From Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens': "[T]he first wave of Sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom." (thread)pic.twitter.com/Ay4pKL0K1u
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Thank you for this informative thread. Thankfully, widespread human-caused species extinction is a thing of the past. Humans now preserve animal habitats, and no species will ever become extinct again.
Indeed. Clearly humans are great at learning from our past destructive behavior, and have gotten our act together.
Yes! Humans are the best! We are in the process of reversing climate change, bringing peace to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, terraforming Mars, and creating artificial meat!
Settle down, Pinker.
Any thoughts on plans to reinstate extinct species we killed off via genetic reconstruction? (That's probably not the right technical term for it)
That's a good question. I don't know enough about biology or genetics to say how feasible that is. Though I'd imagine there might be some problems with it. For example, could we determine how that would impact the current ecosystem? Maybe it'd do more damage at this point.
I don't know much about it either. I heard of it first in a ted talk a couple of years ago. Apparently it's called deextinction now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-extinction …
That's really fascinating. The argument that de-extinction might be used to help fix climate change is an interesting one. Pretty scary how good humans are getting at manipulating the world around us.
We're an invasive species by design. The problem is we have no new ecosystems to disrupt, colonize and take advantage of.
After the industrial revolution, humans branched out and expanded our colonialism to the seas. We've had our fun with terrestrial life, and now we're also fucking up the oceans with industrial pollution.
Your argument is superficial. Mass(and not-so-mass) extinctions happened before humans. And will continue happening even if we're not around. Fucking <everything> man. Always fucking <everything else> up. Humans are no different, just more effective.
I didn't say humans are the sole cause of extinctions (see: the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, which occurred some 60 million years before humans, and was infinitely more devastating). We do our fair share, though. But yes; fucking matter, man. Always fucking up other matter.
Yes, we do our fair share. And it also may be valuable to reduce the suffering and devastation we humans create, whenever we have the chance.
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