Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Left: Aella, 2023. Right: noemamag, 2025.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Reminds me of this linked quote below from Bob Ettinger. https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0xb0ba6b1a https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0xd9215248 It was daring enough in the early transhumanist days to confront the religious dogma by suggesting that humans take control of their own destiny and plan their species' development (aging reversal, eugenics, gene therapy, etc.) instead of letting random mutations brutally select the fittest specimen. Seeing it applied to Mother Nature is even wilder. Not that we don't have de facto stewardship of other species on this planet, whether we want it or not. But if there's anything that economic history has taught us in the 20th century, it's that it's incredibly audacious to believe that we can substitute nature's laissez-faire, free-market approach to evolution with centralized planning, and expect superior results at a planetary scale. The downsides of a failed experiment in that regard are asymmetrically large (e.g., food chain / ecosystem collapses)
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
The difference between central planning on humans and central planning on nature is that as civilization progresses, our ability to understand nature improves, and any specific intervention becomes more and more tractable over time, but humans themselves also become more complex, so the same thing does not happen for interventions directed toward humans.
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