U.S. agency declares 21 species now extinct
pbsnc.org
pbsnc.org
The loss of species is a tragedy because it’s a tragedy, but it’s also a tragedy because we’re destroying our inheritance at an alarming rate before we ever really get to see what it is or what it could be. Billions of years of prior art, gone.
Environmental collapse hurts everyone!
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3nmep/we-went-hunting-for-a...
Further your post is histrionic. ‘Environmental collapse’, ‘destroying our inheritance’, ‘alarming rate’, suggests an individual who is pushing an agenda rather than rationally appraising the current state of the ever-changing environment and biological ecosystem.
Well, being wealth has been increasingly concentrated in fewer people and wealth has always been on the side of fossil fuels and climate denial, would that not illustrate a plausible narrative?
At the very least, those aforementioned people probably could have done something about these issues before any of us knew about them.
About 200 plant and animal species go extinct every day.
Just because it has happened, doesn’t mean we should endorse and accelerate it. What we do determines the future.
Why?
However, in my opinion, it's a rather uninteresting hypothetical because human activity absolutely does play a huge role in the extinction of species today.
What about the ramifications of doing so?
I’m not sure fiddling with natural levels of extinction are smart.
My money would be into the molluscs lost as collateral damages by the effects of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the birds by a combination of touristic development plus Mikonia tree invasion starting on 60's and 70's.
"it's just a series of ever warmer summers, nothing to see here" style suggests oil industry?
Regarding extinction, my suggestion is biome transplants. Take a endangered biome slice and transplant it where the temperatures and conditions for the biome will reemerge post climate change stabilization, preferably in an area where humanity has no economic interest.
Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.
>rationally appraising the current state
both are an agenda. You can't escape ideology.
Now that a species near the top of the food chain is missing, what species can grow and change to fill the gap? Isn't that evolution, you respond to a change in your environment.
Evolution is a process that takes a lot of energy. Every lifetime is a lifetime of energy that has been harnessed to continue the process. So when a species goes extinct, it's not just the energy of all of the living members, but all of the ancestors of all of the living members as well that is destroyed.
Sort of like expending a bunch of energy to train a neural network, and then rm -rf the weights.
Such a waste.
The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
I don't think entropy is necessarily more correct, either. I don't think you or anyone possesses the omniscience to declare that entropy was increased. It could just as well be that some living being decreased entropy in some way, but then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.
OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems. Depending on what species you are, the other species being gone is either a good thing or a bad thing or an indifferent thing. No energy was wasted, nothing lasts, nothing is lost. It's the way of the world, or this universe for that matter. If the sun exploded today wiping out the entirety of humanity and everything else on this planet, what is "lost"? My guess is nothing outside of our planet would even notice.
And our "energy" will still live on, in our radio transmissions. So maybe not all would be lost.
You spend 1 terawatt hour of energy powering a datacenter to come up with a novel protein for a drug by simulating protein interactions.
Your competitor studies an already existing fungus, which may have expended that amount of energy over the combined lifetime of all of its ancestors to arrive at the same design, and gets the novel protein "for free."
One of you had to pay the energy cost, and the other didn't. The fungus is "free" and when it is destroyed, "it" -- that energy expenditure -- is lost forever.
It's not a ridiculous hypothetical because many such things (medicines, food, etc) come from living beings. Some from very obscure living beings. And some that are impossible to buy at any price, like living things that pollinate food, regulate the soil, stuff like that. Thermodynamically it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct but I think we can do a little better than that!
Targeted research is likely a shorter and less expensive route to "finding" breakthrough medicines, especially since technology evolves exponentially.
It's the second law of thermodynamics. It's why heat only flows into objects colder than the source (in an isolated system). You can argue against it, but I'd be curious what your alternative is for why heat only moves one direction.
It's also what makes perpetual motion machines impossible. Otherwise you'd be able to do nutty things like reversing the flow of heat to expand/contract gases in a chamber, driving a shaft into a generator which would create energy (i.e. expand the total amount of energy in the universe).
> then we're getting into defining order and disorder and that's outside the scope of what I want to discuss on an internet forum.
