Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever.

In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions.

It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people.

Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning.

Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea.

Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad.

Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it.

There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.

I would not call either Native Americans or Europeans awful, though. As you correctly point out, neither group (in fact no group in all of history) was either pristine and perfect or wholly bad.

The author seems to merely be pointing out that western society largely denies the magnitude of the human and environmental cost of its prosperity.

On the whole, I think this is untrue. For European countries that had colonies, as often as not the colonies had a negative effect on their economies. If you look at European states today, ones that didn't have colonies (e.g. Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Greece) are just as prosperous on the whole as ones that did (e.g. UK, France, Spain), or the ones that were owned by other European countries (e.g. Ireland, Finland, Slovenia).

Spain in particular suffered a good deal of long-term economic harm from its colonies as the importation of gold crowded out the real economy.

Germany and Italy had short-lived colonial empires that didn't run at a profit.

Probably the British did gain overall from their colonies, but much of their American colonies were lost in the 1770s. Jamaica OTOH made the fortunes of many wealthy British families.

Whether Europe was successful or not in profiting from the genocide, genocide did happen and I think the author is merely saying that the western world for the most part doesn't own up to this.

Regarding the profitability of colonialism, while I agree that it's debatable whether Europe itself was massively enriched by the colonies, Europeans profited. European immigrants to North America were able to create an empire by consolidating their power over the indigenous residents then leveraging North America's land and natural resources.

I don't understand what do you mean with that. I don't think there's an absolute good or bad. But according to the fact that Europeans are the ones who came to America and slaughtered the Natives, they are the bad ones. The Natives did not something bad by defending themselves. In that situation and if you value human life over material benefit you have to admit "Europeans bad!".

Cortez only managed to conquer Mexico by getting caught up in the wars which were already being waged. The Massacre at Cholula, (depending on whose account you believe) was either instigated by the Tlaxcalans or the Aztecs.

In addition, while many native tribes were complicit in the subjugation of their neighbors, the most consistent defense of the human rights of the natives come from religious missionaries who did everything in their power to protect the natives.

In the end, there were 'good guys' and 'bad guys' on both sides and you can't judge Europeans as evil based on this. The truth is just more complicated.

This sort of moral absolutism is hogwash, and has no place in intelligent debate.

This is an interesting topic worthy of discussion, but I really do not think this article serves as a good basis for it. Until we can come up with a fair resource that doesn't look at the natives like saints, and Europeans like evil incarnate, I don't think any productive discussion can happen.

I really can't follow the logic here. Why do you even feel the need to justify the murdering of the natives? And how can you think it can be justified? Even if the old ones were murderers (which is probably not true in general, even if you make it so), what about the babies?

Wait, what? Thanks for going all "think of the children" on me man, where if I'm not with you I'm for murdering the natives. You are (apparently) representative of the moral absolutism problem I am talking about.

I'm not defending the extermination of native American natives.

The problem with this article is that it cast native American society as a utopian paradise, and the white European invaders as evil, ruthless, and completely without moral compunction. This sort of historical revisionist "blackwashing" doesn't help anyone - because it has not fairly represented either side. The natives were not utopian societies, nor were they savages deserving of murder. The Europeans were not ruthless monsters, nor were they benevolent conquerors. To represent this situation as black and white is both ignorant and unproductive.

By "blackwashing" I mean skewing the facts and injecting calls to emotion where it doesn't belong, to try and make something seem worse - where whitewashing is the opposite (skewing the facts and injecting emotion to make it seems better)

[edit] Also, to address specifically why the moral absolutism is a problem: by casting the Europeans as ruthlessly evil, you have removed any deep introspection into why the murder of the natives occurred. You've transformed a complex human situation into a fairy tale - where the bad guys need no explanation. You've also effectively discounted the possibility that bad things can happen for relatively benign (or at least, not overtly evil) goals.

Not to mention dehumanization is inherently dangerous - even if the person you're dehumanizing is the "bad guy".

I don't think in modern times if you murder somebody, the court will be very interested in whether the victim was a good or a bad person.

Also I have to admit I still don't understand what you are going on about - if the European invaders where not evil, ruthless and completely without moral compunction, how were they capable of doing the killing? (The ones who did, let's assume not everybody participated). Who did the killing?

