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Lost biodiversity fills me with a bizarrely deep sense of sadness. I'm really hoping biotech will advance far enough to A) stop the anthropocene extinction and

Lost biodiversity fills me with a bizarrely deep sense of sadness. I'm really hoping biotech will advance far enough to A) stop the anthropocene extinction and B) eventually reverse it, if not by reviving species then by creating new and wonderful additions to our ecosystems. On an odder tangent, this is also part of why I'm really excited about space habitats and eventual Mars habitats. When we start creating massive enclosed spaces where we fully control the conditions, I think we'll start seeing some beautiful engineered ecosystems. Utilitarian stuff at first, like those ugly-yet-functional urban hydroponics setups you see today, but eventually I'm hopeful we'll create some 'natural' beauty.

annnnd 10y ago
On a different tangent: do you think thus created nature will be beautiful to us? Will it be beautiful to people who are born there? I wonder why the trees are beautiful to us.. Maybe because we are used to them and connect nice memories to the image of trees?
- nickparker 10y ago
  I don't think we'll create anything radically different enough to not be beautiful. Modifying what already exists is usually easier than creating something from nothing, and I would expect that to apply for engineering new organisms. If you mean will the ecosystems be beautiful to us, as in, will a forest in a space station really be a forest, or more of a gaudy tourist attraction and/or a sterile research environment, I'm hopeful that we'll choose to include some allowance for beauty in our planning. Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy touches on these themes a lot, and I'm also drawing to some degree from the Culture series' vision of orbitals. We're clearly centuries (at least) from being able to build orbitals, but I think far smaller ring structures - and even more likely mere two-body tether set ups - may be just decades ahead.
yareally 10y ago
The short-term focus of humanity sometimes worries me as we keep making mistakes that are likely irreversible and preventable. Passenger pigeons were once estimated to be the most abundant bird in the world. There were so many that no one thought they could ever go extinct, until they did in the early 20th century. Ignorance befell twice when people failed to realize a bird that would "darken the skies" could go extinct like any creature and that their breeding habits weren't as straight forward as one would assume. Passenger pigeons would only breed in large flocks, so by the time that anyone realized they were doomed and tried to breed them, there weren't enough pigeons left to form a flock of significant size. Some might argue the pigeons or even the chestnut/elm/ash are not a regrettable loss, but miss the point--that our assumption we can easily undo the damage we cause to the planet is not always possible. The trees might make a comeback from genetic engineering eventually, but bringing animals back from extinction is still more theory than application.

annnnd 10y ago

On a different tangent: do you think thus created nature will be beautiful to us? Will it be beautiful to people who are born there? I wonder why the trees are beautiful to us.. Maybe because we are used to them and connect nice memories to the image of trees?

nickparker 10y ago
I don't think we'll create anything radically different enough to not be beautiful. Modifying what already exists is usually easier than creating something from nothing, and I would expect that to apply for engineering new organisms. If you mean will the ecosystems be beautiful to us, as in, will a forest in a space station really be a forest, or more of a gaudy tourist attraction and/or a sterile research environment, I'm hopeful that we'll choose to include some allowance for beauty in our planning. Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy touches on these themes a lot, and I'm also drawing to some degree from the Culture series' vision of orbitals. We're clearly centuries (at least) from being able to build orbitals, but I think far smaller ring structures - and even more likely mere two-body tether set ups - may be just decades ahead.

yareally 10y ago

The short-term focus of humanity sometimes worries me as we keep making mistakes that are likely irreversible and preventable. Passenger pigeons were once estimated to be the most abundant bird in the world. There were so many that no one thought they could ever go extinct, until they did in the early 20th century. Ignorance befell twice when people failed to realize a bird that would "darken the skies" could go extinct like any creature and that their breeding habits weren't as straight forward as one would assume. Passenger pigeons would only breed in large flocks, so by the time that anyone realized they were doomed and tried to breed them, there weren't enough pigeons left to form a flock of significant size. Some might argue the pigeons or even the chestnut/elm/ash are not a regrettable loss, but miss the point--that our assumption we can easily undo the damage we cause to the planet is not always possible. The trees might make a comeback from genetic engineering eventually, but bringing animals back from extinction is still more theory than application.