I think you may be misunderstanding "disorder" in the context of entropy. It's disorder at the chemical level. Energy is stored in bonds in molecules. When those bonds are broken or formed, some amount of the energy stored in those bonds is released as heat. The universe has a constant amount of energy (it can be neither created nor destroyed), this means that heat used to be stored energy. Given that heat can only go from an atom/particle to a colder particle, at some point this means all (or nearly all) energy will eventually be converted to heat. If all the energy is heat, that means particles aren't bound together into molecules, and the universe is disordered at a chemical level.
It has a pretty specific meaning in this exact context.
> OP's asserting that all that "energy" was somehow wasted, but they don't take into account the place those species occupied within ecosystems.
This would be entropy: the amount of energy that was irreversibly converted to heat by those organisms metabolism, and growth, and the same for the things they ate. It's not wasted in the sense that it vanished, but in the sense that we'll never be able to convert some of that heat back into useful energy. At some point the universe will become particle soup, and them existing moved the universe an infinitesimally small amount closer to that soup.
The thing is I am utterly depressed by the way that "climate change" has caused an entire generation to think that conservation is about managing atmospheric chemistry and planetary climate. Conservation is about preventing habitat loss and extinction. Human well-being does not trump avoidance of habitat loss in all cases by any means. And so, I criticized your post for (somewhat analogously to climate change) suggesting an utterly spurious reason for extinction avoidance when no-one should need any reason.
But the generation of people who care about climate change (not you, I'm just ranting) by and large don't know the difference between a eucalyptus/pine monoculture that results from one of their afforestation schemes and a natural forest habitat. Climate change avoidance may well be an important thread of conservation, but the fact that we have lost the simple rallying call of "Save the rainforests" threatens to be a tragedy, and if it turns out so, I will partially blame the last 20 years of climate change discourse.
10 (half) of the 21 species were in Hawaii, several of the other species were mussels
> “The bird had a ‘buzzy’ song, and the song added to the beauty of the bird, and when combined that added to the magic of North Carolina. We lost a little magic when we lost the species. And what’s really sad is that the Bachman’s warbler was abundant at the turn of the 20thcentury, but by 1950 it was noted as one of the rarest birds in North America.”
This hurts, especially knowing that it's a story that we've unfortunately told a thousand times in the past hundred years.
-- is
++ wasI can't find that photo on Getty so I'm not sure if it's mislabeled, or the editor just searched for "warbler", or got it from somewhere else and forgot to change the photo credit from an article template or something.
Edit: It seems to be from Shutterstock and is labeled correctly https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/yellowbrowed-warble.... My best guess is an overworked web producer was told to find a photo for this article, searched for "warbler" in some integrated stock photo search engine, picked this one and copy/pasted the wrong credit.
The reason? It's one of the first images that pop up when you punch 'chigger' into Google, and it appears to be licensed (and mislabeled) by Getty. Tracking the image back to its original source, it was clearly identified as a red velvet mite.
I wish publications wouldn't do this. A completely random lede image would be better than showing a picture of an animal that people will now believe is the one the article was talking about.
>Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct.
There were other, pure bred herds (e.g. Yellowstone, Canadian, etc).
And as this points out, the remnants of hybridization efforts were minimal, even in the direct Goodnight, Jones, and Bedson herds:
>> "These brief experiments form the basis for the controversy surrounding cattle genetic introgression in bison today. A study conducted for her Doctoral Dissertation by Lauren Dobson of Texas A&M University concluded that bison descended from those herds have the equivalent of 1 percent cattle genetic introgression within their genome." https://bisoncentral.com/advantage-item/ranchers-role-in-bis...
At the end of the day, bison didn't take (genetically or economically) to hybridization, as the hybrids were less hardy than pure bred bison.
An extinction twofer!
native Americans
So for instance the most popularly known mass extinction event was the dinosaurs, like caused by an asteroid impact some ~15km large. If there was such an asteroid on an impact course today, we could probably detect it a bit before it impacted - but not do a whole heck of a lot more. We could launch every single nuke we have and it would be like throwing baseballs at a semi-truck. By contrast when it lands, it would be the equivalent of hundreds of millions of nukes going off, and the ash of the impact would completely blot out the sky. Those who survived the initial impact would die from either starvation, freezing, or lack of oxygen as all plants and wildlife gradually died off.
Anyhow, space tech is important. And we're only able to achieve such thanks to human industrialization and spread. Paradoxical, but such is the nature of all technological progress which invariably brings problems ultimately only solved by even more advances which, again, bring their own problems. It makes life feel like a game, or maybe we just make games modeled after life.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg [from the page at] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
All of those were caused by global Earth-level geological events or extraterrestrial objects such as massive asteroids. The latest extinction event is caused by a single species. It is absolutely an exceptional extinction event and the only one of its kind.
