Nature and Technology? Can it be balanced?

[FaxModem1]

After reading the rather...interesting Avatar 2 thread and the fight between industrialization and with it comes progress, social benefits, longer lives, and new toys, while at the cost of destroying whatever resources it has, pollution, destroying the eco-system, and driving many things extinct.

With Nature and environmentalism comes a fresh array of natural wonders, resources to feed on, beauty to marvel at, and a natural oxygen factory to counterbalance our lungs. While at the same time there is starvation, natural selection, predators that feed on us, natural disasters.

So, what would be the optimal way to have both for the human race? All the benefits of industrialization without losing the benefits of environmentalism. And if it can be done, doing away with the cons of both as well.

[Guardsman Bass]

The ultimate goal would be denser cities/towns/neighborhoods (which minimizes the destruction of natural habitat for habitation), relying on relatively clean energy and generally re-cycling non-renewable resources as opposed to additional extraction. I'm not talking about arcologies - think New Urbanism neighborhoods, connected to other areas by clean transit (such as electrically powered rail) and powered/heated mostly by electricity drawn from a combination of nuclear energy plus regionally available clean energy supplies (such as solar, wind, or geothermal energy). You could nudge people towards this type of life through incentives, such as selective taxes on undesirable dirty by-products (such as CO2 and SO2). *

You could also attempt to manage some of the ecosystems as well, although you'd need to be careful. The north American indigenous population frequently did that through the use of fire, and some of the ancient Amazonian societies may have manipulating parts of the rain forest ecosystem as well (such as selectively favoring certain types of fruit-bearing trees).

* The US probably would be drifting towards some of this, were it not for NIMBYism in many established urban areas plus national, state, and local policies going back decades that all favor environmentally problematic behavior (such as sprawl and mass automobile use).

[Shroom Man 777]

The main thing about the Ava Tarrer thread is that our axiom or paradigm or whatever of industrialization for betterment versus non-industrialization and being at the mercy of nature is that it doesn't apply to Pandora, because the constitution of their nature - the fact that Pandora is one giant mega-organism with the entire biosphere as its constituent tissues - changes everything. Everything in their whole environment and whole world is different from ours, so their development ends up also being radically different from ours*.

For us, industrialization gives progress, social benefits, longer lives, and new toys, whereas Earth's nature doesn't give any of these. For the Pandorans, their environment can give longer lives (if we go by the EU, the ecosystem attacks foreign diseases), and they have the social benefit and toys in the form of neurologically communing with an incomprehensible world-spanning consciousness and listening to the Music of the Spheres in a tangible and real spiritual experience that would make the spiritual revelations and epiphanies of Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad combined feel like spiritually-empty nihilists listening to grunge music.

Wants and needs and necessities and the resultant actions are shaped by environmental factors, and if our environment was where we could plug our heads into trees and commune with the Earth Spirit or whatever, then our development in this hypothetical scenario would be entirely different from our development in reality (industrialization, etc.). But since in reality and here on Earth, unlike Pandora, we can't commune with a worldwide mega-organismic biosphere entity, thus we end up doing what we are doing now, industrializing and following the edicts of Troy McClure's great documentary: Man versus Nature: The Road to Victory.


*Which is why going "oh they're not industrialized, they are inferior, we should help make them better" without grasping or understanding (or at least trying to) the reasons for why their ways are completely different (because their entire world is completely different from ours) is pretty dumb and reflective of preconceptions. Of course, you can't blame them, because our world is also different from Pandora, so our own ways and our own mode of thinking and perspective is different.


Anyway, for making human society more balanced with nature so that industrialization won't destroy everything, I need we should also cut back on our rampant materialism and consumerism and capitalism.