That's precisely why it matters who was "evil" and who wasn't. This kind of "pure evil" doesn't really exist, and by assuming it does you are glossing over the real causes of the native genocide. It's far too easy to ask "why did the Europeans murder the natives?" and answer with "because they were evil, ruthless, and completely with morality"

It's a feel-good answer, because moral absolutism makes us all feel better. But it's far from the truth - and masks analysis that can actually help us prevent things like this in the future.

For example (and apologies for the Godwin): we know that not every Nazi soldier was for exterminating the Jews. Heck, we know that many German soldiers guarding the extermination camps were not supportive of the cause, yet they went along with it. Why?

The simplistic explanation that makes us feel better is that these men were evil, without morals, and participated willingly in mass slaughter. But this ignores much more useful insights on mob mentality, the power of coercion, propaganda, misinformation, and a slew of other things that actually help us understand what happened, and prevent these things from happening again.

We're talking about an event that occurred hundreds of years ago - playing the blame game is pretty pointless at this point. It really doesn't matter what is whose fault; the importance of understanding the European conquest of the Americas is to determine the factors that caused a bunch of perfectly reasonable people to exterminate entire civilizations, so that we may better understand our present selves and hopefully prevent such things from repeating.

Which leads back to your original question:

> "Why does it even matter who was "evil" and who wasn't?"

It matters because by playing the blame game, and telling this story as a fairy tale of black and white, good vs. evil, you are bypassing the need to analyze what is, in reality a complex situation of many causes and effects. You are robbing a heinous and dark event of its proper gravity and complexity, and grossly simplifying something that carries relevance today.

I'll argue that it exists - not everybody who torments a baby has an excuse for it. Of course it is useful to try to figure out what made them do it, there might be a kind of excuse in terms of an explanation of what made them do it (bad childhood whatever). Or why - um, presumably they wanted the land? I think what happened in America is that some people had the better weapons and they wanted the other people's property.

"by playing the blame game"

How is it playing the blame game? A bunch of people killed another bunch of people. There is nothing to play about it. What to do about is another question - I am not even sure what you are worried about. Nobody in this thread has called for any kind of reparations or anything, I think?

Isn't pointing out the history of European settlers exactly what you want: pointing out that Europeans can be bad, too, so we always have to keep asking what makes the "bad" come out? I don't think by forgetting history, we are helping the kind of understanding you seem to seek.

Ultimately, though, I think the bunch with the better weapons will always get and take what they want...

[citation needed] -- It's practically a tautology that people take actions for reasons, even if they don't consciously know what those reasons are.

What if Bob had murdered 1000 children, and Frank wasn't a murderer until he murdered Bob?

Does being a victim cleanse your sins?

The practice of rape, pillage and plunder is without a doubt a bad thing.

I'm defending rationality, and criticizing the all-or-nothing cognitive distortion.

> "It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people."

Conquistadors, went to the Americas and slaughtered millions. Regardless of your assertion that both could be "savages", one group initiated and subsequently conducted systematic violence against another group over several decades. You're honestly saying you can't judge that as "bad"? What if you were among one of those indigenous groups that were killed? I know I would not appreciate it...

But of course we can't make concrete judgments about that.

The slaughter of Native Americans by the Conquistadors was a terrible thing. Awful. Tragic. An abomination.

Also, and completely not taking anything away from the awful abominableness of that terrible tragedy, the Native Americans had lots of other problems with their culture, and were in many ways, quite savage.

The Conquistadors had really good food, and the technological know-how to cross the oceans, which are both quite good and important things.

Being a murderer doesn't mean your ships aren't great. Having great ships doesn't make you less of a murderer.

My point is that you can't just say "they did this awful thing, therefor everything about their culture was horrible".

My point is also that you can't just say "they had this awful thing done to them, therefor everything about their culture was better."

We can judge the act as bad without thinking that it somehow pollutes everything that is good about the culture that did the heinous thing.

We can also judge the act as bad without thinking that being the victim of a heinous act somehow erases everything that is bad in the victim.

The real world is complicated, and all-or-nothing thinking is irrationally and unforgivably lazy.

> "The real world is complicated, and all-or-nothing thinking is irrationally and unforgivably lazy."

Yes, some idea require a certain nuanced approach to fully comprehend, others however, do not. This is not one of them. I guess you can throw up you up your hand and cry "I can't decide, these waters are too ethically difficult to navigate, argh!" and forever cop out. It's easier.

That is not what he is saying though. He is arguing for a more rational and more balanced view than that advocated by the original article, which was quite "all-or-nothing". This does not mean that genocide is not bad, it certainly is. But because they committed genocide does not mean they did not have other good qualities and achievements as well.

