Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.
Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.
Wow what an interesting animal, haven't heard about it before.
> the chips are stacked against them.
Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."
Yes, that's it. I could have worded it better. My point was that it's random, evolution isn't a directed willful phenomenon but a consequence of the physical world/physics.
Yes, but those mutations are part of why evolution works. Through random mutations, every possible way of doing something is explored. If something is beneficial, organisms thrive. If it's not beneficial, organisms die. The same is for whole species. If a species was using some niche to their advantage and the niche disappeared, the species will die. But that niche (nook) was explored.
And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
Unfortunately it also seems like these sharks are plagued by parasites in their eyes:
The shark is often infested by the copepod Ommatokoita elongata, a crustacean that attaches itself to the shark's eyes.[17] The copepod may display bioluminescence, thus attracting prey for the shark in a mutualistic relationship, but this hypothesis has not been verified.[18] These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.[11] This does not seem to reduce the life expectancy or predatory ability of Greenland sharks, due to their strong reliance on smell and hearing.
Are they parasites though? It may be symbiotic, especially if the relationship between the species has spanned over many years. e.g. their presence may promote the production of rhodopsin.
OTOH it may be natures way of allowing natural selection to take place in the sharks since their lifespan is so long. The wiki article seems to imply that's not the case though.
> These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.
Highly recommend the book "Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean" by Morten Strøksnes if you're interested in old sharks, small boats or deep oceans https://bookshop.org/p/books/shark-drunk-the-art-of-catching...
I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was studied came from one of these.
This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant.
If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem.
Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year
There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving.
That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.
We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here.
The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons.
It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves.
The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.
Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically.
This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
Resource intensity of GDP has been falling for decades, most quickly in developed economies. Space-based resource extraction isn’t going to be radically cheaper (if it ever is cheaper) than terrestrial sources with known propulsion, so that balance is unlikely to shift. Herego, replacing terrestrial extraction with moderately-cheaper space-based extraction would reduce harm to our ecosystem without changing our economies to turbo-consume materials and thereby accelerate terrestrial extraction.
I agree it may reduce harm (depending on how the actual costs shake out), but the calculus remains that if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially, and you are not recycling them in some way, you will run out of resources no matter how many you have.
I'm not opposed to exploiting resources in space, I think we should pursue the goal of being an "interplanetary species", but I think it's important to understand that it isn't a silver bullet or a free lunch. We still have to change our economy to be more sustainable.
Not to mention that it is not clear that exploiting space resources or becoming interplanetary is possible. I presume that it is. But we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven. We don't know if we're a decade away from mining our first asteroid or a century. We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise.
> if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially
Our material needs in many categories are not expanding exponentially. On a per-capita basis, in advanced economies, it's been flat in several categories.
If anything, the constraints of spacefaring seem perfect for nudging a culture and economy towards conservation and recycling. Building lunar and Martian colonies requires short-term sustainability in a way that does not have clean parallels on Earth.
> we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven
Nobody is banking on space-based resource extraction.
> We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise
Bit of a paradox to this. On one hand, sure. On the other hand, given two civilisations, one which assumes space-based resource extraction and one which does not, which do you think is going to get there first?
> On a per-capita basis, in advanced economies, it's been flat in several categories.
Right, but our population is, at this time, growing exponentially. That may change but hasn't yet.
> If anything, the constraints of spacefaring seem perfect for nudging a culture and economy towards conservation and recycling.
Quite possibly! I agree. But what I was saying is that getting access to resources does not solve sustainability. If anything this is an argument that sustainability is a prerequisite for space travel and not the other way around.
> Nobody is banking on space-based resource extraction.
I understand this is not your position, and I appreciate that your position is reasonable and informed. But it is what was being discussed when you joined the conversation. And it is something I hear people say all the time.
> [Which] do you think is going to get there first?
Are these hypothetical civilizations on the brink of unlocking space travel? Or are they 100 years away? The civilization hell bent on space is likely to burn themselves out and replace their leadership with people with more grounded ideas if unlocking space travel isn't a realistic possibility for them. If space travel is right around the corner than my expectation would be the grounded civilization freaks out about national security and joins this space race in earnest. I think in either scenario, all else equal, it's a coin flip. The tortoise and the hare both have viable strategies given the right conditions.
