I would agree with you husband, but really, your hang up is partly semantics.

I would say your husband, myself, and most atheists would view humans as a natural product of the universe, so in that sense anything we do would be natural - even creating things like "artificial intelligence". I personally don't like using the word "artificial" for things like that. Call it man-made if you must as a distinction, but even AI, should it arise, would simply be another evolutionary step to me - a step, beyond carbon based life, that I think is inevitable if we last long enough as a species. Artificial and natural are not mutually exclusive terms in the way natural and supernatural are for example.

When you think about it, ALL species change the environment, and humans have been doing it for eons - we simply notice it more, because we are egocentric and do have a very significant impact on the environment. To put it into perspective, humans have practiced animal husbandry, the selective breeding of animals, for thousands of years - this is why we have domesticated farm animals, dogs, wheat and corn - pigs chickens and wild wheat were quite different no so long ago. Now we can actually manipulate genomes - but in the end, genetic engineering isn't really all that different than what we've been doing for a long, long time. And husbandry is just another selective pressure like predator/prey relationships. Why we need to call it artificial when we selectively breed animals and plants for the table and call it natural when tooth, fang and claw results in sharper toothed cheetahs and faster gazelles is beyond me. The degree or the pace with which we do such things may be of concern, and come back to bite us in the end, but there have been plenty of species before us that have literally evolved themselves into extinction.

And yes, we certainly should be concerned with what we do to this planet and the things that live on it with us, because, in the end, our survival as a species depends on it.

But in the end, the human race, as we know it, likely WON'T survive. Most species don't. We'll either destroy ourselves, or a tenacious virus will or a meteor or something like that, or we'll continue to evolve. Should there be human descendants on Earth a million years from now, they'd be recognizable to us, but they'd certainly not be same - and not necessarily more advanced.

We're a blip on the screen, a transitional form, like every other species that ever was or will be.

That certainly doesn't mean we ought not be concerned about the here and now.

Hope that helped and didn't muddy things even more for you.

Or we should bomb the Sun now, before it attacks us!

Well they're saying all the methane locked up in the arctic permafrost that's now melting is going to make climate change much worse than previously anticipated so we could become another Venus long before the sun does anything to us.

EXC, best muslim spin off joke... ever!

I think you may have missed the sarcastic nature of my comment.

For the expansion of the sun, is a national security concern. Ask John McCaine.

I should have commented on this before. I disagree, vehemetley on these some of these points.

Unless we are talking about reducing the total human population, cities ARE the way to go.

Cities are MUCH more efficient than suburban and rural modes of life. This is due, in large part to the compactness of the entity. You need less material to house and supply people in a city - you don't have to run sewers and power lines miles upon miles to supply people outside of a city, if more people lived in the city the amount of fuel we waste in commute would be drastically reduced (there are many times more people driving 10+ miles to work in the US than there are in other places), in more concentrated locales we'd lose less energy in transmission over long distant power lines (which is a huge factor world wide), mass transit is more viable in an urban setting, then let's not forget the lawn mowers suburbia uses to maintain their yards, and not forget the fuel it takes to truck supplies to remote locales. By many estimates, the carbon footprint of a person living in Manhattan is 30% less than the average American for these reasons.

People in cities tend not to rely on, need, or even own a car. They can ride a bike to work or take the subway, they don't need to drive 30+ miles a day just to work. And multi-domicile buildings are AWAYS more efficient than single homes - because you end up sharing resources. A high-rise has a MUCH smaller footprint, physically and from an energy consumption POV, than an single homes per capita.

Cities are GOOD for the environment - they increase efficiency and concentrate the harm we do, rather than spread it everywhere. In most cities, you can take a 15 minute drive and find areas essentially untouched by humans.

The ONLY way living in bumble fuck is helping the planet is if you live in bumble fuck self sufficiently and supply all or most of your energy and commodity needs - or farm and produce for hundreds or thousands.

Personally, I think the greenest way to live is live in a city, walk or bike or take the train to work, and if you have a balcony or small yard grow some veges on it. That's certainly better than living 20 miles outside the city and driving to work every day.

No doubt, but this is not something people are going to be receptive too. Mandating how and when we can reproduce would certainly bother me.

I wouldn't tell people they shouldn't have any kids. But why does anyone these days need more than two? That's plenty to satify your m/paternal instincts, keep your kid from being an only child, etc. What extra benefit does anyone get from 3, 4, 5 kids? It usually just drains the family financially and emotionally. I've seen a lot of couples that were the picture perfect happy family with 1-2 kids but when the 3rd kid came the relationships strained and things went downhill from there.

And that Vagina Clown Car woman should have been forced to have her tubes tied after the 10th kid. Get real.

Oh no, I wasn't addressing you. I don't have any kids myself and have never had a very strong desire to have them so, not knowing what it's like to have kids, I just hesitate to take the position that I know whether others should or shouldn't have kids. That's all I meant by that.

And I agree with you. I'm unsure if I'll ever have kids, but right now, I've no desire to. Maybe if I meet some sexy, brilliant epidemiologist or something like that, I may have ONE.

But that's part of the problem too, the more educated of us tend to have far fewer children than - well the idiots. I was smart enough to use protection at 16 even though I was sexually active, and I continue to use protection to this day - for a variety of factors; I don't want and STD, I cannot afford a child without a stable relationship, I could not afford to give that child the education opportunities it would deserve like I had, IOW, I'm responsible.

Now how many people have kids because they didn't want to wear a rubber? How many people get pregnant before 18? How many people have grandparents in their thirties?

The people who understand consequences are already responsible. The vast majority of people are not responsible - that's why they have six kids, that's why they lease Escalades and Hummers, that's why they took subprime mortgages. Until such behavior has more serious consequences, it will continue, why shouldn't it? Such behavior is essentially encouraged by society, religion and governments.

This one is always going to be a problem. As you said, our genes are smarter than our brains and, as far as the gene is concerned, raising another's young is an enormous waste of time and energy. We will always have a stronger desire to raise children carrying our own genes.

This brings up a strange issue. I've often been told that not wanting to have children makes me shelfish. People who have children are apparently more selfless than I am. Where does that idea come from? If you think about it having children is actually a very selfish act. We have children for our own emotional needs and to satisfy our selfish gene. We have children for our own benefit, not anyone elses. Not society's benefit, certainly, since we hardly need more people. Not even the child's benefit. The not-yet-conceived child hardly knows it's missing out on anything if it never gets conceived. And are you really doing the child a favor by bringing it into a world where it can experience stress, war, disease, climate change, crowding from over populatin, and diminishing resources and, ultimately,  the pain and disability of old age and death? As far as I can tell the only motivations for having children are strictly selfish ones. The people willing to sacrifice their genetic line for the sake of the environment by not having children are the less selfish ones.

Scallops, please.

 Sure we're part of nature, but let's not forget that we're just making our situation bad for ourselves, not for the varieties of bacteria that would flourish in any circumstances we could possibly create. Not to mention the varieties of insects that would enjoy the extra space should we find ourselves unable to sustain our massive population.

Life goes on without us, and the earth has definitely been in less liveable condition than it is now. Too bad about the human swarm, though: we were getting pretty impressed with ourselves.