Comment by AntiImperialist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AntiImperialist | Hacker News Reader

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AntiImperialist

I feel the whole "species conservation" thing is very myopic and misguided.

Whatever species or distribution we have today is very different from that 10k years ago or 100k years ago or 1m years ago 100m years ago. This has been going on for at least a billion years and will likely continue for another billion.

How short-sighted do you have to be to think that this is it? Why do we need to "conserve" any species? Didn't dinosaurs evolve into birds? Didn't some underground mammal evolve into us?

Aren't we going to evolve into something else? Or disappear and some other species will take over? Or most animals will disappear and just plants will continue? Or everything will go extinct?

Who came up with the idea that we need to make sure that the species we have remain the same? What is the thought process behind it?

The thought process behind it is self preservation I think.

Sure some other species probably will manage to evolve to take our place but that is pretty presbyopic or "Far Sighted", isn't that just as misguided?

The article is about a moss species that seems to have flourished after being exposed to sunlight due to logging that occured 60 years ago that is now being starved of sunlight due to the trees growing back. Interesting that this in some ways does support your argument in a round about way.

Considering new diseases are appearing out of the wilderness, I think it would be wise to save this moss in the event it has a future medicinal use.

Studying microbes / organisms might also help us discover useful biological and chemical properties which we might be able to use in other disciplines.

What if we could program cells to perform desired tasks? Or find some way to employ a novel form of photosynthesis in solar panels? These are very random examples, and it is likely to be something very different, but with the right technology, who knows what could be possible in the future.

>Considering new diseases are appearing out of the wilderness, I think it would be wise to save this moss in the event it has a future medicinal use.

Well, considering the diseases appearing out of the wild, one of them could appear from a species we conserve. We can't know if it will fare well for us or will turn out to be against us. Also, why does it have to revolve around us?

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