> Human industrialization is certainly causing plentiful destruction, yet it will also likely be the one thing that may possibly save the lives of countless species.
Technology will never not create more problems as it attempts to solve problems caused by other technology.
Also, the first [1] (and one of the most extreme) extinction events ever was indeed caused by a single species, cyanobacteria. Prior to the evolutionary development of photosynthesis, there was plentiful simple life on the planet. The evolutionary emergence of photosynthesis resulted in a dramatic and rapid introduction of oxygen into Earth's atmosphere which was exceptionally toxic to the existing abiotic species. We only think of oxygen as a good thing, because we evolved in its presence. If there was an advanced species that managed to evolve in abiotic circumstance, we'd probably look as weird to them as a creature that breathes gaseous arsenic would look to us!
Is more like how dead on Earth works
If the goal is returning the planet to their original status of lifeless floating rock for billions of years, we are doing a spectacular job in just a glimpse of time. I can imagine how puzzling this will appear in the fossil record some millions years from now.
But we aren't. We're not doing enough.
There is a bullet coming towards our faces, and we are not moving out of the way.
I don't know how I'm supposed to graduate into this climate and be an optimistic member of society.
It "just" takes a sufficient pivot in will, a couple decades and this shit's solved.
I see the current loss of complexity and volume of life as dual to the expansion of complexity and volume of human consumption (via its displacing space and energy demand).
Human consumption is happening because of 1. the will to consume and 2. the means to exercise that will.
2. is enabled by technology with its inherent externalities and we're very familiar with it here.
1. is caused by endogenous tendencies to increase comfort and decrease pain (the idea you have yourself that maybe you don't want to starve or freeze in winter or that 50% of your children shouldn't die by mysterious forces) and by exogenous factors such as manufactured demand (the ideas you likely wouldn't have yourself and that are inserted by a third party e.g. for the newest throwaway fashion, cruise trip, avocado sandwich, smartphone refresh, ... this list is endless).
Demand is manufactured in the form of what boils down to (highly effective!) thought intrusion or hijacking of the reward system (ads, influencers, "haptic" marketing) most of which delivered via information systems. It is here that "one could" immediately intervene and get the 'reduce' going in the 'reduce, reuse, recycle'.
Additionally there's this cultural/education issue that we have become nature-blind. Ask any random person and they'll tell you they love nature and animals. And then they'll stone-cold show you that 'beautiful' picture of <dead landscape in tourist location> they shot from their line cruise (speaking from personal experience here). This is where we could use information technology and education again to shape beliefs.
A big problem is how you'd actually implement all this without having society blow up over this mysterious spectre of 'faltering economy' that is going to happen when the economic activity associated with bullshit consumption goes away (20 hour workweek anyone?).
There's obviously much more to write and things get really complex when you factor in all the different interrelated systems that have metastasized to the point they are now.
Plus we're not really aligned on this issue. I'd wager there's a significant chunk that just doesn't care and thinks it's a lame sideshow as long as it doesn't affect them until they die. I'd say it's because they have no idea what they're talking about (nature-blindness again, and forget about the rest).
Oh and what my last sentence meant: I claim if we could get to a state where we mount a giant concerted action by a sufficient number of decision makers that realign our collective activity towards preservation, we could harness the knowledge and technology we have now to execute successfully on that vision.
It's a big claim and a messy (but not implausible to solve) problem, the incalculability of which I encoded in the apostrophes around just ;)
Good luck with your radio show.
Some commentary...
> A big problem is how you'd actually implement all this without having society blow up over this mysterious spectre of 'faltering economy' that is going to happen when the economic activity associated with bullshit consumption goes away (20 hour workweek anyone?).
See also: countries switching which side of the road they drive on (with lots more variables).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic
> Plus we're not really aligned on this issue.
Perhaps for reasons similar to why the dishes from breakfast are still sitting dirty in my sink rather than clean in the cupboard.
> I'd wager there's a significant chunk that just doesn't care and thinks it's a lame sideshow as long as it doesn't affect them until they die. I'd say it's because they have no idea what they're talking about (nature-blindness again, and forget about the rest).
Even this may be optimistic, as it is.
