With regard to the Redwood trees, my personal thoughts as a blue person are that it is probably a bad idea to destroy something which is both rare and hard to replace (on a human timescale) without having a good reason.
If Redwood was the most common plant species by biomass, we would of course use it for lumber, or even cut down a few hundreds of them whenever we need space for a new Walmart.
Likewise archaeological sites or rare fossils. (Of course, all of that has limits. If we lived in some steampunk world where Redwood trees are the obvious thing to build moon rockets from, I would be willing to sacrifice a few of them for the Apollo missions.)
Generalized, this could be phrased as “don’t make the universe more boring”.
That being said, in terms of excitement per mole, the observable universe still has a lot of optimization potential. Let us perhaps keep Jupiter and Saturn for future generations, but Uranus and Neptune could probably be put to better use.
With regard to the Redwood trees, my personal thoughts as a blue person are that it is probably a bad idea to destroy something which is both rare and hard to replace (on a human timescale) without having a good reason.
If Redwood was the most common plant species by biomass, we would of course use it for lumber, or even cut down a few hundreds of them whenever we need space for a new Walmart.
Likewise archaeological sites or rare fossils. (Of course, all of that has limits. If we lived in some steampunk world where Redwood trees are the obvious thing to build moon rockets from, I would be willing to sacrifice a few of them for the Apollo missions.)
Generalized, this could be phrased as “don’t make the universe more boring”.
That being said, in terms of excitement per mole, the observable universe still has a lot of optimization potential. Let us perhaps keep Jupiter and Saturn for future generations, but Uranus and Neptune could probably be put to better use.