Environmental collapse hurts everyone!

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3nmep/we-went-hunting-for-a...

Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative?

At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.

About 200 plant and animal species go extinct every day.

Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.

Why?

However, in my opinion, it's a rather uninteresting hypothetical because human activity absolutely does play a huge role in the extinction of species today.

What about the ramifications of doing so?

I’m not sure fiddling with natural levels of extinction are smart.

My money would be into the molluscs lost as collateral damages by the effects of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the birds by a combination of touristic development plus Mikonia tree invasion starting on 60's and 70's.

"it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry?

Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.

Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.

>rationally appraising the current state

both are an agenda. You can't escape ideology.

Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.

Evolution is a process that takes a lot of energy. Every lifetime is a lifetime of energy that has been harnessed to continue the process. So when a species goes extinct, it's not just the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed.

Sort of like expending a bunch of energy to train a neural network, and then rm -rf the weights.

Such a waste.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice.

And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.

You spend 1 terawatt hour of energy powering a datacenter to come up with a novel protein for a drug by simulating protein interactions.

Your competitor studies an already existing fungus, which may have expended that amount of energy over the combined lifetime of all of its ancestors to arrive at the same design, and gets the novel protein "for free."

One of you had to pay the energy cost, and the other didn't. The fungus is "free" and when it is destroyed, "it" -- that energy expenditure -- is lost forever.

It's not a ridiculous hypothetical because many such things (medicines, food, etc) come from living beings. Some from very obscure living beings. And some that are impossible to buy at any price, like living things that pollinate food, regulate the soil, stuff like that. Thermodynamically it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct but I think we can do a little better than that!

Targeted research is likely a shorter and less expensive route to "finding" breakthrough medicines, especially since technology evolves exponentially.

It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction.

It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe).

> then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.

I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level.

It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context.

> OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems.

This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.

Nature -> Petroleum -> Refinery -> Power Plant -> Simulation -> R&D -> Production -> Testing -> Drug

is significantly less efficient than:

Nature -> Testing -> Drug

The argument is that we could likely be advancing biotech industries at an even faster rate.

The time energy that goes into designing something is valuable, and we lose access to that once we lose access to that species.

Put in Douglas Adams terms: "If you try to take a apart a cat to find out how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."

The thing is I am utterly depressed by the way that "climate change" has caused an entire generation to think that conservation is about managing atmospheric chemistry and planetary climate. Conservation is about preventing habitat loss and extinction. Human well-being does not trump avoidance of habitat loss in all cases by any means. And so, I criticized your post for (somewhat analogously to climate change) suggesting an utterly spurious reason for extinction avoidance when no-one should need any reason.

But the generation of people who care about climate change (not you, I'm just ranting) by and large don't know the difference between a eucalyptus/pine monoculture that results from one of their afforestation schemes and a natural forest habitat. Climate change avoidance may well be an important thread of conservation, but the fact that we have lost the simple rallying call of "Save the rainforests" threatens to be a tragedy, and if it turns out so, I will partially blame the last 20 years of climate change discourse.