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Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time, beside the Global Seed Vault, to have a Global Species Vault?

What if it's easier to reverse our current course of action than to make a vault of all the animals? I mean even just collecting sperm and embryos from lizards seems kinda insane. Amphibian, fish, mollusk, and insect species are far more numerous and at far more risk.

I love the sentiment but the time to reverse our course was probably in the 60s. We’ve fiddled with all the knobs and dials and we’re in charge of the problem now.

We wanted to play God and now we’ve been given the chance :)

But we still have to reverse course.

I think there's another option, which is cheat codes.

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.

We have to give up a lot of our modern conveniences, diet, and way of life. It's not going to happen by choice.

I would assume you would just take genetic samples in the easiest, and most durable form.

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.

So it's not a vault it's a digital archive. Still the action of scanning in the DNA for future use. Just on lizards still, biggest project humanities ever taken.

I would assume you'd want that digital archive in a vault for the same reasons we put seeds kn the seed vault. Like the seed vault, the only copy doesn't need to (nor should it) exist just in the vault, but that's a good location to make sure at least one copy survives.

I'm still talking about how hard it is... just for the 7000 known species of lizards.

"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.

Well, you said digital, but that's not the only way to do it. Blood in a stabilizer of some sort (if it exists) or some other carrier of genetic material was more along the lines of what I meant. That's much easier to do (maybe? I'm not sure what it takes to stabilize it over a long time frame), but takes a lot more physical space.

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.

Building a giant vault is definitely easier than convincing people to change the way they live. Putting aside whether the book of Genesis is literally true or not, the tale of Noah’s Ark certainly describes how people behave correctly.

I don't use Noah's Ark to make blanket judgements of human behavior.

I don't think you can just freeze a packet of aardvarks like that.

frozen embryos

Like an Ark?

Human violence and lack of morality causes a flood/rising sea levels and now we're talking about an Ark where the enlightened will spare the other animals from destruction that is for humanity to face.

Way to pollute the planet so much the bible becomes an instruction manual lol (no offense to believers, just a joke)

I think believers wouldn't be offended, they want you to use the bible as an instruction manual.

Unfortunately few animal gametes are as hardy as those of plants and fungi. In terms of a record of genetic and phenotypic diversity, the global network of natural history museums (at least those with research arms), largely play this role.

<sarcasm> As soon as we figure out how to rejuvenate extinct species from their DNA records we should all be good ... <wink> </sarcasm>

You mean a ZOO? We have plenty of those.

we already have that, it's called nature parks

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