Granted on the word merely, but animals certainly do not equal “the planet.” The Earth would roll on without them, as well as without us, just fine.

It won’t be for you. It will be reserved only for others. You will get to be their dog, literally. Make sure you put on a good show for your new masters.

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UNBEHAGEN IN DER NATUR
Slavoj Žižek

Biogenetics, with its reduction of the human psyche itself to an object of technological manipulation is, therefore, effectively, a kind of empirical instantiation of what Heidegger perceived as the ‘danger’ inherent to modern technology. What is crucial here is the interdependence of man and nature: by reducing man to just another natural object whose properties can be manipulated, what we lose is not (only) humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right: humanity itself relies on some notion of ‘human nature’ as what we simply inherited, namely, the impenetrable dimension in/of ourselves into which we are born/thrown. The paradox is, thus, that there is man only insofar as there is impenetrable inhuman nature. With the prospect, however, of biogenetic interventions opened up by the access to the genome, the species is able to freely change/redefine itself, its own coordinates; this prospect effectively emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species, from its enslavement to the ‘selfish genes’. However, there is a price for this emancipation:

“With interventions into man’s genetic inheritance, the domination over nature reverts into an act of taking-control-over-oneself, which changes our generic-ethical self-understanding and can disturb the necessary conditions for an autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals.”

“I say: evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.”

That would be very foolish. Here, I have some intelligent nano machines I just made. Lets just let them out and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong?

“…we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us”

That’s not “unbelievable arrogance”, that’s just a given of human life. As soon as we made a tool to make another tool, this what we became.

“The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.”

Ah, now, that’s blind hubris! “Help”, by definition, is not a part of “Nature”.

Have a nice flaming asteroid, Michael Specter, on the house! Thanks for all your help.

The genetic code is hardware, also.

Gattaca will remain fictional as long as people are driven to have unprotected sex.

Ok, I’m with you on gunpowder and nuclear energy…but petrochemicals? We were actually using them as an energy source before napalm. So there, HA!

and you forgot both sticks AND stones.

Is it really the lump of rock beneath it all that you care about? What about the complex web of relationships made up of billions of interdependent living organisms, known as life? To me this is worth protecting, and I wouldn’t consider the planet “just fine” without it.

“ok, so, Immortality. How much, and give it to me.”

It won’t be for you. It will be reserved only for others. You will get to be their dog, literally. Make sure you put on a good show for your new masters.

Sure, sure, that’s a possibility. But as the article pointed out, a lot of this knowledge is “open source”. Will all the gold in world guarantee the idle rich immortality when they need some DNA hackers to make their elixir first? Who can pull the trigger fastest? Also, the isolated mindset to maintain puppetmaster-like control over subordinates may prove untenable in this scenario, or even… backward.

No, I think this story is going to get much more frisky than simply writing “ye doom is come” on the back of a fat check.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8220278.stm

Hopefully that’s not a geo-restricted clip..

Change is happening so fast I can barely get my head around it. I’m not that old, but we used slide rules when I was in school.

And now this.

Wow.

The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet. -W. Gibson

The dates have actually been pushed back due to recent research. Earliest evidence of hominid use of stone tools is back at about 2.5Myr, and evidence of campfires is back to about 1.4Myr.

Yeah, I’ve read the research, I was going with a less controversial reading, but ok, these make my point as well.

Far more species have gone extinct than have ever lived. Many certainly went extinct when faced with pressure from critters other than humans. Anaerobic lifeforms were almost completely eliminated by the rise of photosynthetic plants. The thunder birds of South America went extinct when mammals invaded from North America after the continents collided. It also appears that the extinction of the North American megafauna may have been significantly sped up by an asteroid impact about 13,000 bp
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070924172959.htm)

My point is that habitats are always changing, and will continue to do so whether we are here or not.

I would argue that we have always lived in “balance with nature” because there is no other option. And yes, our distant ancestors were every bit as uncaring of the environment as we have been. For example, the collapse of the Mayan “golden age” was almost certainly caused by environmental exhaustion, and they were unable to produce sufficient food despite having almost all arable land under cultivation.

But changing an environment is not the same as destroying it. The areas of Mesoamerica that the Maya farmed have returned so completely to jungle that we still find sizable settlements that have been swallowed up, including cities that housed many thousands of people. It also now appears that vast areas of the Amazon basin were under cultivation until the native populations were wiped out by European disease, but the area recovered so completely from the cultivation that we couldn’t even see it until we looked very closely. So it appears that environments are more resilient than they are often given credit for.