Nobody was even saying that. You seem to fabricate an enormous straw man.

The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network.

Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.

And since as a nation their positive moral acts was so little relative to their negative moral actions you can call them "bad".

You get into trouble by saying that in Germany my friend :)

I'm not suggesting that Hitler's good roads made the holocaust less bad. I'm suggesting that the Holocaust didn't make the good roads less good.

Things aren't either all good or all bad. That includes the Conquistadors, Hitler, the Nazis, your children, a puppy, the Na'vi, the Native Americans, and everyone else.

This does not mean that everything the German army did was good or justified (e.g. the Holocaust). And neither was the allies knights in shining armour (firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo comes to mind).

My grandparents (although not German citizens) were fiercely supportive of Germany in WW2, as where many people. This stemmed mostly from the UK’s treatment of people in its colonies.

Tyler Durden, Fight club.

Maybe you are trying to argue for something good, but dead people are dead. They don't benefit from a civilization that emerged a couple of decades later.

This is like all the whining about slavery. Slavery has been one of the most widespread practices in the world. Europeans were the ones who have come closest to putting a stop to it. And in fact it is only European derived morality that makes slavery and genocide wrong.

I assume a kinetic bombardment is imminent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

The scriptment fills in some of the gaps though. First, corporations are banned from using weapons of mass destruction in space. Second, the planetary consciousness convinces the humans to leave and not return by threatening them with a virus that will kill all of them.

I have to say the exact same thing occurred to me at the end of the movie. "And so the aliens returned to their dying world." ...yeah, to get more ammo.

Of course, the counter-argument might be that the Na'vi managed to defeat a heavily-armed base using a skeleton force, before most of the tribes had even turned up, so by the time they got back Pandora could be too well-prepared to resist for them to be successful. Kinetic bombardment is all very well, but you need to get down to the surface to pick the stuff up -- unless you completely destroy every living thing on the planet, in which case you develop a very serious logistical problem (they were growing their own food on the surface).

An interesting interpretation, but not one born out by the film. Remember this is a private corporation, so they likely have laws back on Earth they must answer to and it is likely that would ban such an overt destruction.

A "forced relocation" (and remember that for whatever reason they did try to drive them out with minimal loss of life at first) could likely be justified under their laws, and probably so can preemptively wiping out a massing army that could overwhelm their security with shear numbers. Kinetic bombardment to wipe out huge swaths of the population probably crosses the line.

Also, it would not be surprising if they did not actually have space based weapons. They had to jury-rig a transport to act as a bomber. Its quite possible that either the company does not have them at all or that they have to travel all the way to earth and back (a many year journey) to get them. And of course, that still only makes sense if their laws would let them use those space based weapons.

I do wonder about the modern press applied to historical situations (WWII, American Frontier).

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7819&...

That's just how humans roll.

Western Europe had lots of problems, but countries that operate in the European tradition are better places to live. (At least, when you look at the immigration patterns between third-world and first-world countries, it's clear that first world countries export idealism, which is then processed into jaded realism and returned. Meanwhile, poor countries send their top .1% to join the Western world's top 10%; a good deal for both sides).

Precisely. History is littered with examples of the imperialistic tendencies of man (if you want to see some grade-A imperialism, look into how the Aztecs built their empire, hint: it wasn't by having lots of babies).

Also, I'm curious, how are things in your post-imperialist future? Is everything lovely?

Thats not how I look at it. We have made progress from a society of primitive tribes to a more reasonable society rapidly in the last couple of centuries.

Universal women's suffrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womens_suffrage#United_States) did not even exist in the United States until the beginning of the 20th century.

There is an endless number of social issues that Humans have made advancements, including Civil Rights, Gay Rights etc.,

Our understanding of the world has increased [changed] and so has our ability to make decisions based on such new knowledge.

Your thinking is more like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Social_ev...

Than this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory

However, it's almost guaranteed that you do descend from conquerors, warlords, or murders. This probability says nothing about what you should do or whether you should learn from the past. It only states that in the past few thousand years shit has been pretty bad, and humans adapted to it.

With so many of the comments seemingly endorsing manifest destiny on the part of "civilized" people, I'm beginning to reconsider this opinion.

"I'd like that.. but that shit ain't the truth."

Other than merely agreeing with the commentor on this aspect of human nature, I do have a point. I believe to deny the brutality in our nature is extremely dangerous.

I suggest the whole point of civilization is to recognize the destructive potential in us all and to regulate it.

