4 ms·

Are those 20000 plant species of any actual relevance though? There're hundreds of thousands. For context: >The world’s food supply depends on about 150 plant

Are those 20000 plant species of any actual relevance though? There're hundreds of thousands. For context: >The world’s food supply depends on about 150 plant species. Of those 150, just 12 provide three-quarters of the world’s food. More than half of the world’s food energy comes from a limited number of varieties of three “mega-crops”: rice, wheat, and maize. Not everything is valuable by just existing.

digging 3y ago
Not all value comes from being mass-produced by humans. Specifically, the 20,000 species you're talking about, are > some 20,000 flowering plant species upon which many bee species depend for food which has intrinsic value. And if you really need to tie it back to humans, we need those native bee species, because the ones we've mass-produced are not as good at the job. https://www.ecowatch.com/honeybees-pollinators-native-species.html https://www.ecowatch.com/honeybees-pollinators-native-specie...
adrian_b 3y ago
The problem is that we are not able yet to judge which are valuable and which are not. Most of the current chemical techniques are still extremely inefficient in comparison with what can be done by living cells and we are not yet able to design catalysts comparable with the natural enzymes. The disappearance of any species of living beings may have as a consequence the definitive loss of some valuable knowledge about useful chemical processes, which might be discovered again by humans decades or centuries later, if ever. When we will become able to recreate some kind of living being, after storing enough information about it, then we will afford to decide that it is not valuable and that we can let it become extinct or even intentionally eliminate it from nature. Until then, permitting the destruction of information that we do not understand yet, and which has a chance, however small, to become essential for our own survival, is extremely stupid, even for those who believe that the other living beings exist only to serve them, as written in the Genesis.
tinyplanet-o 3y ago
[dead]

digging 3y ago

Not all value comes from being mass-produced by humans. Specifically, the 20,000 species you're talking about, are > some 20,000 flowering plant species upon which many bee species depend for food which has intrinsic value. And if you really need to tie it back to humans, we need those native bee species, because the ones we've mass-produced are not as good at the job. https://www.ecowatch.com/honeybees-pollinators-native-species.html https://www.ecowatch.com/honeybees-pollinators-native-specie...

adrian_b 3y ago

The problem is that we are not able yet to judge which are valuable and which are not. Most of the current chemical techniques are still extremely inefficient in comparison with what can be done by living cells and we are not yet able to design catalysts comparable with the natural enzymes. The disappearance of any species of living beings may have as a consequence the definitive loss of some valuable knowledge about useful chemical processes, which might be discovered again by humans decades or centuries later, if ever. When we will become able to recreate some kind of living being, after storing enough information about it, then we will afford to decide that it is not valuable and that we can let it become extinct or even intentionally eliminate it from nature. Until then, permitting the destruction of information that we do not understand yet, and which has a chance, however small, to become essential for our own survival, is extremely stupid, even for those who believe that the other living beings exist only to serve them, as written in the Genesis.

tinyplanet-o 3y ago

[dead]