[extropy-chat] Extinctions

[Anders Sandberg]

Damien Sullivan wrote:
>> So, how do we fix it? Looking at it from the big perspective it is
>> fairly
>
> In the short term, donations to the Nature Conservacy, good zoos, and
> other conservation organizations; push for human population
> stabilization (there's probably more growth potential for intellectual
> capital and problem solvers in educating the exiting population than in
> growing it) and contracted land use.

I think conservation attempts certainly have merit, but I wonder about the
utility of population stabilisation. Or rather, it tends to follow female
literacy rates and reducing poverty, two other things that are good in
themselves. Just stabilizing the population is unlikely to be morally
doable without a lot of good carrots, and a too quick stop might actually
cause bad social conseqences (like China and the former east block).

> Don't eat beef you know came from
> ex-rainforest land.  Don't eat fish species you know are being harvested
> unsustainably (http://seafood.audubon.org/)

Contracted land (and sea use) is probably one of the most efficient
solutions if we can get it economical. The latest vat-beef programs seem
to be getting somewhere, and also realises the need to find low trophic
level inputs into the process. If we could drop on average one trophic
level in our food intake we divide the area used by ten or so. But we are
still going to need biomass inputs to the food (and fuel) system even
then, of course. And the vat-approach doesn't seem to bring down the cost
significantly; maybe what we really should look at is not vat beef but vat
beets. And if we could find an artificial substitute for krill it would be
very useful.

Even going for more city aquaculture with combined hydroponics might be a
good idea, if it can be packaged in such a way that it is easy to use and
do not spread pathogens. This seems to be quite realistic, if there was
only an economic incentive for it.

> Desalination has
> costs in brine disposal, but might still be a net positive if nuke- or
> solar- powered.

This is also a killer app for early nanotech.

I'm suspicious of the arcology idea, since most of its proponents have
made rather centralist assumptions and imagined that people would
naturally want to become good little homo sovieticus once they joined the
collective. It would be interesting to design an agoric arcology that
actually used internal markets to be flexibly self-sustaining.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University