Before we get so excited about those high tech huts everyone is sleeping in these days, we should work on the problems we have right here in our caves.
Will huts help us share our mammoth meat more peacefully? Will huts make Atkinson Clan stop beating up Montanas? Will huts make Montanas any less annoying?
Mark my words, sisters and brothers. These problems will go with us wherever we build huts. Until we learn to make Montanas less annoying and Atkinsons less murderous, I say we stay in these caves.
That's true. Shortly after we moved out of the caves Atkinsons and Montanas invented warfare. We should have stayed in the cave. I'm sorry, my grandchild. Never leave earth.
Sure, we can sustain ourselves off "one step forwards, one step back still moves us somewhere else", but the average person doesn't see how many steps back we take to make those steps forward and will come to an overly optimistic plan to move.
That's highly misleading. Pre-agricultural humans weren't some kind of noble savages, living in perfect harmony and balance with nature. They lived "sustainably" only in the sense that their environment killed them off at the same rate as they procreated, not of their own volition.
Between (and in defiance of) those two positions are some interesting ideas about sustainability.
On one end, "cavemen" are sustainable humans with implied cultural virtues. On the other, the pre agricultural equilibria is mostly about high human mortality and low population size.
At any given time though, people often had cultural understandings of natural ecosystems. We started being humans by living as part of such ecosystems, and undoubtedly both caused and witnessed all sorts of sudden changes and disasters... some linked to human activity.
If you live in an areas, and rely on plants, game and such... your culture is more likely to be "literate" in these things. Game can be hunted out, plants overharvested. A population surge in one species may deplete another. "Balance" can be restored, sometimes in a more or less beneficial way than before. These are all observable, and of great interest to people (those left) who make their living this way. The occasional and unpredictable flush of rabbits one autumn, is relevant to the life of someone who eats them.
Interesting, thanks for the link. My comment however was in response to the comparison cave/hut, not caveman lifestyle in general. But I get what you're saying. Maybe we're just fundamentally unable to live sustainably, by design so to speak.
Slash and burn is ancient agriculture, too. While Wikipedia calls it sustainable, it was only sustainable with approximately no humans, resulting in functionally unlimited land. Larger populations can't wait for the forest regrowth part of the cycle.
/grandiose
We are genetically programmed to live for a few decades, reproduce, and care for our kin (both blood and tribe) in a world which was limitless (relative to us as individuals.) I deeply fear this is the sad answer to the Fermi paradox. Now, our survival depends on outsmarting our short-sighted genes.
> and don't go spewing their shit all over the cosmos
Why? What's the downside to littering on some random asteroid? There's no ecosystem that would care – not even bacteria – nothing and nobody would mind if you drop a plastic bag on 423 Diotima. Take a step back and think about why pollution on Earth is bad, and you'll realize that "polluting" an asteroid isn't ethically wrong.
Of course, that only applies as long as those asteroids are utterly devoid of life. Once there's an ecosystem, polluting becomes ethically wrong again.
Heh, reminds me of that Jeff Bezos incident :
At one meeting, Bezos was regaling attendees with visions of hollowing out asteroids and transforming them into space arks when a woman leapt to her feet. “How dare you rape the universe!” she said, and stormed out. “There was a pause, and Jeff didn’t make a public comment,” says Kevin Polk, another member of the club. “But after things broke up, Jeff said, ‘Did she really defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?’ ”
>Take a step back and think about why pollution on Earth is bad, and you'll realize that "polluting" an asteroid isn't ethically wrong.
Of course, that only applies as long as those asteroids are utterly devoid of life. Once there's an ecosystem, polluting becomes ethically wrong again.
Why? There is no ecosystem on top of Everest yet people will get upset when they see what it looks like.
I think in the vast majority of cases it is an ethical concern, but I agree that even in the absence of ethics there is an aesthetic dimension. Usually we rephrase it under the umbrella of "preserving it for future generations"
Why not do both in parallel? A few decades of pausing space progress now could have a much bigger impact than later, and it’s not like space travel is so easy that we’ll suddenly wake up colonizers of the entire solar system. Did you fully mature before you went out into the world? Sometimes making relatively small mistakes is the fastest way to learn. “Move fast and break things”, but on the species scale.
