The sheer damage politicians across the world are inflicting on future generations with these privacy laws are very depressing.
Source: sitting in the gunsmith shop I work in right now
4,500 species are critically endangered right now
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2017/12/15/53e6147c-...
Species do go extinct, but not at the rate we are experiencing today. Even if the current rate of species loss was equal to the historical rate, that does not mean that humans wish to live in such a natural state of chaos. Did American culture lose some of its heritage with the near-extinction of the buffalo? Is it any less of a failure of humankind to drive polar bears to extinction than it would be to obliterate the complete works of Jack London from the face of the Earth? That shit is cool, and we should try to preserve it for future generations.
If we always preserve what we have, there will be no room for something new to develop.
We are, in fact, in a mass extinction event right now, with extinction rates estimated at 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than any previous such event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
> If you can see the sun, we shouldn't have all these animals dying.
Not all previous mass extinctions have involved the sun be blotted out by impact or volcanic events, though several have.
As long as you don’t have any attachment to anything more narrow than “all life on earth” (e.g. your family, language, city, country, culture, species, ...) thriving for a long time into the future, there’s no reason not to just shrug at whatever impending apocalypse.
No, they haven't; extinction rates in the current mass extinction event are much higher than previous ones.
But putting in practical terms of "what do I have to gain?", let me say this: every species is carrying unique genetic information that we can learn and employ to our advantages. Maybe a particular species doesn't have anything we can use right now, but might have in the future. Letting it be extinct mean we lose that information forever.
Genetic information is like nature's source code. Now imagine we can't write code, we can just use what's already out there. Every time a species dies, it's source code forever lost.
Like... plants in the Amazon forest. A lot of them served as the material for medicine. We used their "source code" to fight diseases, and fix human problems. And we are losing genetic source code we never even had time to analyze yet!
There are animals that can kind of rejuvenate, and they never die of old age. Imagine being able to "steal" their code and use it to make our health better! If they go extinct, we lost that source code. Forever.
There's no going back, no un-extinction. And we can't go to other planets to analyze their animals, since we haven't found alien life yet. All we have is the life that is available, and we're getting rid ot that life fast.
And they're going out of business. Isn't that evolution?
The short version - pandas are just find for their habitats, and aren't going out of business.
The traits of pandas sound odd, but they're actually common to lots of highly-successful animals. They mate just fine in the wild and are bulk feeders that can easily consume lots of low-efficiency food. Their population hasn't been in any kind of steady decline, but has plummeted twice, each time when large portions of their habitat were destroyed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2rmf6h/til_t...
How many new species has evolution produced in that time? Zero?
I think that the world as we know it is valuable to us because we enjoy it, and nothing more. If we can't appreciate the beauty of life (most of us can't persist on the pure beauty of mathematics or conceptual analysis), what's the point?
In terms of shaping a planet the way we want, we can do that on earth, and more so if we figured out how to live without being dependent on other earth organisms.
For years, my two biggest spheres of advocacy have been environmentalism and privacy/anti-surveillance.
What I've noticed, with that background, is that privacy activism has steadily become more like environmental activism.
With rare exceptions (e.g. the ozone layer), environmentalism is an endless, grinding rear-guard action. Extinct species do not become unextinct. Destroyed habitats do not recover, at least not within hundreds of years. Draining the Glen Canyon Dam will not restore Glen Canyon; Church Rock will never be remediated. And the threats are endless and everywhere: 4,500 species are critically endangered right now, global warming is set for 3+ degrees Celsius, the Great Barrier Reef might die entirely.
Attacks on privacy aren't new, but they seem have changed. The Clipper Chip was a central, recognizable enemy, promoted by branches of the government citizens can relate to. 24 hour turnaround on surveillance legalization for intelligence agencies is part of a new and horrible political landscape. SOPA and PIPA were indirect attacks, part of a state-corporate partnership that lets each party do the things the other is barred from. And even those were too central and easy to oppose - now they're coming back piecemeal, in budget bills and trade agreements where they're harder to address.
And as with the environment, what's lost is lost. Repealing surveillance laws is rare and unsustainable. Fighting surveillance in open courts is impossible; fighting it in FISA courts is a Kafkaesque nightmare of secret evidence and lack of standing. Corporate data-gathering is unprovable, and user information breaches are irreversible. Stolen identities can't be changed or recaptured.
So yes: I'm tired. I'm tired, and it's not an accident, because we're on the wrong end of an asymmetric fight.