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So, the website states that 6 species are going extinct per hour and continues to claim "the solution is de-extinction". Shouldn't we start by preventing furth

by Tepix 4y ago

So, the website states that 6 species are going extinct per hour and continues to claim "the solution is de-extinction". Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Also it seems rather unlikely that they can scale their approach to 6 de-extinctions per hour...

marmetio 4y ago
Nobody has figured out how to stop everyone else from extincting species. These people may be able to de-extinct some species themselves. Whichever thing you can actually do yourself is the solution [1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-shit-in-the-other-see-which https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-sh...
- lukas099 4y ago
  Wouldn't the de-extincted species probably face the same pressures that made them extinct in the first place?
  - marmetio 4y ago
    I guess if you dumped them in the wild and wished them luck. But they would probably actively manage the species.
    - lukas099 4y ago
      Right, so we'd be keeping them in zoos, so not really helping the biodiversity of nature.
      - marmetio 4y ago
        A managed population is wild. You can do a lot without having to keep an animal captive in a zoo.
        lukas099 4y ago
        I see. I guess that it could also help biodiversity efforts from a PR standpoint to have wildlife reserves for a 'charismatic' animal like the dodo, similar to how everybody wants to protect the panda bear.
        marmetio 4y ago
        Could do. There's zoo pandas. There's the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone where they're less likely to get shot by farmers protecting livestock. Anti-poaching guards for wild rhinos. Seagrass restoration for manatees. Programs for people to grow baby mussels in fish tanks so they can be relocated to the ocean. Hunting programs for deer culling. Giving out free native plants and seeds to help native birds. Lots of options depending on the needs of each species.
gmuslera 4y ago
Should we save that person that we have in front? After all, thousands are dying every hour around the world. Distribution matters, you can't be everywhere. It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
chongli 4y ago
There are so many problems in this world that could be solved if only we could "get everyone to do X." The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." So when a small team comes up with a plan and says "we (small team) are going to do Y (something very technically difficult)", it's not helpful to reply "but wouldn't it be easier if we just got everyone to do X?"
- thfuran 4y ago
  Sure, but if X results in Z and Y is 0.00001 Z, it's not without merit to point out that perhaps that doesn't really accomplish Z, the nominal goal of Y.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    It's worse than that, since it may give the lazy or disingenuous an opportunity to muddy the waters by pointing out that... "hey Y reverses Z (or 0.00001 of it) so we don't need to worry about it any more!".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- spoonfeeder006 4y ago
  > The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation Thats what the Baha'i Ruhi institute seeks to do https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circles/quotations-to-memorize/ https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circ...
mattigames 4y ago
The world uses Uber an similar apps to bring an stranger's car at your location to pick you up, shouldn't we instead have a network of fast trains in every single city given that it would be much faster and less damaging for the environment? Well yes, but unfortunately that would require huge policy changes and major coordinated efforts unlikely to become reality, just like the changes needed to stop extinctions.
ravenstine 4y ago
It depends on the cause of extinction and why we would want to unextinctify a species. Species go extinct all the time without human intervention.
- spoonfeeder006 4y ago
  I wonder how many new species come about as well?
- btilly 4y ago
  According to https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/paleontology/extinction-over-time https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p... the usual rate is around 1 species per million, each year. With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    That is so ridiculous. What is the “usual” rate and how would we even justify such a thing. People are so caught up in environmentalism they don’t realize how anti-nature and laughably ignorant of scientific reason they end up being.
    - btilly 4y ago
      To quote from the article that I linked, "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year." And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate. Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
karaterobot 4y ago
> Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
somenameforme 4y ago
On extinction this [1] is an extremely informative article on how estimations are made, and why they vary in such extreme ways. Observed extinctions are many orders of magnitude less than 6 per hour. The article (2015) references a total of about 800 observed extinctions in 400 years. And some number of those extinctions were not actually extinctions. So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number. Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote. [1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s not just that the critical bit for the 800 number is: “That’s because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. It’s also because we often simply don’t know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.” A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
- astrobe_ 4y ago
  In other words, those estimates are as reliable as Drake's equation output. Someone who can't say "I don't know" when they know they don't know, is either a fool or a con artist.
edgyquant 4y ago
>Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?
- danuker 4y ago
  Currently that reason is us. We are destroying habitats faster than species can adapt. The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Currently? It’s been that way for at least 60,000 years.
    - danuker 4y ago
      We've been hunting species to extinction for 60k years, yes, but we haven't reached global transformation of the environment until the past few hundred. But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
      - djitz 4y ago
        Hunting anything near extinction is very solidly at the last inch of the timeline encompassing the last 60k years.
        criddell 4y ago
        Most extinctions, sure. Some think humans hunted Australia’s megafauna to extinction 50,000 years ago: https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animals-in-australia/ https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    We are just another species. Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere. The only thing that will change is their makeup. Organisms that can’t keep up with their environment die and are replaced by new ones that can.
whiddershins 4y ago
I’m not even sure how we know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something non obvious about it … like it’s an estimate of insect species presumed to be lost based on Amazon deforestation per year or … who knows.
kerpotgh 4y ago
Like everyone else with this tired argument, we can do both.
lukas099 4y ago
It's like saying that we should terraform Mars because of global warming. Uh, wouldn't we have to make Earth worse than Mars for that to be useful?
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  It can also be useful if you can make Mars better than Earth. That obviously can't be done, but deterioration of Earth is not logically required.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to make Earth better than to make Mars better than Earth?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Yes.