Why the heck should we keep on mining more minerals and vespene gas just so every few years we can buy useless new nick knacks (composed of plastics, metals and whatnot with lithium batteries or whatever), designed by some black shirt and skin tight denim pants wearing dick and manufactured by wage slaves, that can carry 10000 more Lady Gaga songs in its silicon microchip memory cards all so we can have more pop music crap to listen to while we take a shit in a toilet or go shopping for more pieces of cloth (sown together by Ethiopians) to wear because our perfectly fine worn pieces of cloth have end up becoming out of fashion and we need new shits to wear at fancy shmancy parties with our well to do yuppie friends drinking orange mocha frappuccinos in plastic cups as we see in the biniminiminillions of advertisements beamed all over the omnipresent telescreens of our great society? Motherfucker.

(Jesus Christ, with this in mind, wouldn't YOU want to take off your clothes, paint yourself blue, and try sticking your pony tail neuro-mullet into some juniper bush to commune with the world spirit?)

[FaxModem1]

*snips Shroom's well reasoned response*

(Jesus Christ, with this in mind, wouldn't YOU want to take off your clothes, paint yourself blue, and try sticking your pony tail neuro-mullet into some juniper bush to commune with the world spirit?)

No that sounds like a good case of getting blisters, chiggers, and thorns in uncomfortable places.

[Akhlut]

Honestly, we need to somehow combine the benefits of living as hunter-gatherers (20-40 hour work weeks composed of fun work; very little lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or the like; long lifespans when acute disease and infant mortality are excluded) with the benefits of modern industrialism (low infant morality, reduced acute disease, the internet).

I think Guardsman Bass covered some decent ideas, though. To expand a bit, I think that expanding urban and rooftop gardens to help feed those cities would be a tremendously great idea, in addition to maximizing green spaces within urban centers.

Further, instead of commuting to work, it'd be nice that all work that didn't need to be done in one location (manufacturing, lab-based science, etc.) were done through telecommuting with webcams and so forth. That would drastically cut down emissions due to transportation due to the numerous jobs in officework and sales done at an office that don't necessarily need to be done at an office. Even if an office presence were required at some minimal level, every work hour cut not at an office is useful.

Also on the environmental side, it'd be helpful if we didn't divert so many resources to so much completely useless bullshit. Consider the love for a well-manicured lawn in the United States: it consumes vast lakes of water and gasoline for the sole benefit of having a marginally aesthetic frame for a house. It hurts the environment and it hurts industry (millions of gallons of gasoline are consumed, which hurts supply and raises prices for no reason, as well as diverts enormous amounts of metal to build lawncare tools), so by focusing on native plants and ignoring lawns, we'd all be better off, at least in the USA.

[Spoonist]

Of course they could be balanced. Lots of the modern greedn movement is on how we can utilize tech to save nature, like windmills etc.
However we humans have the wrong hardwiring for this to be feasable. Our brains have a hard time figuring long term profit vs immediate profit. Even when we are in a context where it is obviuos which is best, like governance. Add to that that the whole concept of the stock market is oriented vs immediate profit and the environment is srewed.

Just look at what happened first in the US and then in the world with the global warming issue. People who knew better willingly used massive resources to distort facts to misinform the public and thus policy makers, so successfully that there is a new generation of public and policy makers that do not "believe" in the scientific method's results.
That was all made for immediate profit.

So if it was just up to tech, then tech could have saved the environment, but people and thus culture/politics will screw that up.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Spoonist hits this directly on the head.

With modern tech, there needs be no conflict between living a happy, modern, and tech savy life, and raping mother Earth.

We don't NEED factories chugging out vast pollutants, or cars belching smog, or oil, or a vast array of uneeded checmicals. Etc Etc..

It is simply people are greedy, selfish, and short sighted.

If it were up to me, in terms of moving the world to more sustanable methods. We would be foucsing on Mass Urbanized areas like Pablo Solari's Achology Movement. Making a building that can hold up to 50,000 people in a space that normally holds less then 1000 AND be able to feed, power and clean them in a sustainable method.

[VarrusTheEthical]

I'm all about the colonization and industrialization of space, myself. The resources of the solar system could provide all the material resources that an industrial society would ever need, while well-designed and well managed O'Neil style space colonies could provide safe, comfortable, and sustainable homes for large numbers of people. Basically, by having industrial growth happen in space, you effectively segregate it from Earth's biosphere. The obvious problem is getting there, but fantasies don't have launch-costs.