>>>> The systems we use for coordinating our actions and beliefs aren't sufficiently sophisticated....and we are too indoctrinated to realize it.
>>> The (information) systems are actually incredibly sophisticated, but they are aligned with extraction not preservation.
>>> It "just" takes a sufficient pivot in will, a couple decades and this shit's solved.
>> Do we have any that can reliably detect and surface the errors/flaws in your comment though, in a productive/positive manner? ;)
> Oh and what my last sentence meant: I claim if we could get to a state where we mount a giant concerted action by a sufficient number of decision makers that realign our collective activity towards preservation, we could harness the knowledge and technology we have now to execute successfully on that vision.
This seems like a substantially (to a materially important degree) but different (improved) meaning - and yes, I am being "pedantic" (and evasive). Flaws remain though - is further refinement possible?
> It's a big claim and a messy (but not implausible to solve) problem, the incalculability of which I encoded in the apostrophes around just ;)
Similar to the pile of dishes in my sink....I should "just" go wash them! Nah, maybe later.
"We tried" is a very generous statement
Around 50 new species get found every day to put that number into perspective.
https://smv.org/learn/blog/how-many-species-are-left-be-disc....
Of course, climate change and human civilization is causing a selection process that may lead to new species. But the rate of change is too fast for even them to survive to what is coming.
Ironically it’s our quest to not be the last songbird that seems to keep ruining the planet for the songbirds.
I really don't think animals pay any attention to abstract concepts like this at all.
Tell that to cane toads.
I'm not familiar enough with birds to speak about them, but other mammalian species absolutely understand loneliness, and understand the difference between having human friends and having friends of their same species.
That fact we’ve caused this level of suffering is abhorrent to me.
I agree that other animals feel loneliness too. But not the same level of anxiety about “what if I don’t exist, or my species or bloodline” doesn’t go on.
This level of anxiety is reserved for us, in the same way we’re worried about the stock market or economy not growing year on year. This is our gift.
To some extent, sure. But I think some of this is us habituating to pets who were sterilized prior to puberty. In post-pubertal animals the drives to have and rear children are pretty strong.
That is self contradictory. A lot of species go extinct due to other species.
If we don't have that "right", that makes us special.
IIRC early Christianity thought acting violated the ten commandments, and some fiction writers today say their job is to tell lies for money.
That a lot of us refuse to see ourselves as part of the animal kingdom is indication enough.
Let's also not forget our pompous assumption that only humans can make and use tools (debunked), only humans can feel emotions (debunked), and so on.
If something ferocious ever comes around to knock humanity down several pegs, it will be very deserved.
"Deserved" is a human concept. Pretty much all 'smart' animals (orcas, dolphins, bonobos, etc.) engage in extremely cruel behaviors towards other species or even to their kind. They are no better than us. We're the only ones who are having moral qualms over it (and we should).
Something as pea brained as a groundhog has calls to describe the shape, color, threat level, and individuality of any number of warning calls. Orcas literally have memes. I’m sure if dolphins could use the internet we’d get so much “dead fish on head” r/fashionadvice.
On the other hand, I have a hard time squaring that with practical morality. If all life is equally valuable, we all commit the crime of murder just to eat and survive. That does not feel quite right. And if we say that life is maybe not so valuable, then does it mean the crime of murder itself is not wrong? I think that also doesn’t feel right.
So maybe it’s not that all life is equally valuable, but rather life is valuable. Equality is a human construction, after all - unchecked nature is much more vicious in dealing with inequality in the margins. Life consumes life, that is how it is. It is a cycle that doesn’t quite repeat, and there is no destruction of life in sustenance, only transformation.
And maybe that is what happens when one species - or a million - dies out. Perhaps that is nature’s brutal callousness in action, and as such is a perfectly natural thing to happen. I don’t think I quite like that either.
Every time I have a deep think on the way things are, I’m reminded of the Buddhists, who I think found at least some truth in it all: “life is suffering”. I’m not sure there’s much more to it than that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc_TETgMSNA
Lyrics excerpt:
In Costa Rica, in a burrow underground // Climb to the surface, blink my eyes and look around // I'm all alone here as I try my tiny song // Claim my place beneath the sky, but I won't be here for long //
I sang all night // The moon shone on me through the trees // No brothers left // And there'll be no more after me //
Way to pollute the planet so much the bible becomes an instruction manual lol (no offense to believers, just a joke)
I think the answer to your question is that if it's easier to reverse our course then a bunch of species will be dead with no way to revive them. Easier does not mean easy, and reversing course is IMO next to impossible, so it bei g harder than that just means it won't happen.