by Tepix 4y ago

marmetio 4y ago

Nobody has figured out how to stop everyone else from extincting species. These people may be able to de-extinct some species themselves. Whichever thing you can actually do yourself is the solution [1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-shit-in-the-other-see-which https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-sh...

lukas099 4y ago
Wouldn't the de-extincted species probably face the same pressures that made them extinct in the first place?
- marmetio 4y ago
  I guess if you dumped them in the wild and wished them luck. But they would probably actively manage the species.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    Right, so we'd be keeping them in zoos, so not really helping the biodiversity of nature.
    - marmetio 4y ago
      A managed population is wild. You can do a lot without having to keep an animal captive in a zoo.
      - lukas099 4y ago
        I see. I guess that it could also help biodiversity efforts from a PR standpoint to have wildlife reserves for a 'charismatic' animal like the dodo, similar to how everybody wants to protect the panda bear.
        marmetio 4y ago
        Could do. There's zoo pandas. There's the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone where they're less likely to get shot by farmers protecting livestock. Anti-poaching guards for wild rhinos. Seagrass restoration for manatees. Programs for people to grow baby mussels in fish tanks so they can be relocated to the ocean. Hunting programs for deer culling. Giving out free native plants and seeds to help native birds. Lots of options depending on the needs of each species.

gmuslera 4y ago

Should we save that person that we have in front? After all, thousands are dying every hour around the world. Distribution matters, you can't be everywhere. It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.

chongli 4y ago

There are so many problems in this world that could be solved if only we could "get everyone to do X." The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." So when a small team comes up with a plan and says "we (small team) are going to do Y (something very technically difficult)", it's not helpful to reply "but wouldn't it be easier if we just got everyone to do X?"

thfuran 4y ago
Sure, but if X results in Z and Y is 0.00001 Z, it's not without merit to point out that perhaps that doesn't really accomplish Z, the nominal goal of Y.
- kurthr 4y ago
  It's worse than that, since it may give the lazy or disingenuous an opportunity to muddy the waters by pointing out that... "hey Y reverses Z (or 0.00001 of it) so we don't need to worry about it any more!".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
spoonfeeder006 4y ago
> The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation Thats what the Baha'i Ruhi institute seeks to do https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circles/quotations-to-memorize/ https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circ...

mattigames 4y ago

The world uses Uber an similar apps to bring an stranger's car at your location to pick you up, shouldn't we instead have a network of fast trains in every single city given that it would be much faster and less damaging for the environment? Well yes, but unfortunately that would require huge policy changes and major coordinated efforts unlikely to become reality, just like the changes needed to stop extinctions.

ravenstine 4y ago

It depends on the cause of extinction and why we would want to unextinctify a species. Species go extinct all the time without human intervention.

spoonfeeder006 4y ago
I wonder how many new species come about as well?
btilly 4y ago
According to https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/paleontology/extinction-over-time https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p... the usual rate is around 1 species per million, each year. With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  That is so ridiculous. What is the “usual” rate and how would we even justify such a thing. People are so caught up in environmentalism they don’t realize how anti-nature and laughably ignorant of scientific reason they end up being.
  - btilly 4y ago
    To quote from the article that I linked, "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year." And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate. Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.

karaterobot 4y ago

> Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.

somenameforme 4y ago

On extinction this [1] is an extremely informative article on how estimations are made, and why they vary in such extreme ways. Observed extinctions are many orders of magnitude less than 6 per hour. The article (2015) references a total of about 800 observed extinctions in 400 years. And some number of those extinctions were not actually extinctions. So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number. Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote. [1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...

Retric 4y ago
It’s not just that the critical bit for the 800 number is: “That’s because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. It’s also because we often simply don’t know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.” A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
astrobe_ 4y ago
In other words, those estimates are as reliable as Drake's equation output. Someone who can't say "I don't know" when they know they don't know, is either a fool or a con artist.

edgyquant 4y ago

>Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?

danuker 4y ago
Currently that reason is us. We are destroying habitats faster than species can adapt. The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.
- criddell 4y ago
  Currently? It’s been that way for at least 60,000 years.
  - danuker 4y ago
    We've been hunting species to extinction for 60k years, yes, but we haven't reached global transformation of the environment until the past few hundred. But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
    - djitz 4y ago
      Hunting anything near extinction is very solidly at the last inch of the timeline encompassing the last 60k years.
      - criddell 4y ago
        Most extinctions, sure. Some think humans hunted Australia’s megafauna to extinction 50,000 years ago: https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animals-in-australia/ https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...
- edgyquant 4y ago
  We are just another species. Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere. The only thing that will change is their makeup. Organisms that can’t keep up with their environment die and are replaced by new ones that can.

whiddershins 4y ago

I’m not even sure how we know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something non obvious about it … like it’s an estimate of insect species presumed to be lost based on Amazon deforestation per year or … who knows.

kerpotgh 4y ago

Like everyone else with this tired argument, we can do both.

lukas099 4y ago

It's like saying that we should terraform Mars because of global warming. Uh, wouldn't we have to make Earth worse than Mars for that to be useful?

thaumasiotes 4y ago
It can also be useful if you can make Mars better than Earth. That obviously can't be done, but deterioration of Earth is not logically required.
- lukas099 4y ago
  Wouldn't it be easier to make Earth better than to make Mars better than Earth?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Yes.