So a minor inconvenience is a good reason to eliminate a method to combat what our media calls "settled science" of a phenomenon that is an existential threat to humanity?
I think the problem with this is plausibility. I have much more faith in humanity culling itself, by whatever misanthropic means, than behaving "amicably and rapidly."
The possible solution might not be the pleasant one.
For a start, the cities you list contain many valuable people. Places doing lots of slash-and-burn farming, not so much. My original comment was a bit facetious, but if it is a civilization-ending threat (and I'm not saying it is), better to start the killing sooner when we can control who dies than collapse the whole thing and lose thousands of years of scientific and cultural progress.
I am somewhat uncomfortable with the tech for eradicating a species (genetic bombs etc). It feels like a Pandora’s box.
I get similar vibes to nuclear weapons, like, should we be on this path at all? Does an ethical person walk that path, even for “righteous” ends, or is the ethical move just to sit down in place and make someone else drag you down it.
BUT, letting so many people die when you could help is also unethical. That’s very different from an atom numb... bombs don’t save lives.
Still, the idea of weapons that are sexually transmitted and eradicate branches of the tree of life is just a bone chilling concept.
I mean, I’m pretty concerned about the magnitude of suffering of those hairless apes. That seems like a sufficiently bad outcome to warrant a change in behavior and even doomsday rhetoric.
I don't think so, since that too was ultimately aimed at preventing human casualties.
gerggerg is claiming there's a big difference between this and previous deliberate attempts to wipe out a whole species. I'm asking, what are those previous attempts? I can think of none for which human welfare wasn't the main selling point.
What I'm ultimately doing is disagreeing with the gerggerg; I'm saying that human welfare doesn't justify any attempt to wipe out an entire species.
With practices like this, and other less murderous but still extremely wasteful shit like airlines burning thousands of gallons of fuel to keep their "slots" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511488), I for one won't even mind if something decimates our so-called civilization.
I'm less worried about machetes since they can't kill the whole human population. Even something as horrific as gas chambers only killed a fraction of a percent of the world population.
Genocide is ancient, but humanity somehow stumbles on as a species.
I'm more worried because we developed technology capable of wipe out all of humanity (and potentially, all life on Earth) in the fifties with thermonuclear bombs. The number of potentially humanity-destroying technologies has grown exponentially since, and with biological weapons, the cost and complexity has fallen.
I can think of directions to take humanity to take extermination off-the-table, but we don't seem able to implement big changes anymore.
It’s controversial, but consider genocide. I fear the day will come someone will actually put this option on the table. Our species seems to be particularly prone to bouts of this tendency.
You may find some comfort in the fact that the proposed solution wouldn't actually work. Humans are extraordinarily robust creatures. Our best efforts at exterminating them, even using state-of-the-art technology on industrial scales, have, for better or worse, barely made a dent in the population.
Destroying civilization in the off chance that it might help is the approach that’s worrisome.
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