[sirocco]

Personnally I believe in biotechnology or rather in technology imitating the nature up to the point that we would be able to integrate it to our biosphere.

Seriously wouldn't it be cool to have in 2150 AvatarApple releasing the iEywa, our own personal thinking tree? It provides fresh air, clean water, food and the internet. You no longer need to tweet, you can directly talk with birds.

[K. A. Pital]

A good idea would be merging technology and biology - a massive cyberization. Technolyze!

[madd0ct0r]

Tolkien's elves seem to have altered everything in their environment around them, to the point where they appear to live comfortably with no obvious industry.

Same with Terry Pratchett's idea for Ciggie bushes - the seeds are fire activated in the filter. Dropped cigarette stubs grow into new bushes that flower and produce smokable fruits.


We're a long way off that yet, but we're getting better at systems design and getting more done with the same resources (as opposed to just getting more done)

[Darth Wong]

After reading the rather...interesting Avatar 2 thread and the fight between industrialization and with it comes progress, social benefits, longer lives, and new toys, while at the cost of destroying whatever resources it has, pollution, destroying the eco-system, and driving many things extinct.

Correction: all life does this. If given a chance, any dominant species will alter the biosphere, make competitors extinct, and use up resources until it ends up harming its own environment and running into resource limits imposed by its expansion. It is not an exclusive property of technology.

With Nature and environmentalism comes a fresh array of natural wonders, resources to feed on, beauty to marvel at, and a natural oxygen factory to counterbalance our lungs. While at the same time there is starvation, natural selection, predators that feed on us, natural disasters.

So, what would be the optimal way to have both for the human race? All the benefits of industrialization without losing the benefits of environmentalism. And if it can be done, doing away with the cons of both as well.

Our problem is the same as any species' problem: if we multiply too much, we take up too much of our habitat, and crowd out biodiversity, to our own detriment. We can try to make our technology more environmentally benign, but ultimately the problem is one of sheer quantities, not technology vs nature. What technology does, environmentally speaking, is that it allows us to consume more resources per person.

[Shroom Man 777]

Didn't some scientist theorize that the first mass die-off was when primordial microorganisms that took in CO2 and excreted O2 as a waste product got too successful and too numerous that the atmosphere got saturated in O2, which ended up poisoning them?

EDIT: Here we go

[Zinegata]

How would the ethics of "Nature vs Technology" work outside of the Earth though?

Let's say for instance that we eventually want to setup human habitation on Mars. Should we do stuff like try to change the atmosphere of the world so that humans can eventually walk around on Mars without having to wear a space suit, or should we entirely limit ourselves in technologically-created habitats?

[Shroom Man 777]

Depends on your definition of nature. Would we just be changing the layout of a planet that has nothing in it but a bunch of rocks, ice and unbreathable gas? This would be different from, say, deforestating a martian jungle and slaughtering all sorts of martian wildlife. About as different as building an artificial lake in the middle of the desert and/or putting a city full of casinos and whores in it, and doing the same in the middle of a jungle and cutting down all the trees and animals.

[Zinegata]

There aren't any Martian jungles or wildlife.

[NoXion]

There aren't any Martian jungles or wildlife.

That's why I think it would be extremely difficult to make Mars a less inhabitable world, despite being the next best piece of the Solar system apart from Earth. Greenhouse gas emissions? Won't make the air any more breathable, but they might warm it up a bit. Radiation? The surface of Mars is practically sterile thanks to UV. No native organisms to exterminate, so far as we know.

Mars is an industrialist's dream come true.

[Simon_Jester]

There aren't any Martian jungles or wildlife.

I'm pretty sure that's Shroom's point.

