• FrogPrincess@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      Neither. We can’t even unfuck Earth, where in that did we earn the privilege to pollute the cosmos?

      What kind of weird Abrahamic mental model is going on here? We need to morally prove ourselves to Jehovah and he will decree we have “earned” the “privilege” to go to some rocks? Makes no sense.

    • lunar_solstice@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      What’s your definition of ‘pollute’? I don’t really get how the verb ‘pollute’ can apply to non-biological planets; to me the word means something like ‘putting matter in places where is disrupts ecosystems’. I think the book about Gaia has a definition like this too.

        • serenityseeker [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          I think this is the Gaia quote they’re talking about –

          The very concept of pollution is anthropocentric and it may even be irrelevant in the Gaian context. Many so-called pollutants are naturally present and it becomes exceedingly difficult to know at what level the appellation ‘pollutant’ may be justified. Carbon monoxide, for example, which is poisonous to us and to most large mammals, is a product of incomplete combustion, a toxic agent from exhaust gases of cars, coke or coal-burning stoves, and cigarettes; a pollutant put into otherwise clean fresh air by man, you might think. However, if the air is analysed we find that carbon monoxide gas is to be found everywhere. It comes from the oxidation of methane gas in the atmosphere itself and as much as 1,000 million tons of it are so produced each year. It is thus an indirect but natural vegetable product and is also found in the swim-bladders of many sea creatures. The syphonophores, for example, are loaded with this gas in concentrations which would speedily kill us off if present in our own atmosphere at similar levels.

          Almost every pollutant, whether it be in the form of sulphur dioxide, dimethyl mercury, the halocarbons, mutagenic and carcinogenic substances, or radioactive material, has to some extent, large or small, a natural background. It may even be produced so abundantly in nature as to be poisonous or lethal from the start. To live in caves of uranium-bearing rock would be unhealthy for any living creature, but such caves are rare enough to present no real threat to the survival of a species. It seems that as a species we can already with stand the normal range of exposure to the numerous hazards of our environment. If for any reason one or more of these hazards should increase, both individual and species adaptation will set in.

          What is your definition of pollution tho? How can there be pollution on a lifeless rocky planet?

          • frauddogg [they/them, null/void]@hexbear.netEnglish
            0·
            4 days ago

            Again, I don’t do “quibbling definitions with sophists”, and honestly this just reads as techno-woo made to justify leaving dead rovers and broken satellites in our wake. “Oh, it was already there in trace amounts so we can just leave our toys scattered around the playroom.” If I had that kind of laissez-faire attitude towards say, Yellowstone, I’d be put out of the park and banned for life. The fuck happened to ‘leave no trace’?

      • frauddogg [they/them, null/void]@hexbear.netEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        You’re so fixated on whether you can that you will never stop to question if you should. What, are you going to frack asteroids until they become space junk? Utterly violate another planet to its core for all its worth the way you’ve done the Earth, just to bail out like the deadbeat developer humanity has proven itself as? Disgusting, parasitic, over-consumptive, self-centered, practically narcissistic-assed question out of you.