7 ms·

A Bestiary of Loss

66 points by Thevet 4y ago

goda90 4y ago
This would make for an interesting(though sad) coffee table book.
- boringg 4y ago
  Oh man it this would be fascinating but definitely a book of what could have been. If we had more visibility into details of why/how certain species didn't survive or how their competition "won" it would be a super interesting read. That said if it collected all species that didn't survive the book would >>> then the ones that have survived so clearly not viable to produce.
- filoeleven 4y ago
  You might like The Photo Ark. The photos are all of animals in danger of extinction, and some have since gone extinct, but the populations of others have risen and not all of them are doomed yet. All of the 13,000 photos taken so far can be viewed for free on the site. There are coffee table books available, and they’re high quality. https://www.joelsartore.com/photo-ark/ https://www.joelsartore.com/photo-ark/
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
I was expecting a collection of things people lose over their life, for example: Their life, virginity, parents, innocence, good faith, etc.
- drdaeman 4y ago
  Entirely off-topic, but I was expecting a certain meme. I'll see myself out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    ┌──┬──┐ ││ ││|│ ├──┼──┤ │││││_│ └──┴──┘
    - dang 4y ago
      I've banned this account until we get some clarification about whether the "I am a bot" business in your profile is actually true. (We don't allow bots on HN.) Could you please email hn@ycombinator.com?
      - culi 4y ago
        given that they recognized the loss meme, I highly doubt this is a bot
        dang 4y ago
        We've unbanned the account now.
leidenfrost 4y ago
I legit thought from the title it was a catalog of the most cryptic iterations of the loss meme from Ctrl+Alt+Del
- AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  Yes, I was initially disappointed that it wasn't exactly that. This will have to suffice. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss
derbOac 4y ago
The Carolina parakeet is something that's particularly sad to me. I have family in the coastal Carolinas and there's a certain historical continuity of culture and natural history that extends from there to the caribbean. Many people in the area seem to migrate back and forth, there are fish and animals whose northernmost range is in the area and whose southernmost range is in the carribean, and there's many historical connections between the two (pirates, commodity trade, and so forth). Even hurricanes make their way from places in the carribean northward to the coast before they dissipate or hit land. The Carolina parakeet is kind of a ghost in this way, this animal that's conspicuous by its absence once you learn about it. It's easy to imagine one special, northern, cold-adapted species of parrot living on the American southeast-midatlantic coast, especially in the Carolinas, a kind of northern relative to birds living in the tropics, in the same way that so many other things are.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  This is likely another remnant of human civilization, but there are now multiple colonies of (Argentina-native) monk parakeets around the NYC region [0] (in the 14 years since this article, they have established colonies in multiple other locations). [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-jersey/07parrotsnj.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-jersey/07par...
revolvingocelot 4y ago
One of the ways in which I'm confident humanity won't do anything meaningful to stop the accelerating biosphere collapse is the fact that no influential billionaire nor UN organization is cataloguing high quality genomic information of animals-which-are-soon-to-die. If anyone who was anyone had any faith in future humans Doing Something about the worsening problems, even with speculative sufficiently-advanced technology, you'd think this would be happening. But no, not even the so-called charismatic megafauna [0] get backups. I assume there are a lot of practical concerns, like "these aren't seeds, how do we keep the data fresh" and "how many individuals do we practically need to stave off genetic bottlenecking". Barring sufficiently-advanced technology, I wonder if there's even a viable way to freeze mammalian tissue, eggs, anything, for Very Long Term storage; more germanely, I wonder if we can get there before the collapse. I'm therefore pinning my hopes on the mammoth burger enthusiasts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna
- mym1990 4y ago
  Why is the requirement for an Influential Billionaire to do cataloguing? And how do you definitively know that it is not happening under the radar?
  - toss1 4y ago
    Because the influential billionaires have hogged all the resources, so if anyone can, and should, do something about it, it is them. They literally have more money than they can use in multiple lifetimes at any ordinary spending rate. The only useful thing to do is to return those resources to something productive.
  - revolvingocelot 4y ago
    ...or UN organization, I believe I wrote. Because those are the two organizational forces that would have the wherewithal and resources to do this. Governments and corporations would never bother, for roughly the same reasons. I do not definitively know that it is not happening. But one also cannot definitively know that everything outside of one's field of view isn't the objects one's sense of object permanence expects but rather densely-packed Hitlers, as per the relevant SMBC [0]. I cannot allow myself the luxury of irrational hope, no matter how cool and Hollywood-filmy the idea of a secret saving-the-world agency might be. [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3307 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3307
RupertEisenhart 4y ago
I don't want to take away from the seriousness of this but > we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event. mischaracterises the reference they link: > Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. 'in the midst' != 'may be under way' My point is not to nitpick, but to say, unlike climate change, we still have a fair bit of time on this one. If you read the relevant literature more closely, it says something like (from memory) "if current rates keep up for 500 years, it will be one of the largest mass extinctions ever". This is a deeply important issue. If our species ends up responsible for a death-of-dinosaurs scale mass extinction its.. hard to overestimate how bad that would look, from any sort of, I dunno, galactic-UN sort of application-process-review sort of perspective. But implying we are 'in the midst' aka 'approximately halfway through' might rob people of hope. We are at the start of a mass extinction event which, like many other terrible potentialities ahead of us, we can very much avert.
- sixbrx 4y ago
  Agree, and this point, that the current age can't yet count as a mass extinction, was made well in the book "The Ends of the World", which is about the five major mass extinctions (and which was a good read). It's not that what we've done so far isn't a possible start on a mass extinction, it's just that the big five (and especially the end-Permian) were mind-bogglingly destructive "perfect storms". They killed most organisms of all types and sizes in all environments over the entire world. It's hard to imagine how that's even possible!
  - filoeleven 4y ago
    “If current trends continue, we are on target for meeting the requirements for another mass extinction.”
  - toss1 4y ago
    >> It's hard to imagine how that's even possible! And that is exactly what will make it possible. We, in our individual experience see only the stuff moving around us. Moving earth for a few days for a new house or driveway or shopping center. But we have no realization that it was years ago that humans surpassed all other natural processes as movers of earth [0], or that over half the world's land is use for agriculture [1], or that we've already increased the CO2 levels to 150% of the value from 1750 [2] or reduced insect biomass by 76% in a few decades [3], or polluted every raindrop with beyond-unsafe levels of PFAS chemicals [4], etc., etc., etc., and that's just the stuff off the top of my head. The naive view is 'How could puny humans have an effect so big?'. Yet we do, and it is because we can magnify physical forces and scale operations. No more than a failure to imagine that you could drive off a cliff and die does not mean that you cannot, there is zero to say that we will not make an error with this scaling and effectively kill our planet and ourselves. In both cases, the failure to imagine how it would even be possible will massively magnify the risk. [0] https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/humans-overtake-nature-as-the-biggest-contributors-to-landscape-evolution/ https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/humans-overtake-nature-as-the-big... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations [4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-what-it-means-for-health https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-...
culi 4y ago
We should have an endangered-species backed currency. When a species goes extinct, all your tokens are destroyed. Imagine activating the power of crypto bros for good

