Someday (emphasis on someday) should humans euthanize every animal on Earth? (legal, death)

[Clintone]

Someday, emphasis on someday, should humans euthanize every other animal on Earth?

This is more of a thought exercise than anything anyone sane would advocate right now.

Right now we depend on animals for food and various resources. Without them our societies would collapse in various ways. Plants would experience ramifications too from having their habitat's so dramatically altered. Plants would lose their pollinators. Chaos would ensue, and anyone who attempted such a thing would probably be tarred and feathered five seconds after they began the attempt. All government officials responsible for passing the bill would be fired and replaced, either through legal procedures or via sacking of the government...so that's not going to happen.

However, let's say our species can survive entirely in space without needing anything from Earth. Getting from earth wouldn't even enhance our standards of living. That's how advanced our technology is. We get everything we need from solar energy and mining celestial bodies.

Earth has long been a nature preserve, with no human inhabitants.

Should we vote to have all life on Earth painlessly euthanized? We could build nan-machines and sprinkle them over the atmosphere. They could be designed to target only animal life. They replicate themselves using materials from nonliving parts of the environments, then enter the animals' bodies. At some point, once all animal life is saturated with the nano-machines (which wouldn't hurt them or be noticed by them...yet) we could send out a signal to the nano-bots to unleash some kind of electrical pulse, destroying the nervous systems, brain cells, and anything else needed to end the lives of every animal on Earth. They all would die painlessly and simultaneously.

We'll still be able to keep our pets up in space, and any insects we farm for protein.

This would be one of three options. It's option C.

Option A would be merely leaving Earth as a nature preserve.

Option B would be taking a more active approach. We'd sterilize certain species of carnivores and omnivores, and feed them human-constructed meant products that required no animal suffering, until they'd go extinct. We'd sterilize certain species or groups of herbivores too, to prevent overpopulation. We'd devote countless hours of effort and resources to changing Earth into something more pleasant for its animal inhabitants. We might genetically engineer certain species to survive more easily, or have slower breeding rates, or shorter lifespans to help prevent overpopulation. We'd re-make venomous and highly poisonous animals so they don't endanger the others. We'd re-make the natural world to be a friendly, cuddly place.

Option B would be incredibly expensive and time consuming. I assume no one would want that unless technology had made it so humans lacked a sense of purpose and desperately wanted some point to their lives, now that they lived in lifelong, boring, utopia.

Option A would involve letting Darwinian evolution do it's thing. From evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins:

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/222...in-the-natural

Option A would leave the animals of Earth in that state. Those animals don't understand death in much detail. Some of the more clever social organisms might begin to have inklings of wondering about it, but for the most part, what's going to matter most to animals is how they've lived their lives. By rendering them all extinct in a painless manner, given that they don't understand anyway, I don't think we would be doing anything they would mind. It would, however, bring them out of the endless cycle of suffering resulting from Darwinian evolution.

This is just a thought experiment. I thought it up because I think it shows how the most ideal solutions, oftentimes, can come from thinking far, far outside the box, into the realm of the unnerving. In that realm you'll often find solutions nobody has thought of before, because it's an unnerving place people don't like to think about much.

Another good example of a solution that might help people a great deal, pulled from that realm of the unnerving, would be the invention of artificial wombs so that children could be formed and developed entirely outside of woman's bodies. Benefits of this (assuming everyone had seen its advantages and chosen to sterilize themselves, so that births never again come from women's bodies) would be 1. no more birthing pains. 2. no more risks of complications during the birthing process. 3. No more unplanned pregnancies, and sex becomes purely recreational. 4. no more abortions.

But that's scary...to think about changing human nature so much.

A more modern way we think outside the box to arrive at conclusions that benefit the species is through abortion. You take a very simple life in exchange for the improvement of multiple lives, potentially including that very simple life...because if you just have another baby when your financial state is more secure, or you want one, or that doesn't have serious birth defects, that's not a whole lot different from having the first baby born into a wealthier environment, cured of its birth defects, raised by loving parents.

That's just how humanity works. We're essentially gods of the Earth. It's up to us to use our creativity to be decent gods, because Mother Nature has no mind. We do. We're smarter than her. We can provide guidance where she can't.

A big mistake people can make is feeling like their feelings will guide them down the correct path. They sometimes will, but those feelings were invented by Mother Nature, and she has absolutely no idea what she's doing. Humans can design a better world than Mother Nature ever could. We already have, just from the curing of smallpox and the invention of methods of distributing clean water.