Granted, you may be right. However, the consequence of putting in unnecessary protections against destruction are much more mild than the converse case.

I would guess that India gains by having rich Indians living abroad. They increase the wealth of their families still living in India, they sometimes move back to India or start businesses there. If they didn't have the opportunity to move abroad and get rich, India probably wouldn't be as wealthy.

But what suggests "places that operate in the European tradition" will remain better (i.e. what traits of Euro civilization are optimal given any group of humans)? What makes this expression any more meaningful than something like, "C had lots of problems, but languages in the C-family are better to work with"?

What's interesting is that I almost never find out, halfway through an argument like this, that I'm talking to someone who moved to a place unspoiled by Western imperialism. Mongolia, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts

Indian & Chinese civilisation was crushed by armies & opium.

Any concrete reason for that belief? It looks like the "overbreeding" is objectively true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate . As far as simpletons go, you tell me: is there any intelligence test you know of that routinely ranks people in Djibouti over people in Japan? If not, it sounds like your statement is unfounded.

The rest of your interpretation is also suspect. The places Victorians conquered weren't more advanced than the places the Victorians came from. Regardless of the reason, Europe was more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, and they used that advantage to conquer as much of the world as they could.

When you complain about how the Victorians ran things, you have to compare it to something. If you compare, e.g., the Congo in 1955 (http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,866343,00.html ) to the Congo in 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... ) you get the idea. You might not like how imperialists run things--but they run things well because they run them for profit. You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).

It's interesting that you need to preface that with 'law-abiding people.' What happens when you are accidentally on the other side of the law?

Update: Maybe I should be more specific in what I mean. In Thailand you aren't a 'law-abiding citizen' if you criticize the king. What similar laws does Singapore have? What happens is someone doesn't like me and decides to set me up for a crime I am no guilty of (e.g. deface some property and then claim that I did it)? The only problem that I have with harsh justice systems: What happens if you're an innocent person, but that system believes you to be guilty?

We sent William Gibson to Singapore to see whether that clean dystopia represents our techno future.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson.html

How about pre-Victorian rule? European profit seeking turned Congo in to a hell hole.

Did the Belgians just find a country like that, and take it over?

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

The problem here is, as mattmaroon put it, if you buy into this logic we'd all still be chasing down antelopes on the savannah. At some point some civilizations, for whatever reason, start developing things like private property, the wheel, common law, reading, the printing press, etc.

It's become fashionable to say something like "well, that doesn't make them any better than other civilizations" but I think that's soft-headed horseshit. Anybody who lives in a civilization with private property, contract law, medicine, literature and art is living in a better place, and in a better way, that somebody who doesn't have it. Some cultures are demonstrably better than others, like it or not.

The interesting question, especially with alien stories, is "How do two wildly diverse cultures interact in a way that is respectful of both?"

I've thought about this for some time, and using all the earthly examples I can come up with, the fact is they don't. If we ever meet another primitive species and interact with them? It's going to be very traumatic on the part of the other species. Likewise, if Cebulons from the Osari System arrive next week with technology five thousand years ahead of ours? You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture.

And I guess I'm okay with that. If the Cebulons show up, I'm going to be first in line learning to speak Cebulonese, watching all the Cebulonese TV shows, and taking my kids to Cebulonese high schools. We will learn, adapt, and overcome, and the human species will continue. To me that's a lot more rational that sitting around moaning about how things might have/would have been had things not changed. I just hope the Cebulons come to trade and exploit our resources in a manner respectful of private property, so we can go to their system and do the same one day :)

I really did not like Avatar. Gorgeous, magnificent movie. Terrible hackneyed, one-dimensional plot. Ugh. I think a quote from Cameron's other movie is most apt: I vote we nuke it from orbit. It's the only way we can really be sure.

He's talking about genocide. Not accidental genocide, "bring me back 100 scalps" genocide. This isn't in the realm of "theoretical cultural conquest".

Imagine if descriptions of Nazi concentration camps included lengthy treatises on how Jewish culture was backwards and savage, while German culture was refined and noble. Would you find this appropriate, or even relevant in any way?

The point wasn't that somehow Europeans were "right" in the way they treated the natives, any more than the natives were "right". My thesis is, given any two sufficiently distant cultures, any interaction between them, no matter how principled, will be traumatic to the lesser culture.

