| For humans it does not really matter whether some kind of life will still continue to exist on this planet. That is a too weak consolation for unrecoverable losses. Ignoring any ethical or esthetic arguments, every species of living beings that disappears today, regardless if it is a beetle or a whale, is a definitive loss of very important information, whose value we are not yet able to assess. It is equivalent to the burning of a library containing very valuable research papers containing results obtained after many years of work, for which there are no copies elsewhere. Despite the huge progress of technology during the last few centuries, there are still a lot of essential things that living beings can do, but which we have not learned yet how to do. An example is the energy-efficient capture of the diluted carbon dioxide from air and a huge number of other chemical processes that would be very useful, if mastered by humans. Every species that is lost might be the one who could save us a lot of work in the future, when we will become able to determine in much more detail how a living being works, which could provide solutions to important technical problems, some of which are actually critical for the survival of humanity, because our current technologies cannot sustain human life without help from a great number of different kinds of living beings. For some species that have disappeared or that are disappearing we have DNA sequences. However that is not the complete information about a living being, which would allow its reconstruction. We are still unable to read the complete information about a living cell, because there is a lot of necessary information besides that stored in nucleic acid sequences. It is likely that we will become able to read the entire information in less than a century from now, but by then it may be too late and a very large number of species will be already lost, and even the survival of the human species is not certain, due to its great median stupidity. Even for the species where you see claims that the DNA has been sequenced, that is only very seldom true. Especially for the eukaryotic species, where the structure of the genome is much more complex, with many chromosomes and epigenetic information, for a very small fraction of the "sequenced" genomes we have complete information, e.g. including the actual composition of the chromosomes and the locations of the genes on them, which may be important for gene regulation. For most of the existing sequenced genomes, we only have the sequences of a great number of random fragments of the genomes, from which we can make an estimation of the full genome, by examining the overlaps between the known fragments and hoping that they cover most of the genome. There are only relatively few genomes that are known with great accuracy. Even the human genome, whose study had priority, has features that were finally discovered only decades after the first announcement claiming (falsely) that the sequencing of the human genome has been finished. Determining the sequence of the last unknown 1% of a genome can take more than the sequencing of the first 99% of the genome. |