I work in biotech, and effectively the entire field is rifling through Nature’s LEGO bin to find the parts it needs. There’s a weird overlap happening here of environmental collapse at the same moment that we’re learning just how rich that diversity is, what it means, how to use it. Hell, transgenic rices and grains - the engine of the green revolution - were all remixed landrace species, which are in danger now of being replaced by monocrops.
The loss of species is a tragedy because it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tragedy because we’re destroying our inheritance at an alarming rate before we ever really get to see what it is or what it could be. Billions of years of prior art, gone.
Evolution is a process that takes a lot of energy. Every lifetime is a lifetime of energy that has been harnessed to continue the process. So when a species goes extinct, it's not just the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed.
Sort of like expending a bunch of energy to train a neural network, and then rm -rf the weights.
If you want to be pedantic, the correct term is probably entropy. That being living irreversibly increased the entropy of the universe, and we wasted that increase in entropy.
"energy" the way OP is using it is bordering on woo. I was simply reminding them of the proper use of the word.
I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.
OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice.
And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.
Sorry. Let me clarify. For simplicity's sake, consider this hypothetical:
You spend 1 terawatt hour of energy powering a datacenter to come up with a novel protein for a drug by simulating protein interactions.
Your competitor studies an already existing fungus, which may have expended that amount of energy over the combined lifetime of all of its ancestors to arrive at the same design, and gets the novel protein "for free."
One of you had to pay the energy cost, and the other didn't. The fungus is "free" and when it is destroyed, "it" -- that energy expenditure -- is lost forever.
It's not a ridiculous hypothetical because many such things (medicines, food, etc) come from living beings. Some from very obscure living beings. And some that are impossible to buy at any price, like living things that pollinate food, regulate the soil, stuff like that. Thermodynamically it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct but I think we can do a little better than that!
The existence of any proteins in any fungus is not an automatic solution for anything - even more energy has to be expended to find it, purify it, test it, and notice any benefit for anything. There are likely a billion such proteins in nature right now that will never be discovered as useful for anything.
Targeted research is likely a shorter and less expensive route to "finding" breakthrough medicines, especially since technology evolves exponentially.
> I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased.
It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction.
It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe).
> then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.
I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level.
It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context.
> OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems.
This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.
I work in biotech as well, and the idea that the extinction of 21 species from an estimate 8M+ species has any sort of meaningful impact on biomedical research or the understanding of basic biology is ludicrous.
Further your post is histrionic. ‘Environmental collapse’, ‘destroying our inheritance’, ‘alarming rate’, suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda rather than rationally appraising the current state of the ever-changing environment and biological ecosystem.
I find your take quite odd, considering your background. Biodiversity is not a hit points bar that knocks out your player character when it falls below a certain level. You remove a single keystone species and the whole local ecosystem collapses, creating a butterfly effect of disasters.
Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative?
At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.
not so ludicrous. Some species are more important than the other. In terms of biomedicine, the lack of a single species having evolved a unique substance could change the human history.
Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.
You missed the bit where the person you're replying to said they knew something about the field. The loss of some species in a genus of Hawaiian honeycreepers is not tragic because of the potential for making medicines out of honeycreepers.
But we will not realize it until 2073. This 21 are species that went extinct between 1960's and 1980's.
My money would be into the molluscs lost as collateral damages by the effects of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the birds by a combination of touristic development plus Mikonia tree invasion starting on 60's and 70's.
Oh well then i guess it doesnt matter we destroy the earth. Fire up those coal plants and slap some more meat on the barbecue, nothing matters after all because things have happened in the past!
The timing and placement of your statement comes off as a challenge to the original statement. It appears you’re implying that what we’re doing today is ok because it is part of a natural process.
While true, we also have agency to transcend the natural process or perpetuate it.
Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.
Maybe. If that helpes us develop better medicines or food crops it sounds like the smart thing to do. Instead of waiting around for 2 million years until eco-system has recovered.
However, in my opinion, it's a rather uninteresting hypothetical because human activity absolutely does play a huge role in the extinction of species today.
This is a lot closer to my thought as well. No one is saying extinction is beneficial. However, in the grand scheme of things, how critical was the unique Catfish that was only found in 1 river in Ohio? How many species have come and gone completely undetected?
Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.
Bot: claim of role, rank relevant to the discussion + I agree with you butt (missing) + counter claim or talking points.
"it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry?
Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.
That's the wrong reason to mourn Bachman's Warbler. I suspect you're a nice person but your post completely misses the beauty and the tragedy of these species, instead focusing on a non-existent advantage to humans they might represent. That's the big mistake of the last decade: conservation and environmentalism are not about making the planet more beneficial for humans. There's plenty of genomes around for your transgenics, don't worry. Our duty and mission is to prevent habitat loss and the extinctions it causes.