That doesn't mean I approve of the side-effects of interaction, or that I'm a believer in social darwinism, or that we should kill a million people in order to make drugs to extend the lives of the billions of other humans. These are all extreme positions that I do NOT take. I'm simply pointing out the patterns from the past, which I fully expect to continue in the future. My personal opinions have no bearing on this anymore than whether or not I like the beach has anything to do with the migratory patterns of sea turtles. It's an observation, not a value judgement.

Even when I say I would send my kids to the schools and such, what I'm saying is that we must do what we have to in order to survive as a species. Not that I approve or somehow would be complicit in it. I'm saying that the personal attitude of survival and not moaning over things lost is what makes us able to move forward no matter what position we are in.

The more interesting question would be if the aliens arrived with all sorts of goodies, much like the Europeans did. What if we could eliminate death? Eliminate suffering? Live more fuller lives? But what if the interaction was bound to kill 90% of the population no matter how well it was handled?

I'm not in charge of making decisions like that and I quite plainly refuse to do so, even in a rhetorical sense. I'm much happier describing my personal reaction to such an event than trying to figure out what's best for an entire species over the long run. That's way above my pay grade.

But it's not a matter of me good, them bad. It's more like "some cultures are better than others, and when two cultures get significantly far apart mixing them becomes extremely traumatic to the lesser one"

You want an answer to the Fermi Paradox? I think it's right here.

The problem with attributing these kind of motives to those with whom you disagree is that all discussion then shift away from the logical merits of various positions and into the decidedly illogical territory of whose voice you think this the most "authentic". In short, instead of asserting that your opponents have different positions then they actually do, perhaps its worth asking whether or not that is their position.

"You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture"? More like "You can say goodbye to a lot of humans". But that's nothing to worry about when the remaining humans will be part of a 'better culture', right?

Any want about the people who didnt get to live? None of this excuses genocide.

I'm having a really hard time swallowing this one. If people value different things, how can you even make such an argument?

Ok, so that's more "how" than "why". The "why" was because they wanted it.

You can't say, "I claim this piece of land for my own. Oh, look! There are people living on it already. I guess I get to enslave, rape, torture them." This has more to do with brutal people being the first people to encounter the natives in the Americas, and deciding that since there was no European justice system or society to condemn/jail then that they could do whatever they felt like.

Actually, you can say EXACTLY that. The very idea of private property is founded on that principle. When whoever it was originally decided some plot of land belonged to him, that's precisely what he said. All I would add to that statement is the clause, "Or they can get the hell out."

Not everyone wants to be a traitor to his own people, or as it will most likely turn out for humanity in your scenario, a brutalized, ghettoized, subservient class.

But that does not imply that there was not an extermination. [1]

[1] A single and not isolated example. -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people#European_colonizati...

The racial traits are different from african to american natives. It's clear the difference between Brazil or Cuba (where most slaves were brought) and Mexico. And remember I'm writting of average,

About the word "extermination" it seems you're using it to describe killing of many individuals. I would keep it to refer to something like killing 99.99 indigenous population.

Extermination didn't take place, but rape did?

Still, homo sapiens largely wiped out neanderthal populations many eons ago. They had a similar to larger cranial capacity to cro-magnons and modern humans, they used and created tools, and there's some evidence of cultural artifacts such as jewelry around their sites. The signs point to a culture of intelligent humanoids, now almost completely wiped out (except with possible genetic relics in the human population). This genocide preceded civilization as we know it by millennia...

Placental mammals, crossing over to south america from the isthmus of Panama when it arose, almost completely destroyed marsupials in south america. That's not just an ethnicity, race, or species, it's an entire infraclass. It is likely the case that our primate ancestors did the same for many other classes of beings.

So to turn the clock back, it is hard to know when to stop. Fundamentally it is difficult for me to reason about when it is good for one creature to profit while others perish. I do know, though, that they are in a much more complicated relationship -- that it is impossible to separate one creature from its ecosystem, and that if no particular creature or plant or species is to be sacred above others, then surely it's the integrity and continued vitality of the ecosystem that matters. This is one reason I am an environmentalist: human beings now have immense power over the environment, and as such need to take responsibility for the fact that they can alter it, destroy it, or care for it. We have to become not the Earth's ignorant children, but the it's gardeners.

I always thought that the Romans empire expanded solely out of greed and power lust. One day I was reading about one of their very, very early battles. Turns out the population of Rome and of the neighboring city had expanded to the point where there was only enough resources for one city to survive. Rome won, and in a quest to secure resources and protect the home city from getting sacked, did not stop expanding.

