Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Also it seems rather unlikely that they can scale their approach to 6 de-extinctions per hour...
In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation
Thats what the Baha'i Ruhi institute seeks to do
https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circ...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-sh...
So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number.
Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote.
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate.
Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?
The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.
But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...
> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.
If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.
But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.