[HN Gopher] A Bestiary of Loss
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A Bestiary of Loss
Author : Thevet
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-12-02 03:55 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I was expecting a collection of things people lose over their
| life, for example: Their life, virginity, parents, innocence,
| good faith, etc.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Entirely off-topic, but I was expecting a certain meme. I'll
| see myself out.
| [deleted]
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| +--+--+ || |||| +--+--+ |||||_|
| +--+--+
| dang wrote:
| I've banned this account until we get some clarification
| about whether the "I am a bot" business in your profile is
| actually true. (We don't allow bots on HN.)
|
| Could you please email hn@ycombinator.com?
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| I don't want to take away from the seriousness of this but
|
| > we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event.
|
| mischaracterises the reference they link:
|
| > Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be
| under way, given the known species losses over the past few
| centuries and millennia.
|
| 'in the midst' != 'may be under way'
|
| My point is not to nitpick, but to say, unlike climate change, we
| still have a fair bit of time on this one. If you read the
| relevant literature more closely, it says something like (from
| memory) "if current rates keep up for 500 years, it will be one
| of the largest mass extinctions ever".
|
| This is a deeply important issue. If our species ends up
| responsible for a death-of-dinosaurs scale mass extinction its..
| hard to overestimate how bad that would look, from any sort of, I
| dunno, galactic-UN sort of application-process-review sort of
| perspective.
|
| But implying we are 'in the midst' aka 'approximately halfway
| through' might rob people of hope.
|
| We are at the start of a mass extinction event which, like many
| other terrible potentialities ahead of us, we can very much
| avert.
| sixbrx wrote:
| Agree, and this point, that the current age can't yet count as
| a mass extinction, was made well in the book "The Ends of the
| World", which is about the five major mass extinctions (and
| which was a good read). It's not that what we've done so far
| isn't a possible start on a mass extinction, it's just that the
| big five (and especially the end-Permian) were mind-bogglingly
| destructive "perfect storms". They killed most organisms of all
| types and sizes in all environments over the entire world. It's
| hard to imagine how that's even possible!
| derbOac wrote:
| The Carolina parakeet is something that's particularly sad to me.
| I have family in the coastal Carolinas and there's a certain
| historical continuity of culture and natural history that extends
| from there to the caribbean. Many people in the area seem to
| migrate back and forth, there are fish and animals whose
| northernmost range is in the area and whose southernmost range is
| in the carribean, and there's many historical connections between
| the two (pirates, commodity trade, and so forth). Even hurricanes
| make their way from places in the carribean northward to the
| coast before they dissipate or hit land.
|
| The Carolina parakeet is kind of a ghost in this way, this animal
| that's conspicuous by its absence once you learn about it. It's
| easy to imagine one special, northern, cold-adapted species of
| parrot living on the American southeast-midatlantic coast,
| especially in the Carolinas, a kind of northern relative to birds
| living in the tropics, in the same way that so many other things
| are.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| This is likely another remnant of human civilization, but there
| are now multiple colonies of (Argentina-native) monk parakeets
| around the NYC region [0] (in the 14 years since this article,
| they have established colonies in multiple other locations).
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/new-
| jersey/07par...
| culi wrote:
| We should have an endangered-species backed currency. When a
| species goes extinct, all your tokens are destroyed.
|
| Imagine activating the power of crypto bros for good
| goda90 wrote:
| This would make for an interesting(though sad) coffee table book.
| boringg wrote:
| Oh man it this would be fascinating but definitely a book of
| what could have been.
|
| If we had more visibility into details of why/how certain
| species didn't survive or how their competition "won" it would
| be a super interesting read. That said if it collected all
| species that didn't survive the book would >>> then the ones
| that have survived so clearly not viable to produce.
| filoeleven wrote:
| You might like The Photo Ark. The photos are all of animals in
| danger of extinction, and some have since gone extinct, but the
| populations of others have risen and not all of them are doomed
| yet.
|
| All of the 13,000 photos taken so far can be viewed for free on
| the site. There are coffee table books available, and they're
| high quality.
|
| https://www.joelsartore.com/photo-ark/
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| One of the ways in which I'm confident humanity won't do anything
| meaningful to stop the accelerating biosphere collapse is the
| fact that no influential billionaire nor UN organization is
| cataloguing high quality genomic information of animals-which-
| are-soon-to-die. If anyone who was anyone had any faith in future
| humans Doing Something about the worsening problems, even with
| speculative sufficiently-advanced technology, you'd think this
| would be happening. But no, not even the so-called charismatic
| megafauna [0] get backups.
|
| I assume there are a lot of practical concerns, like "these
| aren't seeds, how do we keep the data fresh" and "how many
| individuals do we practically need to stave off genetic
| bottlenecking". Barring sufficiently-advanced technology, I
| wonder if there's even a viable way to freeze mammalian tissue,
| eggs, anything, for Very Long Term storage; more germanely, I
| wonder if we can get there before the collapse.
|
| I'm therefore pinning my hopes on the mammoth burger enthusiasts.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charismatic_megafauna
| mym1990 wrote:
| Why is the requirement for an Influential Billionaire to do
| cataloguing? And how do you definitively know that it is not
| happening under the radar?
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| Even past the technical issues you describe, none of the
| animals preserved this way would be suited to the world you
| thrust them into. Their ecology they were adapted to would
| likely be gone, and to me it seems just as likely to cause
| damage to an ecosystem by arbitrarily reintroducing species
| into it. We frankly aren't smart enough about how the massively
| complex living systems around us work to even know which
| species would be useful to future restoration efforts.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >none of the animals preserved this way would be suited to
| the world you thrust them into
|
| Oh please. Save the plants, too. Save the soil fungi that
| support them. Save the soil-chemistry and meteorological and
| geological data. Save the audio transcripts of the
| descendants of the indigenous people talking about what their
| grandparents said about the animals and plants and soil and
| weather.
|
| Look, the very concept is a heady cocktail of hopium and
| handwavium. The realistic bet seems to be, as I say above, on
| the absolute destruction of everything as we currently
| understand it. We, if I'm being honest, "frankly aren't smart
| enough" to stop global society becoming about Line Goes Up
| rather than human flourishing -- which has historically
| required the resources of the (collapsing!) biosphere to
| accomplish, and which, if adopted, would likely represent a
| sufficient condition for the strenuous (but not
| insurmountable) changes required to realistically survive.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| I legit thought from the title it was a catalog of the most
| cryptic iterations of the loss meme from Ctrl+Alt+Del
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Yes, I was initially disappointed that it wasn't exactly that.
|
| This will have to suffice. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss
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