A Bestiary of Loss

66 points by Thevet 4y ago

goda90 4y ago

This would make for an interesting(though sad) coffee table book.

boringg 4y ago
Oh man it this would be fascinating but definitely a book of what could have been. If we had more visibility into details of why/how certain species didn't survive or how their competition "won" it would be a super interesting read. That said if it collected all species that didn't survive the book would >>> then the ones that have survived so clearly not viable to produce.
filoeleven 4y ago
You might like The Photo Ark. The photos are all of animals in danger of extinction, and some have since gone extinct, but the populations of others have risen and not all of them are doomed yet. All of the 13,000 photos taken so far can be viewed for free on the site. There are coffee table books available, and they’re high quality. https://www.joelsartore.com/photo-ark/ https://www.joelsartore.com/photo-ark/

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

I was expecting a collection of things people lose over their life, for example: Their life, virginity, parents, innocence, good faith, etc.

drdaeman 4y ago
Entirely off-topic, but I was expecting a certain meme. I'll see myself out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  ┌──┬──┐ ││ ││|│ ├──┼──┤ │││││_│ └──┴──┘
  - dang 4y ago
    I've banned this account until we get some clarification about whether the "I am a bot" business in your profile is actually true. (We don't allow bots on HN.) Could you please email hn@ycombinator.com?
    - culi 4y ago
      given that they recognized the loss meme, I highly doubt this is a bot
      - dang 4y ago
        We've unbanned the account now.

leidenfrost 4y ago

I legit thought from the title it was a catalog of the most cryptic iterations of the loss meme from Ctrl+Alt+Del

AndrewOMartin 4y ago
Yes, I was initially disappointed that it wasn't exactly that. This will have to suffice. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss

derbOac 4y ago

The Carolina parakeet is something that's particularly sad to me. I have family in the coastal Carolinas and there's a certain historical continuity of culture and natural history that extends from there to the caribbean. Many people in the area seem to migrate back and forth, there are fish and animals whose northernmost range is in the area and whose southernmost range is in the carribean, and there's many historical connections between the two (pirates, commodity trade, and so forth). Even hurricanes make their way from places in the carribean northward to the coast before they dissipate or hit land. The Carolina parakeet is kind of a ghost in this way, this animal that's conspicuous by its absence once you learn about it. It's easy to imagine one special, northern, cold-adapted species of parrot living on the American southeast-midatlantic coast, especially in the Carolinas, a kind of northern relative to birds living in the tropics, in the same way that so many other things are.

