[abemiller]

I think your point is somewhat fair, and I agree that advancing medicine is not a great sole reason to keep around our fellow organics. There are a few ways to respond to this, including such notions as having intrinsic respect for nature, and appreciation for what natural selection has wrought. But for one and most simply with regard to your anthropocentric viewpoint, the ecosystems that these species constitute are actually critical to keeping civilization going in a practical economic sense.

The theoretical human civilization that can withstand a global ecosystem collapse and exist on a paved over earth is perhaps possible with the right technology but also it is 1. very dreary and 2. much more expensive and difficult to maintain than just putting in some effort to prevent ecosystem collapse now.

Fisheries management is a good microcosm for the cost of ecosystem collapse. If we manage a fish population correctly, we can continue to harvest fish from it and get resources out of it indefinitely. If we do not manage it well and let the population go extinct, we lose that pool of resources permanently and need to replace it with another equivalent source of food which may be very expensive in comparison. Perhaps the local human civilization which relied on the fish will be unable to adjust and will also fall.

[thegrimmest]

Thank you for your good faith reply. I agree with everything you wrote, but don't see how saving importantly regarded mammals such as polar bears, elephants, whales and dolphins (etc.) fits into the picture. If these animals and others no longer have vast tracts of wilderness to roam on an anthropocentric earth, what's the downside?

[chordalkeyboard]

Extirpation of keystone species causes the rest of the food chain to become disrupted, resulting in proliferation of some species and extinction of others. The consequences for humans are zoonotic diseases and loss of natural food sources.

[thegrimmest]

This is basically bioforming, and I'm sure it's more complicated than "removing keystone species == always bad". For instance, sperm whales compete significantly with humans for tuna fish, making up about 50% of the fish eaten. As our demand for tuna grows, wouldn't exterminating sperm whales help us meet that demand?

[myshpa]

Ad tuna ... it's worse than you think. I have to quote to a very good article:

"The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year. While they claim this is to smooth supply on a year-to-year basis, conservationists believe they are acting in the expectation that in the event of the fish’s extinction in the wild, prices will skyrocket. Frozen in great stacks at –60oC by the same company who made my childhood cassette player, the bodies would be sold for astronomical prices.

It has a name, this uniquely vile game: it is called extinction speculation. It’s practised by those who collect Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders and rhino horn; men and women with hearts that sing along only to the song of money. There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar."[0]

The tuna is not on brink of collapse because it competes with sperm whales for food. They were here together, perfectly fine, for ... i don't know ... millions of years? It's near die off because we eat them and work tirelessly towards their extinction.

Also ... if you want to know more what happens to the ecosystem when some key species die off (it collapses), I highly recommend the movie Seaspiracy [1]

[0] https://granta.com/tuna/ [1] https://www.seaspiracy.org/

[pfdietz]

Also, wouldn't extermination of primates prevent crossover of viruses? A world without other primates would have been a world without HIV. A world without other mammals would be (or would have been) a world without COVID, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Marburg, Rabies, hantavirus, bubonic plague...

Hmm. I'm taking the fanatical blue aliens' position from the second Doc Future e-book.