You want to live on a volcanically active planet.
Why? Thereâs no reason some amazing planet couldnât exist that has no earthquakes and also no volcanos.
I have no citations, but Iâm confident that without tectonic activity (quake/ volcanic) the planet wouldnât have the chemicals required for life.
Regardless of the extinctions they may cause.
Because all things change the state of all other things. Nothing interacts or is observed without affecting everything.
There are consequences to every action. By seeing an apple with your human eyes, you physically interacted with that apple via a series of photons. Irrevocably interacted.
There are complex and unpredictable side effects to any and all actions, and always will be.
At that level, all actions permanently expend energy. Fewer actions means fewer consequences.
Your question is reductive to the point of being meaningless.
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But itâs just coincidence that the side effects are always negative for our society, environment, and general well being?
We never have some kind of happy side effect. Oh, we found a source of fuel. When we burn it, itâs actually really efficient, and it releases a chemical that is good for us and smells great!
A situation like that would be the best evidence for the divine ever.
Itâs absence is a nice indicator that the divine doesnât exist. Or hates us.
Someone should google anthropic principle.
Iâm zooming out, but you zoomed out too far!
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Being not immediately dead is the minimum side effect that people will settle for.
fwiw, itâs all a matter of degrees. These terms youâre using like perfect or evil arenât really quantifiable, they fall into the âIâll know it when I see itâ camp.
A good example is steel right? So to get steel ya gotta do the super dangerous mining, thatâs bad, no way around that, mostly anyway. I think there was some like on the surface that you could get pretty easy but we got all that long ago.
But youâre not done, now youâve got this iron ore and you gotta smelt it with coal to get that steel (Iâm excluding the pigiron step cause Iâm keeping this simple) Very bad, burning all that coal releases poison into the air. Double whammy right?
Not necessarily. If you use charcoal instead of regular coal, youâre taking poison from the air using trees and putting it into metal where it will chill there for almost ever. Youâre cleaning the atmosphere, or at least not making it any worse!
Perfection? No, probably not, but a lot better than taking poison outta the ground and putting it into the air.
Itâs all a matter of degrees.
We are genetic material that evolves based on environmental stimuli via a process of natural selection.
In that context, any change to our environment is more likely to stress us than help us. Most of our adaptations are to mitigate the cruel realities of existence.
Hereâs an example. We evolved in the presence of natural background radiation. Weâre always being exposed to small amounts of ionizing radiation.
We adapted to that environment. We selected, in effect, for that environment.
Anything that adds more radiation to the environment stresses our adaptation. The same applies to anything that removes this radiation from our environment. I just watched a youtube video about a recent study seeking to confirm if there is any detriment to cellular life in the absence of any environmental background radiation. Itâs a real concern that needs study.
See vitamins and trace elements as another prime example. We evolved in a world where there are trace amounts of things that we just have to deal with. Our body assumes a little bit of this stuff is just always available and there. We do poorly when itâs missing, and we do poorly when itâs in abundance.
You want to break this fundamental cycle of niche adaptations via natural selection? Welcome to the future of extreme gene/body modification, bespoke genomes, robot bodies, etc⌠But thatâs a long way off. For now, we still need to consume carbohydrates and burn things to make heat.
We can see this in real-ish time also, with bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance. Strain x becomes resistant to drug y, but the bug as a whole is less efficient or lethal or reproduces slower.
The reason being, whatever mechanism they are using now, if it was more efficient, they already would have been doing it.
Maybe living things would have lower mutation rates and therefore be more prone to extinction.
This makes sense. We adapted to a specific environment, and we adapt really slowly. Therefore, literally any change to the environment is bad. More is bad, less is also bad, because we adapted to goldilocks. The only way to have a miracle is to somehow do something that does not impact the environment at all because any impact takes us further away from the ideal.
I guess the only thing we can do is become xenomorphs that adapt super fast and can deal with any environment.
The problem is that humans have adapted to escape the harshness of the environment, while we still directly impact it.
Plants, animals etc do not have the same physical protections, which puts the food chain at risk.
Not only that, with all the agriculture and burning of fossil fuel the carbon and nitrogen cycles are at risk.
Thereâs no technological solutions that we can make fast enough that isnât as effective as not burning fossils and planting more trees.
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My take on the xenomorphs was that they couldnât adapt. The facehuggers are basically âcaterpillarsâ. The âbutterfliesâ are what burst out of your chest.
They take the genetic material from the host, so in effect, they become adapted as well as the host was. Theyâre dependant on other animals, thatâs why they hibernate (in the eggs) till itâs safe.
Once theyâre out, theyâre almost impossible to kill, though. They can survive even the harshest most nasty environments.
All changes to environment, by definition, produce biological stress. A change to the environment is literally a biological stressor.
Thatâs because evolution gets you literally just far enough to survive these specific conditions on a population scale. The machinery has no incentive to go beyond âexactly enough to keep reproducing so the population remains,â so literally any change to the rules stresses a population.
All of reality, as we understand, functions as a series of agonist-antagonist responses.
This is why @Apreche canât get answers. There is no âwhy,â thereâs just âthis is.â
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Theyâre easy to kill, difficult to hunt.
Just a little bit of fire is all you need. Just donât go anywhere dark.