I don't think you're a cold-hearted extractivist. That's what I meant when I said I thought you were a nice person (though I totally failed to come up with a turn of phrase to match yours!).
The thing is I am utterly depressed by the way that "climate change" has caused an entire generation to think that conservation is about managing atmospheric chemistry and planetary climate. Conservation is about preventing habitat loss and extinction. Human well-being does not trump avoidance of habitat loss in all cases by any means. And so, I criticized your post for (somewhat analogously to climate change) suggesting an utterly spurious reason for extinction avoidance when no-one should need any reason.
But the generation of people who care about climate change (not you, I'm just ranting) by and large don't know the difference between a eucalyptus/pine monoculture that results from one of their afforestation schemes and a natural forest habitat. Climate change avoidance may well be an important thread of conservation, but the fact that we have lost the simple rallying call of "Save the rainforests" threatens to be a tragedy, and if it turns out so, I will partially blame the last 20 years of climate change discourse.
Vice had an episode years ago where they followed cannabis breeders as they went to the Democratic Republic of Congo in search of the original Congolese landrace strain [1].
That Bachman's warbler is beautiful. Such a shame.
> “The bird had a ‘buzzy’ song, and the song added to the beauty of the bird, and when combined that added to the magic of North Carolina. We lost a little magic when we lost the species. And what’s really sad is that the Bachman’s warbler was abundant at the turn of the 20thcentury, but by 1950 it was noted as one of the rarest birds in North America.”
This hurts, especially knowing that it's a story that we've unfortunately told a thousand times in the past hundred years.
I wonder what the story is behind the Getty photo of it in that article. It doesn’t look like a photo that could have been taken in the 60s or the 80s. Does that mean it’s misidentified on Getty?
I can't find that photo on Getty so I'm not sure if it's mislabeled, or the editor just searched for "warbler", or got it from somewhere else and forgot to change the photo credit from an article template or something.
Edit: It seems to be from Shutterstock and is labeled correctly https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/yellowbrowed-warble.... My best guess is an overworked web producer was told to find a photo for this article, searched for "warbler" in some integrated stock photo search engine, picked this one and copy/pasted the wrong credit.
I went on a microcrusade of sending correction requests last week after a series of articles (coincidentally, also in North Carolina and also about macrobiology) were published about a chigger-borne illness coming to the state, but all of the stories used a lede image of a red velvet mite, not a chigger.
The reason? It's one of the first images that pop up when you punch 'chigger' into Google, and it appears to be licensed (and mislabeled) by Getty. Tracking the image back to its original source, it was clearly identified as a red velvet mite.
I wish publications wouldn't do this. A completely random lede image would be better than showing a picture of an animal that people will now believe is the one the article was talking about.
That's an interesting point. I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with the bird. After some searching it seems it could be a different apecies in that photo. It seems the depictions of the Bachman's warbler show it to have more black on top. I have no idea though.
No, not really. The rate of extinction has skyrocketed above the baseline extinction rate in the last 100-200 years, and it has a very specific and known cause: human industrialization and spread.
Humans already started it when we killed off all the largest land animals outside of Africa 13 000 years ago. You know Elephants and Mammoths were found all over earth before then. Thank humans for the lack of Elephants in America.
As far as I know, there's only one group of pure-bred bison. All of the other bison in the U.S. are effectively genetic hybrids between bison and cattle.
There were other, pure bred herds (e.g. Yellowstone, Canadian, etc).
And as this points out, the remnants of hybridization efforts were minimal, even in the direct Goodnight, Jones, and Bedson herds:
>> "These brief experiments form the basis for the controversy surrounding cattle genetic introgression in bison today. A study conducted for her Doctoral Dissertation by Lauren Dobson of Texas A&M University concluded that bison descended from those herds have the equivalent of 1 percent cattle genetic introgression within their genome."https://bisoncentral.com/advantage-item/ranchers-role-in-bis...
At the end of the day, bison didn't take (genetically or economically) to hybridization, as the hybrids were less hardy than pure bred bison.
He's presumably referring to a geologic timescale. This [1] graph is telling. There have been numerous extinction events, even before the existence of humanity. So the survival rate of species looks much more like a sine wave than it does some sort of linear graph. Life, even on a species level, is brief. It creates an interesting balance between humanity and nature. The one solution to this problem is to expand - make life multiplanetary, and not just human life. Human industrialization is certainly causing plentiful destruction, yet it will also likely be the one thing that may possibly save the lives of countless species.