InitialLastName 4y ago
This is likely another remnant of human civilization, but there are now multiple colonies of (Argentina-native) monk parakeets around the NYC region [0] (in the 14 years since this article, they have established colonies in multiple other locations). [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-jersey/07parrotsnj.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-jersey/07par...

revolvingocelot 4y ago

One of the ways in which I'm confident humanity won't do anything meaningful to stop the accelerating biosphere collapse is the fact that no influential billionaire nor UN organization is cataloguing high quality genomic information of animals-which-are-soon-to-die. If anyone who was anyone had any faith in future humans Doing Something about the worsening problems, even with speculative sufficiently-advanced technology, you'd think this would be happening. But no, not even the so-called charismatic megafauna [0] get backups. I assume there are a lot of practical concerns, like "these aren't seeds, how do we keep the data fresh" and "how many individuals do we practically need to stave off genetic bottlenecking". Barring sufficiently-advanced technology, I wonder if there's even a viable way to freeze mammalian tissue, eggs, anything, for Very Long Term storage; more germanely, I wonder if we can get there before the collapse. I'm therefore pinning my hopes on the mammoth burger enthusiasts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna

mym1990 4y ago
Why is the requirement for an Influential Billionaire to do cataloguing? And how do you definitively know that it is not happening under the radar?
- toss1 4y ago
  Because the influential billionaires have hogged all the resources, so if anyone can, and should, do something about it, it is them. They literally have more money than they can use in multiple lifetimes at any ordinary spending rate. The only useful thing to do is to return those resources to something productive.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  ...or UN organization, I believe I wrote. Because those are the two organizational forces that would have the wherewithal and resources to do this. Governments and corporations would never bother, for roughly the same reasons. I do not definitively know that it is not happening. But one also cannot definitively know that everything outside of one's field of view isn't the objects one's sense of object permanence expects but rather densely-packed Hitlers, as per the relevant SMBC [0]. I cannot allow myself the luxury of irrational hope, no matter how cool and Hollywood-filmy the idea of a secret saving-the-world agency might be. [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3307 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3307

RupertEisenhart 4y ago

I don't want to take away from the seriousness of this but > we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event. mischaracterises the reference they link: > Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. 'in the midst' != 'may be under way' My point is not to nitpick, but to say, unlike climate change, we still have a fair bit of time on this one. If you read the relevant literature more closely, it says something like (from memory) "if current rates keep up for 500 years, it will be one of the largest mass extinctions ever". This is a deeply important issue. If our species ends up responsible for a death-of-dinosaurs scale mass extinction its.. hard to overestimate how bad that would look, from any sort of, I dunno, galactic-UN sort of application-process-review sort of perspective. But implying we are 'in the midst' aka 'approximately halfway through' might rob people of hope. We are at the start of a mass extinction event which, like many other terrible potentialities ahead of us, we can very much avert.

sixbrx 4y ago
Agree, and this point, that the current age can't yet count as a mass extinction, was made well in the book "The Ends of the World", which is about the five major mass extinctions (and which was a good read). It's not that what we've done so far isn't a possible start on a mass extinction, it's just that the big five (and especially the end-Permian) were mind-bogglingly destructive "perfect storms". They killed most organisms of all types and sizes in all environments over the entire world. It's hard to imagine how that's even possible!
- filoeleven 4y ago
  “If current trends continue, we are on target for meeting the requirements for another mass extinction.”
- toss1 4y ago
  >> It's hard to imagine how that's even possible! And that is exactly what will make it possible. We, in our individual experience see only the stuff moving around us. Moving earth for a few days for a new house or driveway or shopping center. But we have no realization that it was years ago that humans surpassed all other natural processes as movers of earth [0], or that over half the world's land is use for agriculture [1], or that we've already increased the CO2 levels to 150% of the value from 1750 [2] or reduced insect biomass by 76% in a few decades [3], or polluted every raindrop with beyond-unsafe levels of PFAS chemicals [4], etc., etc., etc., and that's just the stuff off the top of my head. The naive view is 'How could puny humans have an effect so big?'. Yet we do, and it is because we can magnify physical forces and scale operations. No more than a failure to imagine that you could drive off a cliff and die does not mean that you cannot, there is zero to say that we will not make an error with this scaling and effectively kill our planet and ourselves. In both cases, the failure to imagine how it would even be possible will massively magnify the risk. [0] https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/humans-overtake-nature-as-the-biggest-contributors-to-landscape-evolution/ https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/humans-overtake-nature-as-the-big... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations [4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-what-it-means-for-health https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-...

culi 4y ago

We should have an endangered-species backed currency. When a species goes extinct, all your tokens are destroyed. Imagine activating the power of crypto bros for good