This is kinda sorta what happened in the space race. The USSR pursued rockets aggressively and took a massive early lead, believing that ICBMs were the solution the the USA's dominance in bomber aircraft. But they couldn't sustain that pace. If I recall correctly, by the time we landed on the moon they hadn't launched a mission in years. The USA more or less gave up on manned space travel and space colonization shortly thereafter. Obviously both continued to explore space and the tide is beginning to change, but I think that's a natural experiment which roughly addresses this question. (Not to the exclusion of future attempts with better technology going better.)
> our population is, at this time, growing exponentially
Not in advanced (i.e. materially intensive) economies. And global population models are currently all aiming towards stabilization.
> this is an argument that sustainability is a prerequisite for space travel and not the other way around
How so? Without space travel, there is no near-term incentive to develop those technologies. (The terrestrial incentives are all long term.)
> Are these hypothetical civilizations on the brink of unlocking space travel? Or are they 100 years away?
China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases. Not permanent, independent settlements. But settlements that need to be as self-sustaining as possible nevertheless on account of launch costs and travel time.
> that's a natural experiment which roughly addresses this question
I see a different reading. We got a lot of sustainability-progressing technology out of the space race.
Alignment with the goal of human colonization wasn’t yet there. But there are reasons to be optimistic with modern materials, bioengineering and computational methods. Methods that could very easily also yield literal fruits that make our economies more sustainable at home.
> Without space travel, there is no near-term incentive to develop those technologies.
Of course there is. Our climate is getting less hospitable, right now, in our lifetime. Storms are stronger, wildfires are more frequent and severe, we're beginning to strain our fresh water aquifers, etc. We are seeing really alarming rates of decline of flying insect biomass and other signs of an ecosystem in distress, and that ecosystem provides us with trillions of dollars of value. There is no human industry without our ecosystem to support us.
Solar, wind, etc. are also getting more and more competitive with fossil fuels, providing a purely monetary incentive.
And if we disregard all long term incentives, who cares about space? Even if we use very optimistic figures we're not going to be exploiting extraterrestrial resources for a few decades. And if we encounter significant setbacks (which I have to imagine we will) that take quite a long time.
> China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases.
I'll believe it when I see it. But if this is true, then wouldn't you say, by your logic, that this is a near term incentive for developing sustainable technologies?
> But there are reasons to be optimistic...
I agree. I don't think we really disagree in principle on any of this. I think we have different values and different levels of skepticism (or perhaps are skeptical of different things) but broadly/directionally agree.
> if we disregard all long term incentives, who cares about space?
The short-term incentives string together into a long-term plan.
> Our climate is getting less hospitable, right now, in our lifetime. Storms are stronger, wildfires are more frequent and severe, we're beginning to strain our fresh water aquifers, etc. We are seeing really alarming rates of decline of flying insect biomass and other signs of an ecosystem in distress, and that ecosystem provides us with trillions of dollars of value
Which has been enough urgency to do what exactly?
> Solar, wind, etc. are also getting more and more competitive with fossil fuels
Great example of folks pursuing short-term profit incentives making progress towards a long-term goal.
> if this is true, then wouldn't you say, by your logic, that this is a near term incentive for developing sustainable technologies?
If we try. Yes. If we gut those programmes, no. (For the technology benefits we just have to try.)
> we have different values and different levels of skepticism (or perhaps are skeptical of different things) but broadly/directionally agree
I think so too.
I think some people are motivated by stewardship and others by exploration. Focusing one one at the expense of the other is a false economy. And pursuing both doesn’t necessarily mean a long-term trade-off.
> The short-term incentives string together into a long-term plan.
Sustainability isn't different in this regard. Eg, algae farming is a promising way to produce protein and fix carbon. But the economics aren't there yet, so commercial algae farms are pursuing higher margin markets like supplements and inputs to cosmetics rather than food (with the notable exception of feed in aquaculture like salmon).
When solar was still very expensive it was deployed in weird environments like satellites and oil fields where the grid wasn't available. But that proved to be stepping stones to a much larger solar industry.
> Which has been enough urgency to do what exactly?
Lots of stuff, for instance the €5.5B MOSE seawall built by Venice and various projects along the Colorado River to secure the water supply of the southwest USA (to pick just one, Las Vegas' Third Straw at around $1.3B). When disasters happen we obviously spend hundreds of millions to a billion+ on cleanup, rescue, etc. It's also been urgent enough to drive a huge amount of research, advocacy, etc.
Granted, those are fairly low numbers in the scheme of things. But the inaction is driven by interests who stand to lose money, not by economic rationality. I don't think even those monied interests are acting rationally in the long run. They're protecting their interests in the short term but greatly jeopardizing them in the long term. That's a similar false economy/market failure.
Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones.
There are many ways to handle population control, not only controlling natality. That wouldn't be popular but you could imagine a mandatory euthanasy at 55 or 60 for example.
"Poor countries have actually less impact on our planet than wealthy ones."
in the near future, richer countries would wage war againt "poor" country to take their water source
this is what gonna happen, not if but when
with the ever growing technology achievement and billions more people to come and desire to consume finite resources, what do you think gonna happen ????
That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down?
that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi.
i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild,
but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.
> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland.
But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.
Greenland sharks don't kill humans, they're not more "responsible" for what white sharks do than you as a mammal are responsible for tigers killing their prey.
I have permanent damage on my retina of other eye. I hope one day humans could regenerate their retinas as sharks and zebrafish can do. Seems strange, that fish living in deep dark oceans can fix their eyes, while most mammals who rely on vision a lot more cannot.
Thought we'd have replaceable eyes, teeth, hair, etc by now. When your vision goes, instead of getting new contacts or glasses, just replace your eyes with a new pair. You have cavities, just replace your tooth with another. The promise of genetic sequencing and research just hasn't panned out.
The article talk about DNA repairs, helping the eye to maintain its function in the long run. It's not a repair after injurie. I also hope for progress in human eye medecine.
I had no idea they could live for 400 years... I actually now realize that I never thought about the lifespan of a shark before, but I would have guessed (prior to this education) around 25 years or so.
I hate this stupid style of writing. So did they find out anything new besides the fact that a shark supposedly still sees the light? Did this particular shark get a parasite on its eyes or not? Not a single word about DNA repair mechanisms except for in the baity title. Awful.
TL;DR: we think sharks eyes can still see light even if the sharks a centuries old, please fund us for further research!
I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging.
Imagine a world where people like Stalin never die. People like bill gates never have to pretend to be a nice person…
If there’s no chance of death, there will never be any progress in society. People in power would just establish a tighter and tighter grip. All the boomers would be immune to death and disease, but the treatment would be banned for the young because they haven’t done enough to earn it.
+1000 - altered carbon season 1 is amazing. IMHO commit to watching it 3x to get everything going on - after the first watching, everyone's like "that was amazing but I'm not sure what I just watched." It's just so rich - if The Matrix is 136 mins vs 570 mins with that much more depth.
Reminds me of the film 'In Time' where the rich can be immortal.
It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.
Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.
If your thesis was correct, we would presumably not treat children for cancer. Since that’s evidently not the case, I’m not sure how you’re coming to this conclusion
Dictators die all the time and most often not of old age.
As we get older our flexibility to adapt to change also starts to diminish.
You will eventually be outperformed.
We can’t account for what we don’t know.
They’re predatory scavengers that wouldn’t hesitate to eat you if it had the opportunity. I would much rather conduct biomedical research on sharks than mice or rats.
Ah yes potentially getting us one step closer to immortality, hardly worth killing an animal!
I mostly eat vegan because I do have a strong dislike of factory farming and the way animals are treated there. But killing animals is a fact of life and I think scientific progress is a very valid reason to do so.
To put it in perspective, a lot of shark young will kill each other in the womb such that only the strongest is birthed. These animals eat other animals alive, etc.. etc.. My point being it is not like the option is between a rosy utopia or human-inflicted suffering.
I'm not against scientific research per se or living a bit more but... is immortality (or living for, say, 200 years or more) really something we should strive for?
Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited. From politics (even absolute monarchs or dictators eventually die), to economics (think about retirement, for example), demographics (if everyone is immortal and everyone keeps having children, what happens?), even psychology ("everything passes").
Are we willing to throw these implications away? What would be the purpose?
> Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited
Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.
That’s throwing the baby with the bathwater, there’s hundreds ways to die not horribly. And for an "immortal" (as in "not-aging"), there’s still ways to die horribly.
Life is more beautiful when you live it for its experiences, not for the fear of loosing it.
> throwing the baby with the bathwater, there’s hundreds ways to die not horribly
The baby in your analogy being aging?
> there’s still ways to die horribly
Sure. The purpose would be remove a common cause of dying horribly.
(And in no world with longevity treatments would it be mandatory. People and populations who like aging and Alzheimer’s can keep partying like it’s 2025.)
> Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.
Sure but is gerontocracy a good thing, then? I’m not against older people, but shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more. Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally.
> > What would be the purpose?
To not die horribly.
Well ok, but even if you can’t die horribly (ignoring murders,…) you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons. Starving, rape, physical and psychological abuse, painful diseases even if non lethal,… still exist regardless of immortality. It’s not like immortal people are necessarily happy or good.
> shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more
I'm genuinely not seeing the problem. Longer lives means more productive lives. (A massive fraction of healthcare costs are related to obesity and aging. A minority of medicine is in trauma.)
> Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally
We don't have a path to entropy-defying immortality. Not aging doesn't mean literal immortality.
> you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons
The fact that you're levying this argument should seal the case. It's an argument that can be made against anything good.
Yes, of course it can be made against anything good, but what I mean is… is death truly the worst thing? Isn’t it better to focus on other ways to reduce suffering? Unexpected death is of course tragic, but everything eventually stops. I understand looking into ways to treat diseases, reduce other unpleasant events and possibly reduce pain (physical or otherwise), but immortality to me looks like something you (a generic you) just for the sake of it. Also because, when you think about it, you only die once, but you experience suffering in a variety of ways. In addition, death is a way to “enforce” change. Sometimes it’s bad, other times it’s good.
> Longer lives means more productive lives.
When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest, you still do your work (which means, if everything else stays equal, that there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always).
> Isn’t it better to focus on other ways to reduce suffering?
Why?
> ways to treat diseases
Aging underlies tons of diseases. (It’s similar to obesity in that way.)
> death is a way to “enforce” change. Sometimes it’s bad, other times it’s good
This is true of everything bad. You could use this logic for ceasing research into curing cancer, trauma medicine or seatbelts and traffic lights.
> of course it can be made against anything good
Which makes it a pointless argument. (And implicit concession that you’re arguing against something good.)
> When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest
…why? You have more time.
In a world without aging, retirement at 80 would be an objectively better deal than retiring at 60 today. You’d be retiring with a body that hasn’t started failing. And you’d have more years, on average, ahead of you.
> there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always
Lump of labour fallacy. (Average adult lifespans have gone up over the last two centuries. That has accompanied more, not less, labour-market dynamism.)
Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ
> the chips are stacked against them.
Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."
Doesn't look to bad?
Kind of. Mutation rate of our dna is "managed" by the dna/chromosomes/genes to reduce the rate in critical areas.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...>
(Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)
Good call, abc123
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
(And none of those shark-equivalents have developed a space program.)
I’d love to see some space sharks!
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
It's the circle of life.
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
Since we're not seeing any aliens, life on Earth must have started very early.
The universe still has plenty of time to burn, especially red dwarfs. It's sad to think about starless skies, though.
The heme is pretty magical. Probably not a hard requirement, but it sure has been useful for us here.
The shark is often infested by the copepod Ommatokoita elongata, a crustacean that attaches itself to the shark's eyes.[17] The copepod may display bioluminescence, thus attracting prey for the shark in a mutualistic relationship, but this hypothesis has not been verified.[18] These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.[11] This does not seem to reduce the life expectancy or predatory ability of Greenland sharks, due to their strong reliance on smell and hearing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
OTOH it may be natures way of allowing natural selection to take place in the sharks since their lifespan is so long. The wiki article seems to imply that's not the case though.
One idea behind that is that any environment has a carrying capacity, limitations on food etc. It may be the parasites favour older sharks etc etc.
This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant.
If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem.
Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year
The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.
That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea...
http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalg...
The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons.
It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves.
The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.
This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.
I'm not opposed to exploiting resources in space, I think we should pursue the goal of being an "interplanetary species", but I think it's important to understand that it isn't a silver bullet or a free lunch. We still have to change our economy to be more sustainable.
Not to mention that it is not clear that exploiting space resources or becoming interplanetary is possible. I presume that it is. But we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven. We don't know if we're a decade away from mining our first asteroid or a century. We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise.
Our material needs in many categories are not expanding exponentially. On a per-capita basis, in advanced economies, it's been flat in several categories.
If anything, the constraints of spacefaring seem perfect for nudging a culture and economy towards conservation and recycling. Building lunar and Martian colonies requires short-term sustainability in a way that does not have clean parallels on Earth.
> we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven
Nobody is banking on space-based resource extraction.
> We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise
Bit of a paradox to this. On one hand, sure. On the other hand, given two civilisations, one which assumes space-based resource extraction and one which does not, which do you think is going to get there first?
Right, but our population is, at this time, growing exponentially. That may change but hasn't yet.
> If anything, the constraints of spacefaring seem perfect for nudging a culture and economy towards conservation and recycling.