So for instance the most popularly known mass extinction event was the dinosaurs, like caused by an asteroid impact some ~15km large. If there was such an asteroid on an impact course today, we could probably detect it a bit before it impacted - but not do a whole heck of a lot more. We could launch every single nuke we have and it would be like throwing baseballs at a semi-truck. By contrast when it lands, it would be the equivalent of hundreds of millions of nukes going off, and the ash of the impact would completely blot out the sky. Those who survived the initial impact would die from either starvation, freezing, or lack of oxygen as all plants and wildlife gradually died off.
Anyhow, space tech is important. And we're only able to achieve such thanks to human industrialization and spread. Paradoxical, but such is the nature of all technological progress which invariably brings problems ultimately only solved by even more advances which, again, bring their own problems. It makes life feel like a game, or maybe we just make games modeled after life.
> He's presumably referring to a geologic timescale. This [1] graph is telling. There have been numerous extinction events, even before the existence of humanity.
All of those were caused by global Earth-level geological events or extraterrestrial objects such as massive asteroids. The latest extinction event is caused by a single species. It is absolutely an exceptional extinction event and the only one of its kind.
> Human industrialization is certainly causing plentiful destruction, yet it will also likely be the one thing that may possibly save the lives of countless species.
Technology will never not create more problems as it attempts to solve problems caused by other technology.
The point about technology is that there is no choice. It's not like if we did nothing, everything would just live happily ever after. Every species on this planet is living on borrowed time. Literally the only choice for the persistence is advancement and expansion, which of course will also cause numerous negative effects along its course.
Also, the first [1] (and one of the most extreme) extinction events ever was indeed caused by a single species, cyanobacteria. Prior to the evolutionary development of photosynthesis, there was plentiful simple life on the planet. The evolutionary emergence of photosynthesis resulted in a dramatic and rapid introduction of oxygen into Earth's atmosphere which was exceptionally toxic to the existing abiotic species. We only think of oxygen as a good thing, because we evolved in its presence. If there was an advanced species that managed to evolve in abiotic circumstance, we'd probably look as weird to them as a creature that breathes gaseous arsenic would look to us!
If the goal is returning the planet to their original status of lifeless floating rock for billions of years, we are doing a spectacular job in just a glimpse of time. I can imagine how puzzling this will appear in the fossil record some millions years from now.
I think has been calculated already that in the order of tens of species get extinct daily. And the rate is growing. Putting a spotlight in some particular ones a single day won’t stop the drain that we are causing in numbers much higher than the ones show here.
I think part of the point is that we tried to save these specific species and failed. That doesn’t bode well that we can’t even intentionally save species from extinction.
And from the comment about the Bachman's warbler, its extinction process started over half a century ago. So we're already lagging this problem by decades if not centuries at this point.
unless humans act in a large group to change how we follow the laws of economics & political science, we will suffer incredibly over the next few decades.
But we aren't. We're not doing enough.
There is a bullet coming towards our faces, and we are not moving out of the way.
I don't know how I'm supposed to graduate into this climate and be an optimistic member of society.
Well, just to elaborate briefly to give you something to build on.
I see the current loss of complexity and volume of life as dual to the expansion of complexity and volume of human consumption (via its displacing space and energy demand).
Human consumption is happening because of 1. the will to consume and 2. the means to exercise that will.
2. is enabled by technology with its inherent externalities and we're very familiar with it here.
1. is caused by endogenous tendencies to increase comfort and decrease pain (the idea you have yourself that maybe you don't want to starve or freeze in winter or that 50% of your children shouldn't die by mysterious forces) and by exogenous factors such as manufactured demand (the ideas you likely wouldn't have yourself and that are inserted by a third party e.g. for the newest throwaway fashion, cruise trip, avocado sandwich, smartphone refresh, ... this list is endless).
Demand is manufactured in the form of what boils down to (highly effective!) thought intrusion or hijacking of the reward system (ads, influencers, "haptic" marketing) most of which delivered via information systems. It is here that "one could" immediately intervene and get the 'reduce' going in the 'reduce, reuse, recycle'.
Additionally there's this cultural/education issue that we have become nature-blind. Ask any random person and they'll tell you they love nature and animals. And then they'll stone-cold show you that 'beautiful' picture of <dead landscape in tourist location> they shot from their line cruise (speaking from personal experience here). This is where we could use information technology and education again to shape beliefs.
A big problem is how you'd actually implement all this without having society blow up over this mysterious spectre of 'faltering economy' that is going to happen when the economic activity associated with bullshit consumption goes away (20 hour workweek anyone?).
There's obviously much more to write and things get really complex when you factor in all the different interrelated systems that have metastasized to the point they are now.
