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Originally Posted by sweetpea
The small point i was trying to make about humans using up the resources at an alarming rate is that WE SHOULD KNOW BETTER!!!!!!
You made a point that "animals would do the same thing" if they could . . .
But IF Humans are So SMART and "above animals" why are we doing it at all?
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Because the individual benefit from consuming those resources is in many cases positive. The negative externalities often overwealm that individual benefit, but that's a collective problem, not an individual one.
I'll assert that humans are/can be intelligent. I will not claim that humanity is intelligent as a whole. We have attempted to make structures (governments) that act in the best interests of larger numbers of people than one. This seems to be a hard problem.
It isn't in any one person's best interests to conserve petrol. It is quite possibly in the best interests of society as a whole to conserve petrol.
So, would an intelligent person conserve petrol or not?
This possibly holds on larger scales. It might be in humanities best interests to conserve petrol, but it is in each nation's best interest to consume as much petrol as they can.
If you view gaia as an organism, intelligent technological life could be viewed as a reproductive organ. There is no guarantee that this gaia or this organ will result in successful reproduction -- personally, I'm hoping we get lucky. =)