[Akhlut]

Depends on your definition of nature. Would we just be changing the layout of a planet that has nothing in it but a bunch of rocks, ice and unbreathable gas? This would be different from, say, deforestating a martian jungle and slaughtering all sorts of martian wildlife. About as different as building an artificial lake in the middle of the desert and/or putting a city full of casinos and whores in it, and doing the same in the middle of a jungle and cutting down all the trees and animals.

Deserts are ecologically active areas and trying to turn them into havens for humanity often has bad effects further downstream from them (both literally and figuratively).

[Zinegata]

There aren't any Martian jungles or wildlife.

That's why I think it would be extremely difficult to make Mars a less inhabitable world, despite being the next best piece of the Solar system apart from Earth. Greenhouse gas emissions? Won't make the air any more breathable, but they might warm it up a bit. Radiation? The surface of Mars is practically sterile thanks to UV. No native organisms to exterminate, so far as we know.

Mars is an industrialist's dream come true.

Yes, as far as we know there is no life on Mars. But again, is it considered "tampering with Nature" if we start fiddling around with a mostly barren rock, or does it get a pass because we're developing a world where life as we know it does not exist?

Also, an additional conundrum: What if we end up introducing genetically-engineered lifeforms to help terraform Mars? What if we drop down some sort of plantlife that could survive in the Martian environment and help slowly convert the atmosphere to one more breathable for humans? Should we consider the GM lifeforms as "Nature", or simply as technological tools with a biological component?

[someone_else]

Yes, as far as we know there is no life on Mars. But again, is it considered "tampering with Nature" if we start fiddling around with a mostly barren rock, or does it get a pass because we're developing a world where life as we know it does not exist?

Depends on what you call Nature. I tend to assume Nature is composed by living stuff.

As long as the life in a detectable form isn't detected Mars is up for grabs.

Albeit the Moon would be a zillion times better, but that's tangential.

Also, an additional conundrum: What if we end up introducing genetically-engineered lifeforms to help terraform Mars? What if we drop down some sort of plantlife that could survive in the Martian environment and help slowly convert the atmosphere to one more breathable for humans? Should we consider the GM lifeforms as "Nature", or simply as technological tools with a biological component?

100% sure of the latter. Given how GM stuff seems to go, you'll have copyright symbols all over them. They will be owned by some company that will NOT allow anyone else to do whatever was not explicitly stated in a contract. If that does not look like innatural technological tool, I don't know what is.

MARS-TERRA-TECH WILL OWN EACH AND EVERY SOUL OF EVERY MAN THAT EVER TOUCHED THE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN ANY OF ITS FORMS, AND THE SOULS OF THEIR OFFSPRING FOR 7 GENERATIONS AFTER THE FACT.
Isn't more or less like that for Monsanto already?

IF the company holding the rights topples and the specific copyrighted material becomes abandonware and is therefore up for grabs, then it may be called Nature with more inpunity, but it's still artificial as fuck.

[Dooey Jo]

Of course they could be balanced. Lots of the modern greedn movement is on how we can utilize tech to save nature, like windmills etc.
However we humans have the wrong hardwiring for this to be feasable. Our brains have a hard time figuring long term profit vs immediate profit. Even when we are in a context where it is obviuos which is best, like governance. Add to that that the whole concept of the stock market is oriented vs immediate profit and the environment is srewed.

It's not about human frailties, or even the stock market. The whole economic system is based on profit, and in being so businesses have very little choice. If their mode of profit turns out to be 180 degrees counter to the needs of humans, like say if hypothetically there was a huge industry devoted to selling weapons and building torture camps, that's pretty shitty, but the companies' choice is either to keep doing that, or die, or restructure the whole thing towards some other market where they will probably fail and thus die.
Governments are similarly limited. They can't just turn off large sectors of the economy without suffering consequences, any more than they can give life support to unprofitable sectors for any extended period of time.

Just look at what happened first in the US and then in the world with the global warming issue. People who knew better willingly used massive resources to distort facts to misinform the public and thus policy makers, so successfully that there is a new generation of public and policy makers that do not "believe" in the scientific method's results.
That was all made for immediate profit.

