[extropy-chat] Extinctions

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Sat Jun 10 15:05:05 UTC 2006


On 6/10/06, Anders Sandberg <asa at nada.kth.se> wrote:
 http://www.unep-wcmc.org/index.html?http://www.unep-wcmc.org/species/animals/animal_redlist.html~main
> Making the assumption that the ratio 751/86 for the plants repeats for the
> animals, we get a multiplied estimate of the extinctanimals number as 8042
> species. So the order of magnitude is about 10,000 species or so, so far.
>
> The total number of species is somewhere between 2-100 million.
> http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/FelixNisimov.shtml
> which gives an extinction so far of 0.5-0.001%. This indeed seems to be
> within the noise level.

### The actual number of species gone extinct since the ascendancy of
man is surely much higher. Diversity surveys consistently show that
every little patch of forest tends to have a lot of species that
nobody has seen anywhere else, and many millions of patches of forest
have been cut recently.
----------------------------------------------
>
> So, how do we fix it?

### So why bother fixing it? The 99.9% majority of species has no
economic value for agricultural or industrial purposes. There may be a
few percent of extant species that have a discernible aesthetic value
to many humans. Personally, I am very fond of lush forests and meadows
but such pleasing scenery can be created with a few thousands of
species, without the need to preserve the untold millions of bugs that
are known to inhabit them under natural conditions. Of course, this
form of value exists only for the affluent humans like you and me and
most people have really no use for anything except wheat, cows and the
like.

Besides, if we really want to have more species, it will be cheaper to
make them tomorrow than spending a lot of effort on saving them today.
Spending today's money on large-scale species preservation (i.e. land
conservation measures) means deprivation for many humans today when
they don't feel the need for exotic animals but spending tomorrow's
money will buy a lot more, since genetic engineering will be much
cheaper.

I think that Nature shall be the servant of Man (and Woman). When
calls are made to preserve species for their own sake at substantial
cost to humans, it means a reversal of this relationship, which I find
to be quite odious.

Rafal



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