Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years (2014)

Re:Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years ... by jefflombardjr on Friday February 09, 2018 @12:51PM (#16342271)

It does affect human populations[1] and morality is irrelevant.

People don't think there's inherent value in biodiversity, but in reality there are certain ecological functions carried out by many species that we take for granted. These ecological functions are critical for the environments we live in. E.g. Water Filtration [2]

Okay still don't buy it? Well let's talk about efficiency.

There are a couple of startups who are working on carbon scrubbers. [3] They see it as a potential market as the amount of carbon increases. I think this is ridiculous... grasses are extremely efficient at sequestering carbon, specifically bamboo. The entire attitude of science being able to combat climate change smells of engineer's disease[4]. Bamboo has been evolving for millions of years to efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere. A couple of engineers are not going to be able to compete with that in a realistic time frame.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11148

[2] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120925-natures-water-purif...

[3] http://shanghaiist.com/2016/08/04/smog_diamonds.php

[4] https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...

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Re:Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years ... by lostmsu on Monday February 12, 2018 @05:13AM (#16357739)

Simple evolutional strategies are orders of magnitude less performant, than even relatively simple neural networks. I don't see how a mere million of years can compete with one dedicated 100 billion neuron network, let alone multiple of them.

I mean, I admit I have what you call 'The Engineer Desease'. I believe in scientists more, than in plants.

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