Would Human Extinction be a good thing?

If humanity is crap because of human nature, would the extinction of the entire human race be a net benefit?

 

Bit of a weird question that. Answer is No.

Humanity isn't really different from any other form of life, we just have a wider reach.Other life is just as assholish and would burn just as much of the environment, if it had the ability.

There's also just the general question of 'Net benefit to what?' I suppose some other species would do better without humans around, some would do worse. But there's no real thing to measure that against to calculate any net benefit/negative.

 

Not for the human.

Also not for beings that depends on human, eg. domesticated plants and animals, rats, etc.

 

That question always bring this comic to my mind



Oh and this quote



So unless we do something extremely drastic that will destroy the nature completely, nature itself will be completely fine even without us, on the account of it being completely adaptable and malleable unlike our feeble and fragile beings (with the exception of domesticated components like UrsaTempest mentioned)

 

Good luck with that. I can't think of anything which would be completely impossible to recover from. I think even if we were to mine every bit of Uranium on the planet and made a giant explosion it wouldn't be all that catastrophic in the grand scale of things.

 

Mind, there's a chance we accidentally runaway climate change and earth become Venus 2.0, which means everyone dies.

But let's hope we don't do that.

 

Answer: Probably.

Chernobyl is doing pretty well for itself nature wise.

 

By attaching rockets to asteroids and very precisely positioning them, we might be able to disrupt Earth's orbit and make it spiral towards the sun, or at least disrupt the moon's orbit and cause it to crash into the earth, liquefying the crust and destroying all known life forms. That'd do it.

 

First, you need to define what a "benefit" is. What is the metric for desirability? AKA, what is the moral framework you are using to judge the question. Is X better than Y first requires a way to establish a measure of X and Y, which is not given in the problem itself.

Human communication is based on mutual experience and understanding, but that is not stable over time and over different populations. We do not have an "exact scientific language." We encode our differing experiences in our interpretation of words, and gloss over the fact that, especially in the cases like this.

You might as well ask "Would it be glorfindal for all humans to die?" Once you define "glorfindal", it is a trivial question to answer. But you NEED to define glorfindal.


For example, let's define a moral system where the ultimate good is the production of renditions of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. As such, anything that produces more of this musical is good and anything that prevents such is bad.

From here, we can trivially see that it would NOT be a good thing for humans to go extinct, as that means Broadway productions would cease. Sure, we could create robots to do the musical for us, but humans would still have instrumental value in maintaining the robots or making the robots, or performing themselves.

If you think this moral system is nonsense, that's kind of the point. Establishing an ethical framework is inherently unreasonable, because you need the system to judge the system. (That is not to say that it is pointless or meaningless, because fuck Moral Relativism, it defeats itself. Only that you will never be able to have a self-contained logic based argument for or against ethical systems, no matter how much Kant tried, and I say that as someone who admires Kant.)



That is not to say that there is no answer to your question. That's stupid and Morally Relativistic. Rather, it should be acknowledged that both yes and no answers can be rationally justified, and you should be aware of the justifications.

Antinatalism (the overarching ethical movement where human existence is NOT a fundamentally good), is a perfectly rational, self-consistent framework, that is defined by the answer "yes, it would be better if humans went extinct." Antinatalism is not edgy or crazy or depressed or homicidal. It's a thing.

And similarly, it is not edgy or crazy or naive to say "no, it would NOT be better if humans went extinct."

The only crazy thing is establishing a moral framework and ignoring the conclusion it gives.



Here are questions that ARE possible to actually discuss:

"How many antinatalists are there on QQ?" (Easily answered with a poll)
"What existing moral frameworks lead to antinatalism?" (This allows us to start with frameworks to discuss)
"I am beginning to examine antinatalism as a personal belief, given MY moral framework, is that the rational conclusion?" (You can list YOUR beliefs about morals, and discussion can be centered around those.)

Which of those questions are you trying to ask?

 

Definitively no.

Runaway climate change with what? Carbon?

We can't even get on the level of trees simply rotting in forests. No way in hell we can fuck the planet over.

Even plastic is not safe, as nature already has insects and bacteria evolving the capability to eat it.

 

This assumes that other potential sapient species are more noble, and from what we seen of dolphins and chimps the odds are unlikely...

 

Without humans the lizard men would take over and blow up the planet!

Okay the answer is no, humanity all dying off in a massive extinction would throw the current ecosystem out of wack since everything is starting to evolve around us as the dominate species of the planet. So yeah... that wouldn't be a good thing for other species till they all die out because of being dependent on us and eventually a new form of life takes the dominate spot.

My money is on Sloths taking over. Devious bastards.

 

They're certainly giving the Pandas a run for their money.

 

Terrible for us but good for others if they can take advantage of the change in the ecosystem.

 

Here's the thing, we're stupid good at resisting anything less than complete and total annihilation. We give cockroaches a good run for their money. We've got a bare minimum population capability of 100 beings.

100.

Anything that kills us enough to make us go below that is going to kill everything else anyway.

 

Even if this bare minimum is true, oh boy are the birth defects from such a narrow gene pool are going to be showing in a few generations.

 

From my understanding, it did happen once before... and we're the result of that one and the evidence gave us that number.

 

You know, whenever I think about this question, the first thing that comes to mind is Pip waxing poetic about the lady selling godawful fish and chips in Hellsing. Most people don’t deserve to die; they’re at worst obnoxious. Tragically, the people who deserve to die in a massive catastrophe and the people who actually would die in a massive catastrophe are basically two circles with a sliver of overlap.

If you really want to wish for the kind of supernatural intervention needed to wipe out the entire human species, wish for some fucking Karma instead.

 

Humans are currently the only animals who takes care of the environment, saves species from extinction and also actively fight for morality.
Animals as noble beings are plots that come from storybooks.
We, are the one, who actively resist global warming even though it have been global change that was completely natural a hundred years ago. In part of it might be from guilt from accelerating it or the fear of extinction.
Some animals are mindless, some are cold blooded, some are sapient. Each one unique but comes from the same ancestor and thus future animals that might come to replace us would still operate in familiar grounds.

 

I am now regretting making this thread.

 

Might I suggest watching something from Casual Geographic? Nature is far from pure