planet, and every species that goes extinct is a little bit of value that we lose and never get back.

I mean, wasting fossil fuels is one thing, but that's just using up an energy source. The sun's going to keep putting out energy for a long time, so in relative terms running out of coal and oil isn't a big deal. But life is useful machines, and we're not going to extract that from putting a dyson swarm up.

I swear, some day aliens are gonna show up and start frantically taking samples of all the earth life they can find, because we're busy killing it all off.

[scourge728]

Who says they haven't already, that would explain the abductions of cows

[Frumple]

Natural blueprints are generally sodding terribly optimized, tho'. They're like the literal incarnation of if-it-ain't-broke-enough-don't-fix-it, with a side order of GIGO, RNG-hell, and an entire QA industry's worth of shitty bug testing efforts. Like, it's the actual pile of random, potentially useful stuff we'd be hypothetically discarding for nicely optimized replacements, not the other way around.

There's all sorts of reasons to want to keep around biodiversity and rummage through nature-y stuff humans haven't screwed with much for junk to steal, but... yeah. Nature is not good at engineering or optimization, it's just been throwing shit at the wall for much longer than we have and doesn't care if the results dies, so it has some novelty, here and there.

... it's probably worth noting most of the useful stuff we can still yoink out of its squishy bits, we're primarily interested in to fix how much of a biological clusterfuck we are. Nature is not good at any particular job, it's just had literal millions of years to be shit at things. The original Shakespearean typing monkey, save it's less Shakespeare and more tenpenny bodice ripper schlock and now we're stuck trying to edit that shit so we die less.

[Descan]

There are some truly amazing 'innovations' (I guess?) in nature, particularly nanomaterials. Spider silk strength per cm³, gecko feet grippy bits, beetle thoraxes for water collection in arid areas.

I mean I'm hoping to become robomortal, so biological aid is less important to me than that kind of thing. Not NOT important, I still need to live in the squish for the foreseeable future, but long term.

[wierd]

On the nanoscale, biology is hard to beat.  Very efficient and robust micro machines.

the issue is that macro-scale assemblages of these are... Less fantastic in many ways.


Nature's way of making these assemblages "better" involves a whole lot of wasteful mortality. The human way of using advanced theory to pre-select candidates prior to testing is less wasteful.

[JoshuaFH]

There are some truly amazing 'innovations' (I guess?) in nature, particularly nanomaterials. Spider silk strength per cm³, gecko feet grippy bits, beetle thoraxes for water collection in arid areas.

The innovation gets more and more extreme the smaller you go. Grasshopper legs generate all the force they need for their gigantic jumps with functioning gears in their leg joints. A certain species of hornet (maybe the tarantula hornets that plague Hanslanda? I'd have to look it up again) have highly specialized bacteria that live in their antenna that they need for breeding. The mucus lining inside of stomachs has a symbiotic relationship with bacteriophage viruses, with mucus evolved to be a perfect home for viruses, and viruses having seemingly evolved to plant themselves into the mucus, so they can predate on bacteria that much easier. Horizontal gene transfer allows single celled life almost limitless room for adaptation.