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.
Even past the technical issues you describe, none of the animals preserved this way would be suited to the world you thrust them into. Their ecology they were adapted to would likely be gone, and to me it seems just as likely to cause damage to an ecosystem by arbitrarily reintroducing species into it. We frankly aren't smart enough about how the massively complex living systems around us work to even know which species would be useful to future restoration efforts.
>none of the animals preserved this way would be suited to the world you thrust them into
Oh please. Save the plants, too. Save the soil fungi that support them. Save the soil-chemistry and meteorological and geological data. Save the audio transcripts of the descendants of the indigenous people talking about what their grandparents said about the animals and plants and soil and weather.
Look, the very concept is a heady cocktail of hopium and handwavium. The realistic bet seems to be, as I say above, on the absolute destruction of everything as we currently understand it. We, if I'm being honest, "frankly aren't smart enough" to stop global society becoming about Line Goes Up rather than human flourishing -- which has historically required the resources of the (collapsing!) biosphere to accomplish, and which, if adopted, would likely represent a sufficient condition for the strenuous (but not insurmountable) changes required to realistically survive.
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.
...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.
OK, sure. Many "billionaires" are merely people with big business empires. There's a difference between net worth and liquid capital; the former wouldn't suffice to enact the big backup. And then there's the difference between those who chase an ever-rising number to slake some unquenchable thirst in their heads, and those who amass gigantic fortunes to enact some non-financial end. The former would never even think to try this idea, as trying to save chunks of the ending world has nothing to do with making more money.
Or maybe it's merely a matter of focus -- the media hangs on the words of the likes of Gates and Musk, but Bloomberg burned half a billion to learn that you can't meme your way into political power (or perhaps just that you can't do it with an ad blitz).
Anyway, I'm presuming that any individual billionaire who might be financially able to try something like this would likely also need the social capital of a Musk or Gates to overcome the boring, staid, actuarial reality that we don't have the knowledge, technology, or social capital to do something like this.
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.
Perhaps, if we look only at the species that we know have already gone fully extinct. And of course, if there are more than a handful of any species, it technically could recover.
But driving looking only through the rear-view mirror is a plan for disaster.
We must also look at the declines in existing species, like 80% over just a few decades of insects, many types of plants, birds, fish, and more. These are massive and rapid declines, and there is little in the way of trends that are turning in their favor.
In fact, more than climate change, habitat destruction and over-fishing/over-grazing/over-extraction may destroy many species far before climate change would undo them.
Moreover, the actual measurements of climate change indicate that it is changing far MORE rapidly than the models. Plus, we're apparently blowing right through a number of tipping points, including arctic albedo (from sea ice completely melting where it never did before, and the last few inches of ice no longer reflecting white), gigatons of methane starting to release from the thawing permafrost, and several other feed-forward disasters.
Plus, few are looking at what point the food web breaks. Once that happens (and no one knows if we first lose the bees, the plankton, or some other critical link, or a zoonotic pandemic where we don't get as lucky as the last time) we're so far beyond screwed.... and so is the ecosystem
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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
Oh please. Save the plants, too. Save the soil fungi that support them. Save the soil-chemistry and meteorological and geological data. Save the audio transcripts of the descendants of the indigenous people talking about what their grandparents said about the animals and plants and soil and weather.
Look, the very concept is a heady cocktail of hopium and handwavium. The realistic bet seems to be, as I say above, on the absolute destruction of everything as we currently understand it. We, if I'm being honest, "frankly aren't smart enough" to stop global society becoming about Line Goes Up rather than human flourishing -- which has historically required the resources of the (collapsing!) biosphere to accomplish, and which, if adopted, would likely represent a sufficient condition for the strenuous (but not insurmountable) changes required to realistically survive.
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.
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
OK, sure. Many "billionaires" are merely people with big business empires. There's a difference between net worth and liquid capital; the former wouldn't suffice to enact the big backup. And then there's the difference between those who chase an ever-rising number to slake some unquenchable thirst in their heads, and those who amass gigantic fortunes to enact some non-financial end. The former would never even think to try this idea, as trying to save chunks of the ending world has nothing to do with making more money.
Or maybe it's merely a matter of focus -- the media hangs on the words of the likes of Gates and Musk, but Bloomberg burned half a billion to learn that you can't meme your way into political power (or perhaps just that you can't do it with an ad blitz).
Anyway, I'm presuming that any individual billionaire who might be financially able to try something like this would likely also need the social capital of a Musk or Gates to overcome the boring, staid, actuarial reality that we don't have the knowledge, technology, or social capital to do something like this.
> 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.
But driving looking only through the rear-view mirror is a plan for disaster.
We must also look at the declines in existing species, like 80% over just a few decades of insects, many types of plants, birds, fish, and more. These are massive and rapid declines, and there is little in the way of trends that are turning in their favor.
In fact, more than climate change, habitat destruction and over-fishing/over-grazing/over-extraction may destroy many species far before climate change would undo them.
Moreover, the actual measurements of climate change indicate that it is changing far MORE rapidly than the models. Plus, we're apparently blowing right through a number of tipping points, including arctic albedo (from sea ice completely melting where it never did before, and the last few inches of ice no longer reflecting white), gigatons of methane starting to release from the thawing permafrost, and several other feed-forward disasters.
Plus, few are looking at what point the food web breaks. Once that happens (and no one knows if we first lose the bees, the plankton, or some other critical link, or a zoonotic pandemic where we don't get as lucky as the last time) we're so far beyond screwed.... and so is the ecosystem
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-big...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
[2] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-...
This will have to suffice. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss
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.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-jersey/07par...
Imagine activating the power of crypto bros for good
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/
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.
Could you please email hn@ycombinator.com?