Future people may want different things than we do, but regardless of what they want, they’ll probably get their way once they’re there. Arguments for caring about biodiversity anyway could be 1) it’ll be valuable in the mean time, or 2) we’ll want to have the same collection of species for old times’ sake and future people won’t have enough data to reconstruct what that collection was unless we preserve it.
Ecosystem engineering’s also likely to be extremely difficult and expensive, even if we’ve got all the raw data necessary to implement it. One way or another this probably won’t end up being much of a thing to worry about in a post-Singularity future, or even one altered by sub-Singularity transformative technologies like advanced nanotech, but in the meantime, or given conservative assumptions about technological progress, it’s still a cost-benefit analysis worth making.
Future people may want different things than we do, but regardless of what they want, they’ll probably get their way once they’re there. Arguments for caring about biodiversity anyway could be 1) it’ll be valuable in the mean time, or 2) we’ll want to have the same collection of species for old times’ sake and future people won’t have enough data to reconstruct what that collection was unless we preserve it.
Ecosystem engineering’s also likely to be extremely difficult and expensive, even if we’ve got all the raw data necessary to implement it. One way or another this probably won’t end up being much of a thing to worry about in a post-Singularity future, or even one altered by sub-Singularity transformative technologies like advanced nanotech, but in the meantime, or given conservative assumptions about technological progress, it’s still a cost-benefit analysis worth making.