Plus we're not really aligned on this issue. I'd wager there's a significant chunk that just doesn't care and thinks it's a lame sideshow as long as it doesn't affect them until they die. I'd say it's because they have no idea what they're talking about (nature-blindness again, and forget about the rest).
Oh and what my last sentence meant: I claim if we could get to a state where we mount a giant concerted action by a sufficient number of decision makers that realign our collective activity towards preservation, we could harness the knowledge and technology we have now to execute successfully on that vision.
It's a big claim and a messy (but not implausible to solve) problem, the incalculability of which I encoded in the apostrophes around just ;)
fyi, I'd love to have you on a podcast ep. I run an actual radio show (like, over the airwaves) on sunday nights through my college. shoot me a dm I think we share a lot of the same beliefs on this :)
> A big problem is how you'd actually implement all this without having society blow up over this mysterious spectre of 'faltering economy' that is going to happen when the economic activity associated with bullshit consumption goes away (20 hour workweek anyone?).
See also: countries switching which side of the road they drive on (with lots more variables).
Perhaps for reasons similar to why the dishes from breakfast are still sitting dirty in my sink rather than clean in the cupboard.
> I'd wager there's a significant chunk that just doesn't care and thinks it's a lame sideshow as long as it doesn't affect them until they die. I'd say it's because they have no idea what they're talking about (nature-blindness again, and forget about the rest).
Even this may be optimistic, as it is.
>>>> The systems we use for coordinating our actions and beliefs aren't sufficiently sophisticated....and we are too indoctrinated to realize it.
>>> The (information) systems are actually incredibly sophisticated, but they are aligned with extraction not preservation.
>>> It "just" takes a sufficient pivot in will, a couple decades and this shit's solved.
>> Do we have any that can reliably detect and surface the errors/flaws in your comment though, in a productive/positive manner? ;)
> Oh and what my last sentence meant: I claim if we could get to a state where we mount a giant concerted action by a sufficient number of decision makers that realign our collective activity towards preservation, we could harness the knowledge and technology we have now to execute successfully on that vision.
This seems like a substantially (to a materially important degree) but different (improved) meaning - and yes, I am being "pedantic" (and evasive). Flaws remain though - is further refinement possible?
> It's a big claim and a messy (but not implausible to solve) problem, the incalculability of which I encoded in the apostrophes around just ;)
Similar to the pile of dishes in my sink....I should "just" go wash them! Nah, maybe later.
Discovered, not emerged. There are not infinite amount of species, and the number is decreasing at thousands of times the background extinction rate. Is a net loss for the system, no matter if we managed to discover them before they got extinct.
Of course, climate change and human civilization is causing a selection process that may lead to new species. But the rate of change is too fast for even them to survive to what is coming.
I’m pretty sure I’m plagiarizing from somewhere, but there’s a certain distinct sadness in being the last songbird of your species: singing a mating call that no other creature will heed, no matter how skillfully it is sung. When it dies, the world has a little less joy than before.
In Costa Rica, in a burrow underground //
Climb to the surface, blink my eyes and look around //
I'm all alone here as I try my tiny song //
Claim my place beneath the sky, but I won't be here for long //
I sang all night //
The moon shone on me through the trees //
No brothers left //
And there'll be no more after me //
My theory is that humans inject this into it. My observation and feelings are that animals see themselves as part of a much larger whole and don’t worry too much about being the “final whatever”, it’s just a concept.
Ironically it’s our quest to not be the last songbird that seems to keep ruining the planet for the songbirds.
I think we humans overestimate how unique we are. We're at the top of a wide spectrum of intelligence, but it's startling the degree to which even secularly-minded people see our species as different in kind than the rest of the animal kingdom—I normally associate that kind of human exceptionalism with religion.
I'm not familiar enough with birds to speak about them, but other mammalian species absolutely understand loneliness, and understand the difference between having human friends and having friends of their same species.
I agree with you that I think there is some fundamental truth with humans not being any different than animals, or really plants, etc for that matter. That life is a stubborn, collective, anti-entropic force fighting - for a bit at least - against the cold eventuality of the universe. And in that picture it’s difficult to place humans as logically superior to or separate from any other force of life.
On the other hand, I have a hard time squaring that with practical morality. If all life is equally valuable, we all commit the crime of murder just to eat and survive. That does not feel quite right. And if we say that life is maybe not so valuable, then does it mean the crime of murder itself is not wrong? I think that also doesn’t feel right.