I agree that we need to stop habitat encroachment. This is primarily a problem of the developing world, as the rapidly increasing populations are there. Education and technology are vital. Studies have shown that the strongest correlation to decreased family size is with education and reduced infant mortality, not availability of contraception, although there is a weaker correlation there. (Reproductive health in Africa: issues and options, edited by Barbara Janowitz, JoAnn Lewis, Nadine Burton and Peter Lamptey. Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Family Health International, 1984. :35-40).

The estimates I’ve seen put the peak human population at about 9 billion, which is unarguably a whole lot of people, but is well within the carrying capacity of the planet, especially with modern food production techniques.

Our ancestors undoubtably forever changed the ecosystems of the planet, but that is not the same as destroying them. We will almost certainly continue to change them as well, but at least we have the advantage of being aware of our impact on the environment in a way our ancestors never were. Unless we are willing to cull our numbers significantly (read: kill a whole lot of people) the only practical way to achieve some reasonable equity with the other living things on the planet is with the use of technology, and advanced technologies such as those discussed in this article show great promise toward that end.

Nice use of bold, btw.

“But changing an environment is not the same as destroying it. [...] So it appears that environments are more resilient than they are often given credit for.”

That is only true when we don’t drive species to extinction. North America used to be a far more diverse large-animal habitat than the Serengeti is today, featuring multiple species of elephants and mammoths, lions, jaguars, sabertooths, giant short-faced bears, multiple kinds of horses, cheetah-like cursorial hyenas, giant ground sloths, and who knows what – until humans showed up and killed everything except the bison. (The “glaciation extinction of North American megafauna” theory seems bizarre, given the long series of previous glaciations that did not result in mass extinction.)

Also, yes, 9 billion is within the human carrying capacity of the planet…but with what quality of life? Sure, we can all agree to eat soy paste and never go anywhere, but then what is the point of being alive?

Also, I’m pretty sure that, given the catastrophic decline in all major fauna to date, that a 9 billion human future involves extinction of all the predators I mentioned (lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas), plus much of the remaining megafauna (rhinos, hippos, elephants). Remember, 9 billion of us, less than 70,000 of all the big predators combined – and still falling catastrophically, in the case of lions.

And what stops us at 9 billion? Assertions of a “top-out” in population beg the question: what will cause this “topping out”? Will we magically get smarter and solve the problems we refuse to face today? If so, why not solve them today, while there is something left to save? And if not, then what external agency will force us to? Answer: war, famine, pestilence, unimaginable suffering.

So again the answer is: we must get started now, because every day we wait means more suffering in the future.

Finally, you say: “Unless we are willing to cull our numbers significantly (read: kill a whole lot of people) the only practical way to achieve some reasonable equity with the other living things on the planet is with the use of technology,”

This is false. We can simply stop reproducing at greater than replacement rate. No killing required – in fact, much less killing and suffering will occur, because people won’t be constantly starving in areas too ecologically poor to support them.

And, as we both agree, the best way to accomplish that is to support education and equal rights for women.

DOH!

I meant to say: Far more species have gone extinct than are alive today.

That’s an interesting question. We would need to induce meiosis in stem cells and give them a nice cozy place to grow into full sized roe…I’m thinking it’d be easier to drive the stem cells into producing an ovary and letting the ovary produce the roe. Of course, to keep the ovary alive you’d probably need to have at least a significant portion of the rest of the sturgeon, or maybe brave new world-ish vats full of sturgeon ovaries.

“The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.”

such unbelievable delusion and arrogance.

you’re saying that just because something is eventually going to die we should have no concern for it in the present?

you said, “We’ve been moving on from what nature gave us for decades already. Arguably millennia”

no, I’d say about 10,000 years, but we haven’t been moving away from nature – just deluding ourselves into believing that we’re not subject to it’s rules. You’re examples are all very “small picture”.

@Roguemodron:

you said “Humans merely endanger their own survival, but the planet would be just fine without us.”

Tell that to the 200+ species a day who are going extinct. This is definitely not just about humans.

no, I’d say about 10,000 years

As for the planet being in trouble…life has survived supervolcanos and miles-wide asteroid strikes (that would incidentally kill us if they happened now) it’ll probably keep going after we are long gone.

It is good to be concerned. It is also important not to overstate your case.

This is oh so full of fail.

Don’t you people know the path to happiness is to forget about your own physical well-being and dote over your ten or twelve kids while they’re young and healthy and cute and energetic? And if some of them are sick or deformed, hey you’ve got eight or ten good ones right? Nature knows best.

And even if they’re all doomed to the same destiny as you of spending the whole second halves of their lives pissed off about their own decaying bodies and minds, that doesn’t have to bother YOU. Just forget about them when they turn 30 and watch your cute GRANDCHILDREN instead! This works forever, trust me.

Until the food runs out.