A reader responds to the question:
No. "Is civilization good — in the long term — for planets and their capacity to support life?" Yes. So far as we know, technological civilizations are the only way that our planet will be able to spread life outward to other planets that don't have any yet. We may not actually pull this miracle off, but hunter-gatherers don't have a chance.
Another reader:
Very provocative question indeed. From the point of view of a single intelligent species, civilization must, over the long term, be the best choice. Natural disasters, severe environmental changes, or (most likely) meteor strikes would, with eventual certainty, wipe out any species of hunter-gatherers. Only civilization offers the chance of avoiding or mitigating this type of disaster. If you wanted to take an even longer view – Adam Frank says "billions" of years, so let's go ahead with that – any hunter-gatherer species will last no longer than its parent star. Civilization offers the chance to deflect asteroids and, eventually, move to a younger star system. The tradeoff is the downside risk of fundamental unsustainability that was the point of the article.
Another:
We showed up late and we are nearly dead already. Life has been around for about 4 billion years – and it has about 1 billions years left. All living organisms, a collective "us", are 80% towards fulfilling, as Steve Jobs put it, life's greatest invention: death. The sun has a life cycle, and current estimates suggest as the sun's luminosity increases over time it will cook the earth, evaporating away all the water in about 1 billion years from now (see here). That will end all terrestrial life.
We want to be there to be cooked by the sun, rather than doing something collectively stupid and eliminating ourselves prematurely. Civilization allows us to do things that are collectively great, but also collectively stupid (vaccinations – great!; nuclear bombs – maybe not so smart). The opposite is true for living tribally as hunter-gatherers (no nuclear bombs – great!; no vaccines … hello small pox, maybe not so smart). Does one style of living really give us a better shot at being there to be roasted by the sun in 1 billion years?
Another looks backward:
The answer is: Who can say? But in all likelihood, it probably doesn't matter one way or the other. Billions of years ago there was an event called the Great Oxygenation Event or the Oxygen Catastrophe. Life had discovered how to produce energy at the cost of releasing oxygen into the environment. Unfortunately oxygen turned out to be toxic to nearly every other life form on the planet, causing vast swaths of death and extinction. It also changed the global climate, and the whole world irrevocably.
If you'll allow me to anthropomorphize for a second, we could imagine for a second our very, very distant single celled ancestors holding a debate about whether they had done the right thing by adopting photosynthesis as a way of life. What they might see around themselves is nothing but destruction of what was. On the other hand, if this event had not come to pass, the current environment that people are regretting the destruction of would never have existed, along with the people doing that regretting.
Regardless of our own actions, a billion years from now, every individual life form currently alive will be dead, and every species we care about will be extinct. The time between us and dinosaurs after all is measured in millions, not billions of years, to give one a perspective on the sort of changes that we might expect in that coming time period. We will have shaped what comes after, but will it have been the better or worse of the planet and its capacity to support life? Maybe not for the life we know and love now, but it's impossible to speak for the life that will exist then, any more than our oxygen-producing ancestors could have spoken to the quality of our environment.
The Dish 