"We show that as of June 2021, 3,278 unique animals have had their nuclear genome sequenced and the assembly made publicly available in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database (10). This translates to 0.2% of all animal species."
It's a huge project! Just lizards are double the number of complete screens we have.
We should definitely try and get the tech going. It will have uses to recover even endangered species in the near future, but it's not a smart use of our resources for saving us "after" something happens.
I agree it's not something that is necessarily immediately useful right after a problem, but it's something better to have than not. Reconstructing the wooly mammoth DNA required filling in somewhat large gaps with elephant DNA if I recall correctly, so even if we are able to resurrect the wooly mammoth with it, it won't really be a wooly mammoth, it will be mostly one, to the best of our ability. Something definitive tracking species would likely be greatly appreciated by future generations.
We wanted to play God and now we’ve been given the chance :)
To paraphrase a bad movie line: we need to science the shit out of this.
We won't reverse our own course of progress and consumption, but perhaps we can reverse the damage with sufficient tech.
<sarcasm> As soon as we figure out how to rejuvenate extinct species from their DNA records we should all be good ... <wink> </sarcasm>
I would be interested in the answer to this as well.
This isn’t a perfect example, but the other day I was researching shrimp. There is a genus called neocaridina, and they’re generally detritivores. However, I discovered that many species in the genus eat quite differently. Some will eat hair algae, some won’t. Some like to feed on hard algae, some only soft. Some have preference for higher protein foods, others less. Of the 26 known species, the manifestation of their presence in an ecosystem would actually be quite different.
This is a single genus which would have substantially varying impacts on ponds, streams, and lakes for example. If you have a diverse set of these species, you will be far more likely to keep a variety of detritus and algae sources in check. Reduce the diversity, and perhaps hair algae will get out of control. Once this happens, you might see certain fish or insects lose their habitat because they depend on other vegetation, but the hair algae is absorbing too much light and nutrients now.
This is applies to all kinds of animals, in all kinds of habitats. Diversity means greater balance, greater stability, and means of recovering faster when things collapse.
Which ecosystems on Earth are "in equilibrium"?
A given species doesn't just eat items X, Y, Z in a food web. In a pinch, they might be able to deal with others things. A W, perhaps. If the W-predating species suffers disease or some calamity, this other species can, to some degree, pick up the slack. It's really a key part of adaptive radiation. Maybe I could live here, although I don't usually. Maybe I could mate there, although it is a bit out of my comfort zone.
When you play those simulation games with just a few species, you see a lot of boom-bust cycles and eventually you get a collapse. Similarly, those sealed terrariums have similar problems: they eventually fall into a lower equilibrium of fewer species and then they kind of turn to mush.
I hesitate to say "role" because that feels assigned, but different species do different things in an overlapping fashion, like a cross-trained staff lowering your "bus factor."
Now, I imagine there's some kind of maximum number (so many species that finding someone to breed with is hard), but the minimums lack resiliency for various cycles.
On the same token, more species means more genetic diversity and higher levels of resilience to diseases and other threats.
Different species service ecosystems in different ways. Pollination, water purification, soil enrichment, etc. With too few species, key requirements for cross species survival are less likely to be met.
On a less scientific basis, more species just makes the planet richer. The thought of just a few dominant species across the planet is a very sad prospect and would represent a huge loss regarding the beauty that billions of years of evolution have brought us.
Of course, somewhat paradoxically, these species disappearing is an adaptation to shifting ecosystems.
What's happening now is that ecosystems are globalizing. An ecological niche that was filled by 30 local species before modernity, is now being mixed up and whichever species is "best" may fill that niche everywhere.
So if my local frog species disappears, it's probably replaced by more hardworking immigrant frogs. This can be very disruptive and have negative consequences in many ways. But it doesn't mean animal life disappears. It changes.
One big thing is that on land we converted from hunting and gathering the commons to farming private land thousands of years ago.
In the oceans we're still doing it, and modern technology is devastatingly effective at it.
Look at the diversity within canis lupus familiaris, the domesticated dog.
Yes a moth with different wing shape is regarded as a separate species.
