Spiderpig, agreed.
The_Walrus wrote:
Deaths, particularly painful deaths, are always a bad thing.
I think the world would probably benefit from VHE, but it would benefit more from humans living in a genuinely sustainable way. Every extinction is intrinsically a bad thing, imo - loss of humanity would still be a loss of biodiversity.
Very true. And as the arguably most-intelligent form of life we know about, and for all we know (to date) the most advanced form of life that has ever come to exist in the universe, that would be quite a loss. We are on the verge of getting to know and do so many really cool things, too. It would be a shame to lose it all and say goodbye now.
You also made me think, both voluntary human extinction and a slow death via climactic and ecological destruction may not allow the rest of life on earth to recover as quickly as it would if we learn to do the responsible thing and actually work on correcting the problems we've introduced. It took all of us to mess it up, and it will probably take all of us to clean it up, too. I don't mind doing that. Indeed, it may offer more hope for all life.