Quite possibly! I agree. But what I was saying is that getting access to resources does not solve sustainability. If anything this is an argument that sustainability is a prerequisite for space travel and not the other way around.
> Nobody is banking on space-based resource extraction.
I understand this is not your position, and I appreciate that your position is reasonable and informed. But it is what was being discussed when you joined the conversation. And it is something I hear people say all the time.
Specifically, this is what I was responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46563421
> [Which] do you think is going to get there first?
Are these hypothetical civilizations on the brink of unlocking space travel? Or are they 100 years away? The civilization hell bent on space is likely to burn themselves out and replace their leadership with people with more grounded ideas if unlocking space travel isn't a realistic possibility for them. If space travel is right around the corner than my expectation would be the grounded civilization freaks out about national security and joins this space race in earnest. I think in either scenario, all else equal, it's a coin flip. The tortoise and the hare both have viable strategies given the right conditions.
This is kinda sorta what happened in the space race. The USSR pursued rockets aggressively and took a massive early lead, believing that ICBMs were the solution the the USA's dominance in bomber aircraft. But they couldn't sustain that pace. If I recall correctly, by the time we landed on the moon they hadn't launched a mission in years. The USA more or less gave up on manned space travel and space colonization shortly thereafter. Obviously both continued to explore space and the tide is beginning to change, but I think that's a natural experiment which roughly addresses this question. (Not to the exclusion of future attempts with better technology going better.)
Not in advanced (i.e. materially intensive) economies. And global population models are currently all aiming towards stabilization.
> this is an argument that sustainability is a prerequisite for space travel and not the other way around
How so? Without space travel, there is no near-term incentive to develop those technologies. (The terrestrial incentives are all long term.)
> Are these hypothetical civilizations on the brink of unlocking space travel? Or are they 100 years away?
China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases. Not permanent, independent settlements. But settlements that need to be as self-sustaining as possible nevertheless on account of launch costs and travel time.
> that's a natural experiment which roughly addresses this question
I see a different reading. We got a lot of sustainability-progressing technology out of the space race.
Alignment with the goal of human colonization wasn’t yet there. But there are reasons to be optimistic with modern materials, bioengineering and computational methods. Methods that could very easily also yield literal fruits that make our economies more sustainable at home.
Of course there is. Our climate is getting less hospitable, right now, in our lifetime. Storms are stronger, wildfires are more frequent and severe, we're beginning to strain our fresh water aquifers, etc. We are seeing really alarming rates of decline of flying insect biomass and other signs of an ecosystem in distress, and that ecosystem provides us with trillions of dollars of value. There is no human industry without our ecosystem to support us.
Solar, wind, etc. are also getting more and more competitive with fossil fuels, providing a purely monetary incentive.
And if we disregard all long term incentives, who cares about space? Even if we use very optimistic figures we're not going to be exploiting extraterrestrial resources for a few decades. And if we encounter significant setbacks (which I have to imagine we will) that take quite a long time.
> China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases.
I'll believe it when I see it. But if this is true, then wouldn't you say, by your logic, that this is a near term incentive for developing sustainable technologies?
> But there are reasons to be optimistic...
I agree. I don't think we really disagree in principle on any of this. I think we have different values and different levels of skepticism (or perhaps are skeptical of different things) but broadly/directionally agree.
The short-term incentives string together into a long-term plan.
> Our climate is getting less hospitable, right now, in our lifetime. Storms are stronger, wildfires are more frequent and severe, we're beginning to strain our fresh water aquifers, etc. We are seeing really alarming rates of decline of flying insect biomass and other signs of an ecosystem in distress, and that ecosystem provides us with trillions of dollars of value
Which has been enough urgency to do what exactly?
> Solar, wind, etc. are also getting more and more competitive with fossil fuels
Great example of folks pursuing short-term profit incentives making progress towards a long-term goal.
> if this is true, then wouldn't you say, by your logic, that this is a near term incentive for developing sustainable technologies?
If we try. Yes. If we gut those programmes, no. (For the technology benefits we just have to try.)
> we have different values and different levels of skepticism (or perhaps are skeptical of different things) but broadly/directionally agree
I think so too.
I think some people are motivated by stewardship and others by exploration. Focusing one one at the expense of the other is a false economy. And pursuing both doesn’t necessarily mean a long-term trade-off.
Sustainability isn't different in this regard. Eg, algae farming is a promising way to produce protein and fix carbon. But the economics aren't there yet, so commercial algae farms are pursuing higher margin markets like supplements and inputs to cosmetics rather than food (with the notable exception of feed in aquaculture like salmon).
