• 3 Posts
  • 669 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 9th, 2023

help-circle







  • frezik@midwest.socialtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldThe Circle of Life
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    22 hours ago

    It’s exactly what happens, and we have about as good a natural experiment on this as it gets:

    https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/when-reindeer-paradise-turned-purgatory-0

    tl;dr: a Reindeer herd was setup on an uninhabited Alaskan island as a potential food source during WWII with no natural predators. The war ended before anything came of it, so the herd was left on its own. Within a few decades, they had stripped the island bare of all vegetation the deer could possibly reach, and then they all starved to death.

    Also, see predator reintroduction programs, such as how wolves change rivers.

    Elephants and rhinos don’t breed the same way a lot of other animals do. If they did, evolution would very quickly do what happened in Alaska to those deer. Animals like deer and rabbits breed in great numbers with the evolutionary expectation that predators will keep them in check.

    If you think this process is brutal, well, yes, it is. The conservative thing would be to say that this is “natural” and therefore the correct and only way to run human society. This is wrong; we can choose a better path for ourselves while also accepting that nature works this way all the time.







  • That’s interesting. I’ve long thought that self proclaimed Futurists are a clueless lot. It’s technology advancement will always happen and is a good thing, full stop. No consideration for usefulness or how it helps people or even if it will work at all. Most of them lack a background in technology or science, or even just critical thinking skills to tell if they’re being hoodwinked or not. The ones that do have a technical background, like Ray Kurzweil, are the real dangerous ones. They tend to dazzle with bullshit, some of which is correct, but it takes an expert to disentangle the correct parts.

    The other site’s /r/TechNewsToday was the worst for this. Articles about startup companies making impossible claims were swallowed whole, and you’d be downvoted to oblivion for pushing against it. Technology always progresses forward at a breakneck pace, it’s always good, and there’s nothing you can do to convince them otherwise.

    Which is all to say that after a few moments thought, I’m not surprised that it was historically associated with fascism.