Stipulating that future technologies will be limitlessly powerful, a more accurate way of putting this is “future people will probably be able to use future technologies to regenerate as much biodiversity as current people want.”
Should a present-day environmentalist, rational as you please, make decisions as though future people were likely to do so?
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.
Do you mean the thread because that’s hardly missing from the broader discussion, much of the funding goes towards towards seed banks and so on, on a broader scale too a lot of conservation is effectively ecological cryonics- zoos and so on just keep endangered species in a holding pattern. Criticism of these is, as far as I can see, mostly ecological eg: reintroduced tree species will fail to thrive if introduced to soils where their traditional symbiotic fungi have gone extinct in their absence.
One thing that’s missing from this discussion is that we’ll probably be able to use future technologies to regenerate as much biodiversity as we want.
Stipulating that future technologies will be limitlessly powerful, a more accurate way of putting this is “future people will probably be able to use future technologies to regenerate as much biodiversity as current people want.”
Should a present-day environmentalist, rational as you please, make decisions as though future people were likely to do so?
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.
Do you mean the thread because that’s hardly missing from the broader discussion, much of the funding goes towards towards seed banks and so on, on a broader scale too a lot of conservation is effectively ecological cryonics- zoos and so on just keep endangered species in a holding pattern. Criticism of these is, as far as I can see, mostly ecological eg: reintroduced tree species will fail to thrive if introduced to soils where their traditional symbiotic fungi have gone extinct in their absence.