So maybe it’s not that all life is equally valuable, but rather life is valuable. Equality is a human construction, after all - unchecked nature is much more vicious in dealing with inequality in the margins. Life consumes life, that is how it is. It is a cycle that doesn’t quite repeat, and there is no destruction of life in sustenance, only transformation.
And maybe that is what happens when one species - or a million - dies out. Perhaps that is nature’s brutal callousness in action, and as such is a perfectly natural thing to happen. I don’t think I quite like that either.
Every time I have a deep think on the way things are, I’m reminded of the Buddhists, who I think found at least some truth in it all: “life is suffering”. I’m not sure there’s much more to it than that.
I mean is it that unreasonable to think that humans are radically different from any other species we know? Because we obviously are. I don't see any dogs writing on this forum to dispute the uniqueness of humans any time soon. There are clearly many things that we humans can do and no other animal can. A study about chimps using sticks to hunt termites isn't going to be enough to bridge that gap.
"Deserved" is a human concept. Pretty much all 'smart' animals (orcas, dolphins, bonobos, etc.) engage in extremely cruel behaviors towards other species or even to their kind. They are no better than us. We're the only ones who are having moral qualms over it (and we should).
By this logic, cuttlefish must think we’re low iq deafmutes because they don’t see us communicating via variously uv-sensitive patterns on our skin as we trundle along in the ocean.
Something as pea brained as a groundhog has calls to describe the shape, color, threat level, and individuality of any number of warning calls. Orcas literally have memes. I’m sure if dolphins could use the internet we’d get so much “dead fish on head” r/fashionadvice.
I’m actually more in agreement with you than I think you realise. We are not “special” at all. We have no right making other species go extinct. Animals for sure feeling suffering, loneliness, sadness etc.
That fact we’ve caused this level of suffering is abhorrent to me.
I agree that other animals feel loneliness too. But not the same level of anxiety about “what if I don’t exist, or my species or bloodline” doesn’t go on.
This level of anxiety is reserved for us, in the same way we’re worried about the stock market or economy not growing year on year. This is our gift.
> But not the same level of anxiety about “what if I don’t exist, or my species or bloodline” doesn’t go on.
To some extent, sure. But I think some of this is us habituating to pets who were sterilized prior to puberty. In post-pubertal animals the drives to have and rear children are pretty strong.
What if it's easier to reverse our current course of action than to make a vault of all the animals? I mean even just collecting sperm and embryos from lizards seems kinda insane. Amphibian, fish, mollusk, and insect species are far more numerous and at far more risk.
I love the sentiment but the time to reverse our course was probably in the 60s. We’ve fiddled with all the knobs and dials and we’re in charge of the problem now.
We wanted to play God and now we’ve been given the chance :)
I would assume you would just take genetic samples in the easiest, and most durable form.
I think the answer to your question is that if it's easier to reverse our course then a bunch of species will be dead with no way to revive them. Easier does not mean easy, and reversing course is IMO next to impossible, so it bei g harder than that just means it won't happen.
So it's not a vault it's a digital archive. Still the action of scanning in the DNA for future use. Just on lizards still, biggest project humanities ever taken.
I would assume you'd want that digital archive in a vault for the same reasons we put seeds kn the seed vault. Like the seed vault, the only copy doesn't need to (nor should it) exist just in the vault, but that's a good location to make sure at least one copy survives.
I'm still talking about how hard it is... just for the 7000 known species of lizards.
"We show that as of June 2021, 3,278 unique animals have had their nuclear genome sequenced and the assembly made publicly available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database (10). This translates to 0.2% of all animal species."
It's a huge project! Just lizards are double the number of complete screens we have.
We should definitely try and get the tech going. It will have uses to recover even endangered species in the near future, but it's not a smart use of our resources for saving us "after" something happens.
Well, you said digital, but that's not the only way to do it. Blood in a stabilizer of some sort (if it exists) or some other carrier of genetic material was more along the lines of what I meant. That's much easier to do (maybe? I'm not sure what it takes to stabilize it over a long time frame), but takes a lot more physical space.
I agree it's not something that is necessarily immediately useful right after a problem, but it's something better to have than not. Reconstructing the wooly mammoth DNA required filling in somewhat large gaps with elephant DNA if I recall correctly, so even if we are able to resurrect the wooly mammoth with it, it won't really be a wooly mammoth, it will be mostly one, to the best of our ability. Something definitive tracking species would likely be greatly appreciated by future generations.
Building a giant vault is definitely easier than convincing people to change the way they live. Putting aside whether the book of Genesis is literally true or not, the tale of Noah’s Ark certainly describes how people behave correctly.
Human violence and lack of morality causes a flood/rising sea levels and now we're talking about an Ark where the enlightened will spare the other animals from destruction that is for humanity to face.