When solar was still very expensive it was deployed in weird environments like satellites and oil fields where the grid wasn't available. But that proved to be stepping stones to a much larger solar industry.
> Which has been enough urgency to do what exactly?
Lots of stuff, for instance the €5.5B MOSE seawall built by Venice and various projects along the Colorado River to secure the water supply of the southwest USA (to pick just one, Las Vegas' Third Straw at around $1.3B). When disasters happen we obviously spend hundreds of millions to a billion+ on cleanup, rescue, etc. It's also been urgent enough to drive a huge amount of research, advocacy, etc.
Granted, those are fairly low numbers in the scheme of things. But the inaction is driven by interests who stand to lose money, not by economic rationality. I don't think even those monied interests are acting rationally in the long run. They're protecting their interests in the short term but greatly jeopardizing them in the long term. That's a similar false economy/market failure.
There are many ways to handle population control, not only controlling natality. That wouldn't be popular but you could imagine a mandatory euthanasy at 55 or 60 for example.
in the near future, richer countries would wage war againt "poor" country to take their water source
this is what gonna happen, not if but when
with the ever growing technology achievement and billions more people to come and desire to consume finite resources, what do you think gonna happen ????
But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.
how many fish, water mammals and may be humans shark killed for hundred years? did shark thought about their eyes?*
*except in sence that eyeballs are very delicios
TL;DR: we think sharks eyes can still see light even if the sharks a centuries old, please fund us for further research!
Imagine a world where people like Stalin never die. People like bill gates never have to pretend to be a nice person…
If there’s no chance of death, there will never be any progress in society. People in power would just establish a tighter and tighter grip. All the boomers would be immune to death and disease, but the treatment would be banned for the young because they haven’t done enough to earn it.
It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.
Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.
YOU realize that WE do not need. How convenient of you to tell me what I need. I think this is how Stalin's of the world start.
I mostly eat vegan because I do have a strong dislike of factory farming and the way animals are treated there. But killing animals is a fact of life and I think scientific progress is a very valid reason to do so.
To put it in perspective, a lot of shark young will kill each other in the womb such that only the strongest is birthed. These animals eat other animals alive, etc.. etc.. My point being it is not like the option is between a rosy utopia or human-inflicted suffering.
Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited. From politics (even absolute monarchs or dictators eventually die), to economics (think about retirement, for example), demographics (if everyone is immortal and everyone keeps having children, what happens?), even psychology ("everything passes").
Are we willing to throw these implications away? What would be the purpose?
Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.
> What would be the purpose?
To not die horribly.
Life is more beautiful when you live it for its experiences, not for the fear of loosing it.
The baby in your analogy being aging?
> there’s still ways to die horribly
Sure. The purpose would be remove a common cause of dying horribly.
(And in no world with longevity treatments would it be mandatory. People and populations who like aging and Alzheimer’s can keep partying like it’s 2025.)
Sure but is gerontocracy a good thing, then? I’m not against older people, but shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more. Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally.
> > What would be the purpose? To not die horribly.
Well ok, but even if you can’t die horribly (ignoring murders,…) you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons. Starving, rape, physical and psychological abuse, painful diseases even if non lethal,… still exist regardless of immortality. It’s not like immortal people are necessarily happy or good.
I'm genuinely not seeing the problem. Longer lives means more productive lives. (A massive fraction of healthcare costs are related to obesity and aging. A minority of medicine is in trauma.)
> Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally
We don't have a path to entropy-defying immortality. Not aging doesn't mean literal immortality.
> you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons
The fact that you're levying this argument should seal the case. It's an argument that can be made against anything good.
> Longer lives means more productive lives.
When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest, you still do your work (which means, if everything else stays equal, that there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always).
Why?
> ways to treat diseases
Aging underlies tons of diseases. (It’s similar to obesity in that way.)
> death is a way to “enforce” change. Sometimes it’s bad, other times it’s good
This is true of everything bad. You could use this logic for ceasing research into curing cancer, trauma medicine or seatbelts and traffic lights.
> of course it can be made against anything good
Which makes it a pointless argument. (And implicit concession that you’re arguing against something good.)
> When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest
…why? You have more time.
In a world without aging, retirement at 80 would be an objectively better deal than retiring at 60 today. You’d be retiring with a body that hasn’t started failing. And you’d have more years, on average, ahead of you.
> there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always
Lump of labour fallacy. (Average adult lifespans have gone up over the last two centuries. That has accompanied more, not less, labour-market dynamism.)