Second Alexandrian Tragedy.

[BadBeast]

Looking at it from the other end of the human 'equation' maybe our genome is such a special combination, it's actually prudent for the macro-program to invest so much of it's resources in ensuring we survive, because of our totally awesome potential. And if it has to shut a few functions down, it's quite prepared to do so. If the price of getting us off the planet, is that we actually consume four fifths of it's available resources, that's a result all round isn't it? We get to trek off to the stars with our potential, and the planet gets an environment conducive to bringing it's next project along.

Fuck yeah.

Also we're gonna need real lightbulbs in outer space, none of those eco friendly stupid fluorescent non-dimmable fucking things, and wild tuna marinaded in dolphin blood.

BRB, dumping motor oil in the toilet.

(Oops, I stepped on an endangered puppy that was in my way)

Cool beans.  Now it's no longer endangered, it's . . . space fuel!

[BadBeast]

[Kai]

I think you may be taking the the book metaphor too literally, but I'll run with this. Yes, the problem with the matter is that you can't just scan a bunch of specimens into the computer. Organisms are n-dimentional hypersets of information, and our understanding of that hyperset is constantly growing. They're MAGIC books, okay, does that work? The problem of a race against time still stands. Also, natural history collections preserve a great

deal of this information as publication archives and physical specimens. Millions of them. Not the same as a living species, but much better than having nothing.

Yes. I was just trying to describe how hard it would be to preserve such a "hyperbook" of information, besides keeping it alive in its ecosystem.

I mean it's not even just the species itself, its interactions with the environment could have valuable information as well.

So how to do it?

Either get lost as the human species and live and let live the rest of them, or try to save ourselves, deal with the biodiversity poverty somehow, and from that foundation of sustainability try to sorta regrow?

Here's the biggest issue, and the one I've been alluding to.

We not only don't know the species very well, most of them we don't /know at all/.

There are something like 1.8 million valid species names out there, and possibly 1 to 2 orders of magnitude left to be described in the most basic form. That is, most of the biodiversity out there is so unknown that it doesn't even have a name!

That's the first step. We can't do much until we have an idea of the scope, and for that we need a Planetary Biodiversity Inventory. Once we have closer to the majority of species described within various regions, we'll have a better idea of how to conserve that diversity. Until then, it's all just shots in the dark. Sure, you can talk about preserving prairie for bison or wilderness for grizzly bears, but what about parasitoid hymenoptera, soil nematodes, rove beetles, protozoans? We don't even have close to a handle on those groups diversity even at a local level. All we can do now is try to wholescale conserve regions that are known hotspots for biodiversity, at least for megafauna (which to me, is now everything bigger than a bumble bee).

But I didn't write this thread to think of solutions, because honestly I'm doing all I can already. I've been working the last 7 weeks on these issues on the taxonomic level. I don't have the resources to start purchasing land in the tropics, probably never will.

[Triple Zero]

Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.

That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?

Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.

And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?

So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?

That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.

[Worm Rider]

Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.

That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?

Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.

And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?

So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?

That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.

This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.

[BadBeast]

Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.

That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?

Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.

And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?

So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?

That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.

This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.

You might not personally need to know all that biological detail  ,but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?

[Worm Rider]

Sorry but, how long is that going to take? Even with decent funding? What I know of biology is that everything takes really really long and is really really hard work.

That's the point, you're doing everything you can, amazing job, and we know a littlebit more about a single species namely caddisflies. And it took, what, five years?

Then you tell me we've not nearly even described 1% of all species out there even in the most basic form.

And describing that 1% has taken biological science how long? 100 years? How many man-years?

So is building this inventory a realistic scenario? Cause it sounds to me like it would require at least 10,000 years to complete?

That's why I proposed to save the planet first, and get to work on the biodiversity problem later.

This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.

You might not personally need to know all that biological detail  ,but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?