I recommend the book, "The Fates of Nations" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations ). It's dark, but very realistic. The fundamental problem of human affairs is that we are animals born to reproduce, living in a world of limited resources.

The real hope for the human race is not a new moral code. It's thorium and the birth control pill. Only the combination of sufficient energy and controlled population will enable us to share the same planet without clawing each other to death.

In my current thinking, it seems that there must be a new moral code. The powers of individual people, or even small groups, are too great. A million dollar act can cause billions of dollars of damage (e.g. 9/11) causing a many trillion dollar response (our current wars) and we haven't even seen the first real acts of biological terrorism. And what would become of a human population consisting of one group willing to take responsibility for the finiteness of our world, and one group unwilling to do so, intent on expansion, growth, greed and reproduction. There must be some moral code, some mode of thinking, some sociological structure, to deal with this.

(PS: Are you really that keen on thorium? People can still make dirty bombs and I'm not sure about how secure it is in terms of preventing enrichment, and as far as I can tell it's more expensive in terms of amortized cost than uranium reactors, which are more expensive than coal, which in some cases is more expensive than wind and, possibly soon, solar. So plan A for me seems to be using the nuclear reactor that we've already got: the one floating in the sky.)

---

Also, thorium isn't enough. It's just one in a long list of limitations in terms of the planet's resources. We fix more nitrogen than all of other life in the planet combined. Human beings have reshaped one third of the Earth's surface. About one billion people on Earth now enjoy an 'american' standard of living, and thusly an american standard of consumption. In 20 years it will be 3 billion. We don't really have room for another factor of three, even just looking at the amount of food that we'll need. At the currently level of technology, for example, it is not even remotely possible for south and south east asia to switch from a largely vegetarian diet to one which consumes half as much meat as the average american.

---

I highly recommend the article "A Sober Optimist’s Guide to Sustainability"

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/beyond-green/a-sober-optimists-gu...

"The guiding principle of more: It’s interesting to imagine what it would take to change that principle, even by degree. Because making that change seems so fundamental to what you’re saying we’re going to have to do.

I think this is the most difficult issue. And it’s not one you can tell people about. But you can show them. One of the simulation models we use is a model of the overall interactions between population, resources, pollution, technology, and the environment. We’ll run the model live in class. We’ll say, “Okay, here is the simulation, and some very unpleasant things may happen yet in this century. But everything in the model is uncertain. Let’s assume there’s a whole lot more cheap oil and gas available. The marginal cost doesn’t rise so quickly as we pump more out of the ground.” Then you just slide a lever in the model and instantly see the result.

What happens, of course, is that by relaxing the constraint that’s limiting economic growth by lowering the availability and raising the price of energy, the economy grows even more, for an even longer time, until it hits some other constraint. So if you relax the constraint on the availability of fossil fuels, then you hit another constraint, which might be climate change. And if you go in and you relax that constraint, even magically assuming we can solve the climate problem right now, and for free, the economy grows even further until you hit another constraint, such as soil fertility or fresh water, and you see agricultural productivity fall. Relax that constraint, and you’ll grow until you hit some other one.

Pretty quickly people discover for themselves that as long as everybody in the world wants more—as long as everyone in the world wants to be as rich as we are, and we all want to be richer than we are today, there’s no solution.

What makes it particularly hard is that this is a conversation that’s not permissible in our society. Even the English language doesn’t allow it! There are words for not having enough—shortage—but there’s no word for excess demand. There’s no such word as a “longage” of demand."

Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them. I hope that technology will improve, but it's by no means certain that solar power's EROEI will ever match the 5X of nuclear power, or the 10X of fossil fuels.

Energy is by far the most limiting constraint. With sufficient energy, you can alleviate other constraints. For instance, if you have enough energy you can desalinize ocean water and use it to irrigate crops to feed large amounts of people. You can always convert energy into other resources, such as food or steel. But if you don't have energy, you get Max Max.

Finally, the real problem is not necessarily hitting a constraint. If the U.S. reaches a point where we cannot continue to grow our resource usage intensity, that's not a catastrophe. The disaster is when you hit a constraint, but your population keeps growing, because then each person will face a declining standard of living. The other disaster is when you max out a resource and then it grows more scarce, as again, you'll face decline.

This was true 20 years ago, but now it's closer to 1% than 100% (and as that happens the cost per watt has gone down from $50 to $1 and below), though I don't have the direct reference on hand. But I think it's cited in this presentation (http://khoslaventures.com/presentations/Google-4-22-09.ppt) or this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euXfy9c3Vuw&feature=chann...)

