[extropy-chat] Extinctions

Damien Sullivan phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu
Sat Jun 10 18:16:57 UTC 2006


On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 03:50:43PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> I found http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/extinction/ which has some good
> data. The main problem is that we get rates rather than absolute numbers
> so far. Doing a bit of counting in one of Baez diagrams produces a lower
> bound of around 416 species. 

It notes most species haven't even been catalogues and that recorded
extinctions are biased toward large charismatic animals.  Any region of
rain forest seems to have its own endemic species, many of which are
gone already.

http://extinctanimals.petermaas.nl/ gives 921
> animal species cand 86 plant species. So if we make the assumption that

One thing they don't seem to go into is percentages by group.  There are
about 4000 known mammal species, so the 120 extinctions listed gives a
3% extinction total for mammals in the past 1000 years.  About half that
for birds, and less for everything else, but then we consider selection
effects.  It's easier to drive large mammals extinct, but they're also
easier to notice before they disappear.

 http://www.soc.duke.edu/~pmorgan/levin&levin.2002.the_real_biodiversity_crisis.html

Also says:
"Ghillean Prance at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, has noted that
Malesia.the tropical region running from peninsular Malaysia to Papua
New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.contains fewer plant species but more
plant families than the entire neotropics."  Mass extinctions tend to be
evaluated in percentage of genera and even families which survie, not
just species.

> 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.

I'm guessing higher extinction numbers are estimates, so the more
species you think exist, the more would have been wiped out already by
habitat destruction.  That's probably non-linear: if there are more
species, there aren't just more species to get wiped out, but the
species also have smaller populations and smaller ranges, and thus are
more vulnerable to being wiped out.

Dividing a fixed count of recorded extinctions by a variable estimate
doesn't seem to be accounting for everything.

> K/T, but so far it hasn't really got started. The estimates of coming
> extinction rates lie between 0.7 (Lomborg) - 50% (various) over the next

Your first page notes that even Lomborg says the extinction rate is
1500x the natural rate.

> So, how do we fix it? Looking at it from the big perspective it is fairly

In the short term, donations to the Nature Conservacy, good zoos, and
other conservation organizations; push for human population
stabilization (there's probably more growth potential for intellectual
capital and problem solvers in educating the exiting population than in
growing it) and contracted land use.  Don't eat beef you know came from
ex-rainforest land.  Don't eat fish species you know are being harvested
unsustainably (http://seafood.audubon.org/)  

Better water use: if we withdrew less, there'd be more for the
ecosystem.  In theoty a city could be a closed loop, cut off from the
ecosystem.  Politically, repealing perverse incentives, like US West
water rights, should help.  I've read Israel uses half as much water as
we do, probably due to more efficient irrigation.  Desalination has
costs in brine disposal, but might still be a net positive if nuke- or
solar- powered.

Grain-fed livestock probably accounts for a lot of our agricultural land
use.  Going vegetarian, or in my case going for grass-fed beef, probably
helps.  (Though if everyone did the price would go up, I know.)

Long term, I don't know.  Hope that ultratech saves the day, yeah.
Hydroponics, or vat-grown meat with the same trophic level as plants,
uploading or roboticization.  Rearrangement of land use, condensing
humans and leaving larger more contiguous areas for non-humans.

-xx- Damien X-) 



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