I don't mean personally. I mean that as conservationists, we as humans don't need to know that much detail in order to make present day decisions. Building decent scientific models depends upon asking "how much do we need to know in order to know what we need to know?" If we need to know how to conserve biodiversity, and want to create a model predicting the consequences of our management actions on biodiversity, population dynamics, and extinction risk, do we need to fill that model with countless data on thousands of species? Does that improve our model? My answer is almost always no. If you want to conserve trichopterans, you pick some more charismatic umbrella species like river otters and set aside and manage land and water necessary for viable river otter populations, which captures the public imagination, and conserves countless other species at the same time. Do original research on whatever you want to, but the main obstacle to conservation is public support and the idea that economic development should take precedence over conservation, not lack of taxonomic detail.

[Worm Rider]

Suppose I am a librarian in charge of conserving books. I don't need to read the books to know how to conserve them, I just need to keep them at the right temperature and humidity and keep assholes with kerosene and matches away from my library. Go ahead and read the books, that's what they are there for. That is why we are saving them but it isn't how we are saving them.

Advances in conservation are going to come from theoretical approaches to managing the complexity and volume of data inherent in the myriad interactions of a living ecosystem, not from more comprehensive catalogs of species. However, conservation is always going to depend upon setting aside some land and employing simple management actions like controlled burns and reducing pollution to watersheds in order to keep the land like it was before we sectioned it off and developed around it. 

[Triple Zero]

This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.

That was not exactly what I was trying to say, btw.

I was just wondering from a practical point of view and whether it's realistic, not if we "need" to know it or not, IMO we "need" to know as much as possible because it's awesome.

Human race first, must have. Preserving biodiversity as much as possible, awesome, nice to have, secondary.

Actually there's no reason why people that really want to can go ahead and catalogue everything out there right now, it's more that I wonder about Kai's statement we'd need to do it first, before we know what to do because of the complexity in everything. Except I kind of worry that might be a reaally long term perhaps never-ending project, so if in the mean time the climate goes all wonky, we're gonna need to take some shortcuts and try our best current guesses at fixing it, or things (including the project) comes to a premature end.
And then you have this big catalogue with nobody around to read it anymore

but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?

Sorry, but what does that even mean?

[BadBeast]

And my point was that maybe, bio diversity was being diverted by the macro system towards the species that is most likely to evolve itself into a viable post natal  species, instead of a foetus, dependent upon the (by now) disappearing resources.
Buggering about trying to "put stuff back into the system" might be considered churlish, and ungrateful.

[BadBeast]

This. If we knew the exact habitat requirements of 100 million species of tartigrades, slime molds, weevils, and other un-charismatic microfauna, the answer to conservation would be what it is today: set aside land for protection from development, and strictly regulate pollution of water and air. We don't need to know all that biological detail.

That was not exactly what I was trying to say, btw.

I was just wondering from a practical point of view and whether it's realistic, not if we "need" to know it or not, IMO we "need" to know as much as possible because it's awesome.

Human race first, must have. Preserving biodiversity as much as possible, awesome, nice to have, secondary.

Actually there's no reason why people that really want to can go ahead and catalogue everything out there right now, it's more that I wonder about Kai's statement we'd need to do it first, before we know what to do because of the complexity in everything. Except I kind of worry that might be a reaally long term perhaps never-ending project, so if in the mean time the climate goes all wonky, we're gonna need to take some shortcuts and try our best current guesses at fixing it, or things (including the project) comes to a premature end.
And then you have this big catalogue with nobody around to read it anymore

but what about the children? Should they be given a choice?

Sorry, but what does that even mean?

It was a kind of an allusion to the fact that we always seem to exaggerate exactly what it is that we are responsible for.  I'm not saying that there isn't any global warming, but I do question, A/ Exactly how much of it is directly due to our activities, and
B/ How effectual (if at all)any remedial courses we implement would be anyway.

[Kai]

I'm sorry, you guys lost me.

[Triple Zero]

I think we were all sort of talking past eachother at this point anyway.

Better luck next time, or something

[BadBeast]

I think we were all sort of talking past eachother at this point anyway.

Better luck next time, or something

Yeah, sorry Kai, got kinda carried away there. A very thought provoking subject though.