Am I understanding you are advocating a limit on the human population? How would you suggest actually achieving that?

I don't have any answers I really believe in as yet. One incomplete idea I have been toying with is that much of human population growth is driven by the 'biological clock,' one's reproductive age ends relatively soon, and so if (a woman) wants to have children she needs to do so relatively early in life. Were lives longer and were the reproductive years extended, perhaps there would not be such a drive to reproduce so quickly; in a similar if distinct way to how reducing infant mortality reduces birthrates.

Reducing the age of reproduction is nearly as important as reducing the number of children, in terms of limiting the rate of exponential expansion. I don't know any collection of strategies that seem complete, however.

There was absolutely nothing (short of complete isolation until the development of modern medicine) which would have prevented the Indians from dying out. Even if the Europeans did nothing but bring candy, puppydogs and fireworks in trade for furs, the puppydogs would have carried diseases deadly to American Indians.

Or in simplest terms, Old World germs were way nastier. (Contrast: African settlement.)

Eurasians/Africans evolved an immune system capable of fighting infectious diseases because for thousands of years they lived in close quarters with domesticated animals and other people.

American Indians had few domesticated animals (only Llamas and Alpacas, I think), minimal over overcrowding and hence had few infectious disease. This caused them to be tall and healthy by contemporary Eurasian standards, but also made them prone to illness.

For much the same reason, I got food poisoning twice in two weeks in Egypt but my (Asian) Indian girlfriend came away unscathed.

It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc. By that logic you'd have to keep waving your wand until we were all back on the Savannah tossing spears at antelopes.

Or the Nazis?

If they had won WW2 I'm sure some people in Germany today would be calling the Holocaust "an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress" and would tell us all about the backwardness of Jewish culture, I'm sure while also being "sympathetic to the plight" of those victims too.

That doesn't mean that one group of people have the right to wipe out another culture to benefit their own, no matter what the consequences are.

I'm really shocked by some of the comments here.

And how does that scenario compare to the invasion of the United States in the 1500s?

It wasnt invaded to save the population of Europe.

The point of these questions is that it is always easy to moralize when you don't have to make personal tradeoffs. And in real life, there are often hard tradeoffs to make. So I'm trying to figure out under what conditions, if any, you would make the choice to invade. So far, you've moralized, but you've still evaded the hard questions. What would you do in any of these scenarios?

American pharmaceutical companies have this medicine, and they are operating in one of the most profitable industries that have ever existed.

Africans have no goods that are as valuable to them as medicine. Should African countries invade America to get this medicine?

But the oil example actually did happen in real life. You're the ruler of Japan in 1941. The U.S. has just cut off your oil supply. You have months left before your population faces severe hunger and deprivation. Do you invade Indonesia to take their oil? I think if I was ruler I would. How about you?

These questions echo the age-old maxim of Thucydides that "The strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must" but that doesnt mean that the actions on either side are just.

There are fundamental questions to be answered here about the legitimacy of the nation-state, and what right one group has to natural resources over another simply because of their location on Earth, when the results of this unfairness are the strengthing of one group and the weakening of another.

Say what you want about America, but it pioneered most of the rights that the entire first world enjoys, and which are spreading throughout the rest to this date. Capitalism, civil liberties, social mobility. None of them were invented here perhaps, but the whole (which is far greater than the sum of its parts) was.

There's a reason you've probably never seen a public hanging or a head on a pike. There's a reason wars victimize fewer and fewer civilians every decade. America's history is certainly not without blemishes, including this one, slavery, a few ill-advised wars, etc. But on the whole it's been an incredible windfall for humanity.

So no, I wouldn't undo the whole thing. Nothing is perfect, and to take the view that we could have made the omelet we enjoy today without cracking a few eggs along the way is naive at best.

It's hard to make any argument that the holocaust was part of a bigger package that benefited humanity, so the two are dissimilar and entirely unrelated.

However we should acknowledge the history, the lies our ancestors placated themselves with and the parallels in the lies we tell ourselves today. An example would be the premise that we are "more" civilised than other people or are in some way better.

As a westerner and an Englishman considering my history I also find it very difficult to get onto a high-horse about much. As an example in the UK there are many that complain about levels of immigration but if you look into the history of the British Empire it is very apt to have a lot of immigration here.

