The idea of finally talking to something we’ve been killing for resources for centuries is kinda weird.
Edit: Because the topic is about communicating with Whales and my response was to a comment about hunting them, I thought it would be appropriate to reference something Spock said in Star Trek IV. Colloquially known as "The one with the whales".
Usually the species is hunted for something valuable, and that means that the species becoming rarer translates to higher prices. So the people who successfully kill the very last specimens will get rich from them; an absolutely logical motivation, even if it has disastrous consequences down the line. If you can get ten million dollars for the very last whale on Earth, it is better than spending your life hunting some ubiquitous not-whales for 5000 dollars each.
Of course, the end result is bad - the entire industry disappears - but so it is in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
I know you're simply explaining the logic but it's still a psychopath's logic
But ignoring them, I would say, is not in fact logical or rational.
Hunting the white rhinos to extinction is totally fine. It's just game theory, you guys.
1. On taking: we should do it or someone else will 2. On giving: might as well skipt it because someone else will
Logic makes no moral judgements, and also logic doesn't care about the future, if it doesn't include the invididual.
(Here logic is also a stand-in for "maximizing benefit").
If one/a group hunts whales to extintion and makes a huge profit (say, enough to retire), they would be logically sound (if morally bankrupt) to not care less if there are no whales left.
Logic could as well be used perfectly well for minimizing benefit, it's just a tool for forming and evaluating syllogisms based on a set of axioms.
Nobody who knows basic biology has any illusions about the prospect of driving even a single species of bacteria to extinction.
And anyway Russia probably still stockpiles literal tons of smallpox virus frozen underground in Siberian laboratories.
I guess the GP post is simply a direct quote from "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (where IIRC Spock says something along those lines while he and Kirk visit a 20th century museum).
Whales, their extinction and communicating with them was central to the plot of that film.
EDIT: Ok, I looked it up. This exact quote is in the movie, verbatim, in the scene I mentioned. At around 00:47:39
As opposed to two decades ago (right column): https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/icq-2001
That we are so terrible at modesty of consumption in groups is the real tragedy.
Happened to indigenous people in the Americas.
Happens to many politicians by rich/powerful people across the world.
It is a sad truth that humans had little trouble viewing other humans as resources.
Even today, there are reports of african pygmies still being treated as slaves or hunted for both sport and cannibalism[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies#Enslavement,_c...