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Great Auk

en.wikipedia.org

43 pointsbrudgers27 comments

Past people really make me angry sometimes. So many animals and environments are just gone, for nothing. I have an optimistic but perhaps futile hope that we can bring some back some day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_eagle (maybe we don't want this one back outside zoos...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_bird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyptodont

That's just a few of the bigger ones.

I don't see much activity in trying to bring back recently extinct creatures. Neither around reconstruction or reintroduction of extinct ecosystems, aside from the Pleistocene park.

I can see people on HN deeply concerned about the Amazon or Indonesian ecosystems, but noone seems to be doing anything where they live.

It's easier to tell others what they should do, than to actually do something. People can convince themselves that with the level of interconnectedness, effort spent on messaging will have greater effect than actually taking action themselves (a single person). Of course when you're shouting into a deafening noise, it doesn't add much and the best approach is to actually do something, but of course the former option is easier.

Everyone is a propagandist today, but there's no longer any audience.

You don't have to be single - Pleistocene park is not a single person but rather an organization.

You can't do much on a destroyed ecosystem ( see the past discussion about Thames). We are starting to live in a world with "forests" without animals, with only one insect which is eating the forest. In a world with rivers without fishes or with introduced species.

Then maybe people who have already destroyed an ecosystem and can't restore it, stop givind advice (and push) to those who still have it.

It sounds like a good idea but isn't.

Very unlikely we'll see them again, but we can do all we can to protect the 1M+ endangered species:

- build communities with cooperation, not competition; shared pantries/kitchens help reduce waste

- in general, mutualize as much infra as possible to reduce resource usage

- go low-tech as much as you can (as a community) ; every single piece of electronics is close to the worst you can do for the environment

- sabotage surrounding industry? organize with fellow concerned citizens? chances are the psychopaths running the show (hello bezos) will never stop until we're all dead or they've successfully colonized Mars, so we should help them stop peacefully or find their way to the guillotine

Strongly recommend watching the (not-so-recent) End:Civ documentary (you can find it pretty much anywhere on the Internet).

Today we are wiping insects as a class, and all birds that prey on them.

I doubt we'll wipe out e.g. ants out as a class.

Ants and such seem to be at the top of the evolutionary ladder, like humans.

we are wiping out the proper use of things like "e.g." thanks to comments like yours, and the comments you've read to make you think this is the proper use.

no one gives a damn about literally anything anymore.

"e.g." is an abbreviation for "for example".

So, "I doubt we'll wipe out, for example, ants as a class".

Meaning that the comment wasn't particularly about ants, just used them as an illustrative example.

"e.g." is for lists of examples. not just one.

Not necessarily. As I understand it, it indicates the presence of a list or group, that the subject(s) mentioned after it belong to. The location of e.g. in the sentence is unusual though: usually it will be found at the end.

No, it's just an abbreviation, nothing more.

I'm not a native speaker.

I checked an old (1 m high) ant colony near to a corn field at the end of summer: this summer it was dead.

Maybe it died from old age. They live for decades but will die eventually anyways.

There are probably 1m ants living beneath my house. They are one of the species that has adapted extremely well to living with humans.

We'd better hope not. If insects disappear civilization will not be far behind.

It requires no personal sacrifice to lament the fact that prior peoples didn't make sacrifices.

It requires personal sacrifice to be the people who future people's don't lament.

Inaction vs action.

I'm not sure I understand. It would have required no personal sacrifice for the collectors to not push the great auk to extinction through their actions.

How about current people ? "Last chance to see" by Douglas Adams and a photographer (i forgot the name) was very eye opening.

I first learned about the Great Auk due to it being used as the mascot for the Knowledge Master Open (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Master_Open) which my class participated in during elementary/middle school.

> The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.

So saddening.

As seen on the cover of this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_AWK_Programming_Language

Matt Ridley makes the case for attempting to bring back the 'penguins of the north':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbXk7NldnM#t=18m

Matt Ridley, the prominent climate change denier:

https://www.desmog.com/matt-ridley/

I particurly enjoy the 5th Viscount Ridley, hereditary peer in the House of Lords, and inherited landowner of coal mines repeatedly coming to the aid of the 'poor people' that are affected, not by climate change, but in his view climate change mitigation strategies supported by 'upper middle class people, doing yoga and things like that'.

Thank you m'lord, though I assume from all his virtue signaling that he'll have already changed his mind now that wind and solar have been become so cheap for all the people in developing countries that he worries are dying from smoke inhalation due to lack of access to cheap electricity. When pursuing noble goals like that, you need to keep up with the science and economics or you can end up promoting harmful strategies as he's pointed out so many times in the past (okay, it turns out he was wrong on basically all of the facts, but the principle is sound).

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