Way to pollute the planet so much the bible becomes an instruction manual lol (no offense to believers, just a joke)
Unfortunately few animal gametes are as hardy as those of plants and fungi. In terms of a record of genetic and phenotypic diversity, the global network of natural history museums (at least those with research arms), largely play this role.
<sarcasm>
As soon as we figure out how to rejuvenate extinct species from their DNA records we should all be good ... <wink>
</sarcasm>
Can someone make the case using logical arguments on why a higher number of species is any better or worse than a lower number? Why is an ecosystem in equilibrium with 10 million species better than one with 8?
More species means greater potential for adaptation as ecosystems shift. If one niche species dies off, there’s greater potential for a neighboring species to fill the gap.
On the same token, more species means more genetic diversity and higher levels of resilience to diseases and other threats.
Different species service ecosystems in different ways. Pollination, water purification, soil enrichment, etc. With too few species, key requirements for cross species survival are less likely to be met.
On a less scientific basis, more species just makes the planet richer. The thought of just a few dominant species across the planet is a very sad prospect and would represent a huge loss regarding the beauty that billions of years of evolution have brought us.
> More species means greater potential for adaptation as ecosystems shift
Of course, somewhat paradoxically, these species disappearing is an adaptation to shifting ecosystems.
What's happening now is that ecosystems are globalizing. An ecological niche that was filled by 30 local species before modernity, is now being mixed up and whichever species is "best" may fill that niche everywhere.
So if my local frog species disappears, it's probably replaced by more hardworking immigrant frogs. This can be very disruptive and have negative consequences in many ways. But it doesn't mean animal life disappears. It changes.
There's a bunch of fun simulation games you can play where you can sort of prove this to yourself.
A given species doesn't just eat items X, Y, Z in a food web. In a pinch, they might be able to deal with others things. A W, perhaps. If the W-predating species suffers disease or some calamity, this other species can, to some degree, pick up the slack. It's really a key part of adaptive radiation. Maybe I could live here, although I don't usually. Maybe I could mate there, although it is a bit out of my comfort zone.
When you play those simulation games with just a few species, you see a lot of boom-bust cycles and eventually you get a collapse. Similarly, those sealed terrariums have similar problems: they eventually fall into a lower equilibrium of fewer species and then they kind of turn to mush.
I hesitate to say "role" because that feels assigned, but different species do different things in an overlapping fashion, like a cross-trained staff lowering your "bus factor."
Now, I imagine there's some kind of maximum number (so many species that finding someone to breed with is hard), but the minimums lack resiliency for various cycles.
Can someone make the case using logical arguments on why drexlspivey is any better or worse than no drexlspivey? Why is an ecosystem in equilibrium with drexlspivey better than one without drexlspivey?
The irreversibility is probably the key negative. If you assume life is good and biodiversity aids in keeping life going, then the more species that are stable, the better. And species take a long time to create, so losing them precipitously is most likely bad.
Resilience is one thing, but there are a lot of nuances to what makes species and habitat diversity so important.
This isn’t a perfect example, but the other day I was researching shrimp. There is a genus called neocaridina, and they’re generally detritivores. However, I discovered that many species in the genus eat quite differently. Some will eat hair algae, some won’t. Some like to feed on hard algae, some only soft. Some have preference for higher protein foods, others less. Of the 26 known species, the manifestation of their presence in an ecosystem would actually be quite different.
This is a single genus which would have substantially varying impacts on ponds, streams, and lakes for example. If you have a diverse set of these species, you will be far more likely to keep a variety of detritus and algae sources in check. Reduce the diversity, and perhaps hair algae will get out of control. Once this happens, you might see certain fish or insects lose their habitat because they depend on other vegetation, but the hair algae is absorbing too much light and nutrients now.
This is applies to all kinds of animals, in all kinds of habitats. Diversity means greater balance, greater stability, and means of recovering faster when things collapse.
IIRC it's an open secret among preservationists that species often are widely known to be extinct before being declared as such because many protections hinge on their status as "endangered" and would be lifted once they're declared extinct, thus risking further endangering other species sharing the same habitat.
It's essentially a choice between losing protections for other species and painting a rosier picture by undercounting what has been lost.
I'm curious what would be an optimal measure of biodiversity.
As in, if certain species decreases, but another increase, it's not clear to me one is more bad than another.
Obviously, wouldn't want entire ecosystems wiped out. I'm just curious what a good measurement of ecosystem health would be.
I'm sure there's one out there hopefully, as technology advances, we'll be able to mitigate the effects we have on the environment, and occasionally, maybe even help it.
