The "Abolitionists" want to genetically create a cruelty free world
 

I think I rarely ever hear such nonsense - except in some of the discussions or debates here. Finally I figured out where some of the people I have debating here on this kind of topic got their ideas from ;) - or maybe they just had the same idea - or the source is elsewhere. But seriously - re-engineering the world to make it "cruelty free" with vegan lions and the lot? This is what self-proclaimed "ecologically thinking" techno-optimists dream of when they are high on the drug of technology and science? I am glad that they did not try to make Pandora that way, but rather there are predators there - so if Pandora would be (as some people seem to think) a genetically engineered world, at least it was not engineered by "Abolitionists" ;) !

Reprogramming Predators : Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World

Dear god. What the hell kind of pansy thought this up -_-

A world without predation and 'cruelty' would be such an overpopulated and horrible place to live. They have not thought this through at all, and it is not their place to make such changes. Seriously what is going on in these sicko's heads :angry:

Not sure what the point of this is at all. What is this supposed to achieve?

A world where nature has been rewritten so it falls in to line with human ideals that even humans cannot uphold.

They're either trolling or completely insane.

what the fuq :xD:

Well, no, because they're stuck in a nonsensical half-way position. There's no real point to doing what they suggest, because either we're OK with nature continuing as it is, or we're not. If we're not, why not just get rid of it entirely and rebuild the world exactly as we find most pleasing? :P

Who? Me? Nah - see, there are people who actually believe such crap:
This is exactly what these people in the link I copied want - get rid of nature and create some sort of world that is as they want it - without cruelty. Though yes, they seem to want at least to take the present natural world as a base for their redesigned world - unlike you rproposal.

I need to think hard which idea is the one that is more insane...

Right, I'm not sure what the motivation for such a thing would be, unless the whole idea was just a crazy "what if" moment, more about could it be done than actually doing it.

Why keep nature around if you have the biotech to do everything it does? (As they appear to assume as part of their premise.)

I meant the people actually writing the article :P. Total biology fail.

The motivation is clear ans Silver Stag wrote it. They want to apply "civilized" human ideals that even "civilized" humans cannot adhere to (end of violence and cruelty, love happiness and rainbows with unicorns) to the natural world. And to get there, they basically have to dometicate, break and reassemble the natural world. Essentially they are creating a garden instead of wilderness - a garden that only holds domesticated and in this case even engineered life. I assume they are motivated by that false idea that evolution and progress has a goal and a direction toward something "more advanced" - that they have to improve the imprefection of life according to how they define that imperfection. And its not as remote as one thinks. Yesterday there was a show on TV about transhumanism and the lot - they boasted about all the things that will be possible to be done soon. So if they are true, technically this would seem just beyond grasp. I think there are certainly many people who would like to see this happening if it was possible. Thinking of all the vegans out there...

Unless of course these people do have no value for a natural world anyways but rather want to abolish it:
... which just makes clear that some people just did not get any of the messages from Avatar that the natural world and the culture of indigenous peoples have a value of their own and that it is not all just about utilitarianism and efficiency.

Thee are people who say all sorts of rubbish, it doesn't make it plausible. In this case, they fail to understand population control via predator/prey - prey would breed out of all control, while the predators would be in direct competition with them, rather than a mutually fluctuating population level. The majority of people who say "more advanced" in such a sense know nothing about genetics specifically because it's a fallacy that change is always directed, so I doubt that applies here - but then again, I doubt these people know anything about genetics either or they'd realise the impossibility of this - reading wikipedia does not equate to detailed knowledge.

At the risk of misunderstanding him as I have before, I think Clarke was pointing out the flaw in your reasoning - that they want to change Earth as part of preserving it rather than simply replacing it, which doesn't actually seem to be the case, and as such, they should be given no more credence than flat-earthers or the 'zeitgeist' group.

Did you notice the description of Eywa-like distributed intelligence systems? Powerful, though perhaps not completely human-level AI is apparently part of the premise.

More likely, they are entirely aware of this lack of goal - and bypass it, by replacing the randomly evolved lifeforms with life that is, objectively, designed to survive better than that which is currently existing.

If significantly transhuman intelligence comes into play, you are about to lose the game, because intelligence is literally the key to doing everything else. If any sort of bootstrapping or feedback-loop intelligence appears on the scene, you might as well bow down and start worshipping. There's not a lot else you can do, and nothing you could do would matter. :P

But how do we decide what culture is valuable, and which is not?

And don't say that all culture is equally valuable; it's clearly not. If it were, you'd positively support assimilating all the natives in the world into the 21st century hivemind. After all, the cultural and artistic output via the Internet is vastly larger, both in absolute terms and in proportion, than any other culture in history, perhaps by orders of magnitude.

I was trying to prompt a justification of why nature as it stands is automatically better than some other hypothetical nature-like construct. The apparent implicit one is, "Because it's traditional", but that would be fallacious, and so I'm sure it's not the one aurora is using. ;)