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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

It's always astonishing to me that this world is still so unexplored that we can discover an entire population of polar bears in 2022. They're literally one of the biggest animals, how did we miss them?

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We lose humans 400 feet away from hiking trails all the time. The fact that we lose polar bears in the Arctic is not that surprising.

[Mildly exaggerated] It's astonishing to you that we don't have Star Trek/Orville(s03e03 is actually pretty great, watch it!)-type planet-level sensors capable of creating complete inventories of biological lifeforms of a particular type on our planet? :)

Don't need Star-trek tech for that, just people who can move about and there are plenty of those.

People tend to dislike moving about in places where ice bears roam, so there are not very many who do.

Also, how would you know they're part of an isolated population unless you spend time (and money) collecting samples, doing genetic analysis, tracking movement, and observing behavior? And don't forget, having a bunch of researchers running around is going to affect the bears' behavior and introduce some uncertainty into the observations.

Where is the value for shareholders in that

to support big game hunters

We also only just discovered a city of 1.5 million penguins!

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/a-previously-unknown-....

I imagine the phrase "like finding polar bears in a snow storm" caught on :P.

Jokes aside, there is so much of the world that's unoccupied for various reasons. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/these-maps-show-how-e...

I imagine we're missing a lot, especially if you factor in deep ocean and jungle

The population is 27 bears on an island 2.1 million square kilometers large.

They are too busy tracking what you do online...

Mostly because we're not looking. I believe that if there were money in knowing where every polar bear is, we could solve that engineering problem. But there really isn't?

So my answer is essentially: "capitalism".

You mean Coca Cola doesn’t do this ?

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