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!