It's essentially a choice between losing protections for other species and painting a rosier picture by undercounting what has been lost.
As in, if certain species decreases, but another increase, it's not clear to me one is more bad than another.
Obviously, wouldn't want entire ecosystems wiped out. I'm just curious what a good measurement of ecosystem health would be.
I'm sure there's one out there hopefully, as technology advances, we'll be able to mitigate the effects we have on the environment, and occasionally, maybe even help it.
Forgive my, bluntness, but statements like "optimal measure of biodiversity" are perhaps part of the problem. What the does that even mean?
So where advanced technology can mitigate the effects of previously miraculous advanced technology, say micro-plastics, 'forever chemicals', pesticide residues?
I am enjoying my comfort from technology, to include the glasses that allow me to "read", and post on Hacker News, but the negative externalities both to myself, and others, .. are substantial.
1: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/17/2023-22...
Shouldn’t they be placed on onto an uber-protected status list?
So I looked it up: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there
TLDR: Somewhere between 2.1 and 8.7 million.
Also, this is just extinctions in the US, but I can't find a good number of known species that exist in the US. For one example, 10 of the 21 species labeled as extinct here are birds, and there seem to be roughly 900 species of birds in the United States. So 10 seems like a lot. There are also 8 extinct mussel species out of 297 known in North America.
So, depending on which definition you use, you can get very different numbers.
sigh
It's wild how this news is basically a non-story, people don't care about "oops we accidentally did a bunch of extinctions"
...but people will riot if you launch a project to intentionally wipe out the single most deadly insect species in the history of humanity (and one that's not even a keystone species!).
The species that carry disease actually do not have an important role in the food chain. They are not at all a keystone species. In most of the places where they cause widespread misery and death they're not even a native species, they're invasive.
Then conditions change, due to weather, or new plant species gaining foot hold, and that bird may start being outcompeted by a different bird that will eat its specialized food source, or that food source is no longer as prevalent.
Hawaii does have a lot of boomer invaders. Always wondered how long it would take in a war, before they started eating each other. Hawaii is not food secure by any means. It's almost all container ships feeding the island.
Nature will find a balance.
We could do with fewer people. In 2000 there was ~6.1 billion and the world was just fine.
Not sure what you are citing for this, but I would assume this is less than 8 billion people based on our current pollution and consumption rates.
This stat is a mind-blowing one also considering the sheer amount of empty space still available on the planet. With good resource management and terraforming you'd think this number would be a lot larger.
This entire comment is junk assertions based on nothing but this part is hilarious in particular.
And 2 billions more.
And...
Just want to see someone interview him who is as smart as him. Me
Just send the average five year old.
Just want to see someone interview him who is as smart as him.
Anyway sad to see this report. Reason I bring up Musk is he is so self righteous about focus on rockets and EVs. What's the point of a rocket reaching Mars if there is no Earth left to supply it?
We are in the Holocene Extinction and the best minds are ignoring the problem and driving the dagger in deeper. That's sad.
If we sacrificed 1000 species of bird in exchange for 10 million new species of bacteria, that's not a win.
Excluding single cell organisms, the number of species going extinct in a given year in any category outweigh newly discovered or born species by around 8x.
There is the assumption in a lot of the environmental rhetoric that whatever number of species and the exact types of species that existed ~200 years ago when we started keeping track are the optimal ones and that they should stay that way forever. It doesn't work that way though. If a species goes extinct, it's because its environment changed and it's no longer adapted to it. Whether the source of that change is another species (humans) or something else is irrelevant. A new species will come along that's better adapted.
We could model our existence in a way to just optmize for our species existence. Humans have been running species into existence for a long time in order to populate. I think we should optimize the other way though. I think we would if we assumed that our mentally advanced status assumed a stewardship-like responsibility. Instead we take and take and take. I've been guilty as anyone, but have tried to be more mindful as I've gotten older and limit my consumption, and make sacrifices to do so where I see nobody else in my immediate sphere doing the same. I do that because I liked having nature be outside my doorstep. I don't think there is an asumption that there was or is an optimal number of species, I think it is just that some people have seen a tranformation that they don't like.
If a species is extinct there is no hole. The hole it filled in the ecosystem is gone. If it were still there, it wouldn't be extinct. There will be a different hole and a different species. Yes, they don't come up overnight, but life will evolve to exploit an opportunity where there is one.
You do not know the optimum because you do not know the threats.