This is called marketing in other industries. The rest of the world have to follow the precedent set by US industries if they don't want to see themselves losing market shares. This is why any meaningful climate treaty have to be global, otherwise the countries that ignore it are going to be at a massive advantage. But it's important that we realise that even if such a global treaty was implemented, as long as the profit motive is what drives production and unsustainable methods are more profitable than sustainable ones (and they will be for quite some time), there is always going to be a huge pressure on the industries to go back to unsustainable production.

This is simply the nature of our current system, and I also think it's important that we recognise this and start discussing what to do about that, rather than getting cynical about human capacity for evil. So to speak, if humans are capable of evil in some circumstances, and humans can't change, maybe the circumstances can. I don't think anyone can deny that humans also have a large capacity for cooperation, which we aren't exactly encouraged to utilise today.

[Sea Skimmer]

A lot of the current day imbalance between development and nature is specifically because we aren’t willing to pay big dollars for the latest technology even to clean up our own shit; so yeah you can balance them. It’s just going to cost a whole lot more then the land-rape approach to development and mean people can't get a new cell phone every six months. Even unlimited human growth would theoretically present no problem, because we could have started shifting development to the moon by now, and not have such massive third world hellholes in which population growth is still sky high. Some considerable level of destruction is of course inevitable, but can also be reversible in some instances, such as the reforestation of large areas of central Europe and the eastern United States.

[Spoonist]

It's not about human frailties, or even the stock market. The whole economic system is based on profit, and in being so businesses have very little choice. If their mode of profit turns out to be 180 degrees counter to the needs of humans, like say if hypothetically there was a huge industry devoted to selling weapons and building torture camps, that's pretty shitty, but the companies' choice is either to keep doing that, or die, or restructure the whole thing towards some other market where they will probably fail and thus die.
Governments are similarly limited. They can't just turn off large sectors of the economy without suffering consequences, any more than they can give life support to unprofitable sectors for any extended period of time.

Huh? I see no connection between what I said and your response in context of the OP? Maybe I'm a bit denser than usual today but could you care to elaborate?
Profit can not be the root cause as there are examples of business ideas which do put long term profit over immediate profit. There is also a huge market for 'green' products, which definately make profit. So profit in and of itself does not do this. If we would truly be after profit only, then long term plans, including taking care of nature, would definately be in there. But because of the reasons I mentioned that is not the case. All big companies in the top 500 list are making decisions that are detrimental to long term gain over immediate gain, this is directly linked to the budget processes of annual reporting - ie the stockmarket. For governements its corruption and/or election cycles. Again immediate gain vs long term gain.
Then what did weapons and torture camps have to do with nature vs tech? Are you refering to some other conversation on morality from elsewhere?

This is called marketing in other industries.

Marketing??? Tobacco companies making adds to sell more is marketing, tobacco companies bribing researchers to disprove the causality between smoking and cancer is not. I feel like I'm missing some sort of weird context from which you are looking on this.

This is simply the nature of our current system, and I also think it's important that we recognise this and start discussing what to do about that, rather than getting cynical about human capacity for evil. So to speak, if humans are capable of evil in some circumstances, and humans can't change, maybe the circumstances can. I don't think anyone can deny that humans also have a large capacity for cooperation, which we aren't exactly encouraged to utilise today.

What did that have to do with why the system looks like it does, ie what I said? Then we ARE discussing what to do about that etc. We are even doing things to improve stuff. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be cynical or that cynicism doesn't have its place. Because what we do is not enough.
You need idealists and cynics to move forward on issues like this.

[TheManWithNoName]

Huge coincidence, but I'm actually planning on writing a paper on this subject. I shit you not, I just came here for the first time in a long while to make a thread about this...

Anyways, does anybody have any book suggestions that cover this topic? I'm currently thinking of checking out Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singul ... ng_forever). Honestly, that book seems a little too forward thinking - I'm looking for something more short-term or concrete. Is there any sort of "gold standard" when it comes to this stuff?