One devil’s advocate I haven’t seen discussed: let’s say 99% of species die off via a harmful intervention. Once the harmful intervention stops, new species will naturally branch out from the survivors to fill the now-vacant environmental niches. This will result in an increase in the number of “species” back to the original level or beyond.
Assuming humans never destroy literally all multi celled organisms on Earth, I think this rediversification is guaranteed to happen after some amount of time.
Is the number of species really important at all, or is the preservation of the basic genetic drive the important thing?
There is a race between humans destroying their own capacity to destroy and humans destroying all life on Earth. I would bet on the former.