> I'm sure there's one out there hopefully, as technology advances, we'll be able to mitigate the effects we have on the environment, and occasionally, maybe even help it.
Forgive my, bluntness, but statements like "optimal measure of biodiversity" are perhaps part of the problem. What the does that even mean?
So where advanced technology can mitigate the effects of previously miraculous advanced technology, say micro-plastics, 'forever chemicals', pesticide residues?
I am enjoying my comfort from technology, to include the glasses that allow me to "read", and post on Hacker News, but the negative externalities both to myself, and others, .. are substantial.
That might partially because it takes a very very long time before a species is declared extinct. The actual document[¹] is interesting because it includes some responses to peer reviewers and goes more into methodology. The species that were just declared extinct haven't been seen for decades. In some cases, the animal has probably actually been extinct for 50+ years, they're just (understandably) very cautious about declaring it. It would be awkward to have another coelacanth situation.
That's a good point, although in this case you can count the number of wild vaquitas on two hands. I imagine it's much harder for birds, insects, and fish, but for dolphins, they stay by the coast and need air. I can't imagine a species coming back from such low numbers.
Nearly 2M of those are insects, plants or fungi, and none of these made it into the list of 21 here. There are under 100k distinct "animals" in the sense we usually think of the word (mammals, reptiles, birds).
That is a lot lower than I would have guessed (only 300,000 plant species on the entire planet?). I think the number of known species, 2.16 million, is the better comparison here, because we're talking about known extinctions.
Also, this is just extinctions in the US, but I can't find a good number of known species that exist in the US. For one example, 10 of the 21 species labeled as extinct here are birds, and there seem to be roughly 900 species of birds in the United States. So 10 seems like a lot. There are also 8 extinct mussel species out of 297 known in North America.
It's wild how this news is basically a non-story, people don't care about "oops we accidentally did a bunch of extinctions"
...but people will riot if you launch a project to intentionally wipe out the single most deadly insect species in the history of humanity (and one that's not even a keystone species!).
Demonstrating my point - people erroneously line up to defend them.
The species that carry disease actually do not have an important role in the food chain. They are not at all a keystone species. In most of the places where they cause widespread misery and death they're not even a native species, they're invasive.
It's not that they carry diseases, though that's not great for species that get those diseases, it's that this particular species of mosquito (Aedes aegypti) is really just a pest we bring with us. They aren't native to most places and pretty much follow us around and prey on us, piggy backing on the most invasive species of all.
Yes, it would have an impact on the ecosystem. We could study the potential impact, and decide whether it was more or less of a concern than the number of lives lost to mosquito-borne diseases.
Some extinctions are not necessarily because of humans. For example, one species of birds will develop specialized beaks to eat a specific food source, which might lead to it dominating for a while. Especially on an Island like Hawaii.
Then conditions change, due to weather, or new plant species gaining foot hold, and that bird may start being outcompeted by a different bird that will eat its specialized food source, or that food source is no longer as prevalent.
Hawaii does have a lot of boomer invaders. Always wondered how long it would take in a war, before they started eating each other. Hawaii is not food secure by any means. It's almost all container ships feeding the island.
“Destroyed” forest are perfect Warbler habitat—at least for the Kirtland’s Warbler which requires dense areas of young jack pine. That means either fires or logging are essential to their survival. So if you mean don’t pave over forests, then yes. But logging done properly is essential for a lot of species.
> But logging done properly is essential for a lot of species.
Hard disagree here. These species survived in niches carved out by forest fires and ruminants that keep open grasslands, prairies, and other in-between states from endlessly sprouting forests. Obviously they survived for millions of years before man came to North America.
The natural carbon cycle where trees grow, live, reproduce, then die and decay, to be food for endless levels of fungus, insects, worms, grubs, etc, which in turn feed birds, snakes, frogs...I could go on, but I think you miss how utterly disruptive it is just to remove the dead tree trunks from an environment.
Sustainable logging looks OK in the 50-100 year timeframe; it's one of many lies we tell ourselves. If it worked for Grandpa then it'll work for us. Maybe the soil quality holds up in the long run, maybe not? But make no mistake, logging has a vast impact and permanently alters ecosystems. Do logged forests slowly decline over centuries as their soil is depleted? Hmm...
That maybe true but I have noticed significant reduction in insect populations and varieties which is primary foods for small animals, mammals and birds.
> the carrying capacity of a healthy planet is much less than 8 billion people
Not sure what you are citing for this, but I would assume this is less than 8 billion people based on our current pollution and consumption rates.
This stat is a mind-blowing one also considering the sheer amount of empty space still available on the planet. With good resource management and terraforming you'd think this number would be a lot larger.