What's even more interesting is that we are still standing on the backs of the third-world. Sure, we've dimmed it down a little bit and abstracted it beautifully but spare a thought for the chap who made your IPhone or VCR and the number of hours they worked. Acknowledge that our life-styles cause a degree of suffering elsewhere in the world.

When we were in tribes killing animals, that was deemed necessary at that point of time, because of all the benefits of animal food and the shelter provided by the animal skin.

Then we moved into killing other humans, to gain control of their resources, because it was either them or us. I think it was correct from their viewpoint what they did.

It's unfair to judge them using our morality, maybe our descendants will judge us in the future for wasting our natural resources, who knows ?!

This seems completely unreasonable to us but the same was true between e.g. people and animals, europeans and native americans, japanese and chinese (see the nanking massacre).

The "evolution of empathy" is probably still an ongoing process for which our descendants will consider us barbarians.

However, I am more inclined to not do anything at all because we survived so far, and there have been existential threats in the past. I'm even more biased by the fact that if we turn back the clock and fix some of these genocides, I wouldn't exist. It's hard to balance the conflicting philosophies :(

There is, of course, no way of knowing, but if American civilizations had thrived instead, and continued to be "peaceful and democratic" as the article put it, it seems somewhat plausible that we wouldn't be running into these "Tragedy of the Commons" problems... or, at least, that we would be making good progress on mitigating them.

I'm pretty sure that's wishful thinking, though. I'm still interested in what sort of cultures and technologies would have come out of that seed.

Everybody knows that the past is the past and can't be undone. But that doesn't mean that we should lie to ourselves about it. What really matters is what we do here and now in the world. If you condone such actions in the past then it is natural that you will condone them in the present and future as well.

Of course some natives were hunter gatherers and they would have to change their lifestyles, so I am sure there would be some battles, but if the hunter gatherers had an option to assimilate, they would not fight to the death either, they would eventually see that there is no way out after losing a couple of battles. So there may be some war but there would not be genocide. As it happened, they only fought to the death because they knew there wasn't another option.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, relations between the Huron and the Iroquois consisted of constant, low-level warfare (which could be brutal, and involved post facto ritual torture).

So in the early-mid 17th century, the French traders were generally allied to the Huron, while the Iroquois were allies of the Dutch, then English. Both sides sought trade monopolies with the Europeans, but the Iroquois, the Mohawk in particular, acquired heavy armaments first. They then used those armaments to slaughter, and in fact, pretty much eliminate the Huron. (I'm glossing over a lot of detail. See Francis Jennings' many books on this period.)

Now the Iroquois weren't tricked into doing it. They did it because they didn't like the Huron and wanted what they had. The Dutch and English supplied guns and "monetary" incentives, but the Iroquois were morally responsible.

I think that pattern is most obvious in the example I'm trying to describe, but it was hardly unique. There's a tendency to romanticize the Natives (coughAvatarcough) but they could be as filled with hatred and lust as any of the Europeans. Not all of them, of course, but neither were the Europeans all alike.

I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar.

I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care.

However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.

One planetary race driving another into extinction is a universal, cookie-cutter sci-fi plot device. See Independence Day or Ender's Game. I suppose this was the only one where the victims had some sort of aboriginal-sounding accent, but I wouldn't take it as social commentary.

Then again, it's a made up world in a sci-fi movie; there is a long list of things that wouldn't be "implausible."

Do those historically connected with a particular place throughout its history never experience cruelty? How does one explain the slaughter in Rwanda and similar places if tribes living in one place are said to be imbued with an innate purity that should exempt them from having the same impulses toward evil and genocide that characterize the rest of the world?

As I ponder these things, and consider the lurid facts depicted in this article, my intuition tells me that this might be as much a case of selective reporting as anything else - reporting that seeks to shape a narrative consistent with a particular worldview held by the author of the piece.

I know there have been atrocities in the United States and in the Americas generally. But there is undoubtedly something very good as well to be said for the United States in particular, where (whatever its shortcomings and inconsistencies) freedom has been upheld for the benefit of all sorts of people and with which most of the world pales in comparison in terms of opportunities, or at least that is how umpteen generations of immigrations scrambling to get here have seen it.

What makes Avatar such a great movie is that A) so many people are so sure it's "about" a particular historical or current situation that they care about and B) they're all different. I've seen Vietnam, I've seen Iraq, I've seen Afghanistan, I've seen South America or the Americas as a whole, I've seen Africa, I've seen climate change, man, I've seen a lot of different interpretations.

James Cameron FTW!