Most of the extinctions happened when there were less than 10m people. All the large mammals and birds got wiped out during humans hunting and gathering phase.
Certainly one issue where I'm a bit biased to being part of the problem. Observing things doesn't express a belief necessarily, though it is my opinion.
I wish I could interview Musk. Give him a hard interview for once. Going on Lex Fridman is like going for an interview with an adoring fanboy.
Just want to see someone interview him who is as smart as him.
Anyway sad to see this report. Reason I bring up Musk is he is so self righteous about focus on rockets and EVs. What's the point of a rocket reaching Mars if there is no Earth left to supply it?
We are in the Holocene Extinction and the best minds are ignoring the problem and driving the dagger in deeper. That's sad.
Discovered, not newly evolved. It doesn't matter that we know about a species or not, that causes no change in the level of biodiversity. Species becoming extinct on the other hand affects biodiversity.
Skymast's comment is killed but he's absolutely right. New species are born and discovered (note these two are distinct) everyday and we still ™ don't have a good idea of what net change is in species count. I do not mourn the loss of the 49 species of bacteria that died in shower this morning, or the 20 species of mosquito eradicated.
The net change is massively negative for complex life, which is what most people care about.
If we sacrificed 1000 species of bird in exchange for 10 million new species of bacteria, that's not a win.
Excluding single cell organisms, the number of species going extinct in a given year in any category outweigh newly discovered or born species by around 8x.
What is the optimal number of species? Is there a universally optimal number or does it depend on conditions on the planet? On one extreme, if each individual organism were its own species, nothing would be able to mate and everything would die. If everything were one species, one disease or change in environment could wipe everything out. So, those clearly are bad. But somewhere in the middle must be a "best" number for some metric. Ecological resilience would probably be a good metric, if we could measure that.
There is the assumption in a lot of the environmental rhetoric that whatever number of species and the exact types of species that existed ~200 years ago when we started keeping track are the optimal ones and that they should stay that way forever. It doesn't work that way though. If a species goes extinct, it's because its environment changed and it's no longer adapted to it. Whether the source of that change is another species (humans) or something else is irrelevant. A new species will come along that's better adapted.
(Personal opinion with no intent to argue or pursuade) I think you are asking the wrong optimisation question. Indeed species have been going extinct forever and differing rates. I think what we should be optimizing for is quality. I remember as a kid growing up in SE Utah just being overwhelmed with insect, reptile, amphibian, and small game wildlife in the area. You didn't look for it, it was just around. I visit frequently and have been amazed at the decline I've witnessed in just 30 years. So few of everything. Now we search for lizards and horned toads. I hardly ever see butterflies and bees. It's [not] wild. I also just drove in August from SE Idaho to Tacoma. Mostly through Montana and Idaho. I didn't have to clean my windshield once the entire trip, there and back. I remember driving as a teenager it seemed like I always had to clean my windshield, even driving on I-15 from Salt Lake city to SE Idaho. Cleaning dead bugs off my windshield is something I don't need to do anymore. I haven't done it for a long time.
We could model our existence in a way to just optmize for our species existence. Humans have been running species into existence for a long time in order to populate. I think we should optimize the other way though. I think we would if we assumed that our mentally advanced status assumed a stewardship-like responsibility. Instead we take and take and take. I've been guilty as anyone, but have tried to be more mindful as I've gotten older and limit my consumption, and make sacrifices to do so where I see nobody else in my immediate sphere doing the same. I do that because I liked having nature be outside my doorstep. I don't think there is an asumption that there was or is an optimal number of species, I think it is just that some people have seen a tranformation that they don't like.
This is a borderline nonsensical question, because this isn't something you can solve for X. What those species are and what niche they fill matters quite a lot. Genetic diversity within these species also matters. Countless other things matter. The rate of extinction has gone up drastically, and there are not new species cropping up to fill the growing holes.
That's the point. If you don't even know what the optimum is or what you should even optimize for, why jump to the conclusion that some change is bad?
If a species is extinct there is no hole. The hole it filled in the ecosystem is gone. If it were still there, it wouldn't be extinct. There will be a different hole and a different species. Yes, they don't come up overnight, but life will evolve to exploit an opportunity where there is one.
This isn't true. Holes can become unlivable for a species for other reasons than the hole vanishing. The hole still exists, and further the collapse of the species filling it leads other species to collapse, creating growing fissures. Now, wounds heal, yes, if and only if given the time to. If you chop off your entire arm, you'll bleed out long before it scars over.
The loss of species is a tragedy because it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tragedy because we’re destroying our inheritance at an alarming rate before we ever really get to see what it is or what it could be. Billions of years of prior art, gone.