A couple more “out-there” ideas for ecological interventions:
“recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species”—yup, but it probably takes more than just DNA sequences on a USB drive to de-extinct a creature in the future. For instance, probably you need to know about all kinds of epigenetic factors active in the embryo of the creature you’re trying to revive. To preserve this epigenetic info, it might be easiest to simply freeze physical tissue samples (especially gametes and/or embryos) instead of doing DNA sequencing. You might also need to use the womb of a related species—bringing back mammoths is made a LOT easier by the fact that elephants are still around! -- and this would complicate plans to bring back species that are only distantly related to anything living. I want to better map out the tech tree here, and understand what kinds of preparation done today might aid what kinds of de-extinction projects in the future.
Normal environmentalists worry about climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and other prosaic, slow-rolling forms of mild damage to the natural environment. Not on their list: nuclear war, mirror bacteria, or even something as simple as AGI-supercharged economic growth that sees civilization’s economic footprint doubling every few years. I think there is a lot that we could do, relatively cheaply, to preserve at least some species against such catastrophes.
For example, seed banks exist. But you could possibly also save a lot of insects from extinction by maintaining some kind of “mostly-automated insect zoo in a bunker”, a sort of “generation ship” approach as oppoed to the “cryosleep” approach that seedbanks can use. (Also, are even today’s most hardcore seed banks hardened against mirror bacteria and other bio threats? Probably not! Nor do many of them even bother storing non-agricultural seeds for things like random rainforest flowers.)
Right now, land conservation is one of the cheapest ways of preventing species extinctions. But in an AGI-transformed world, even if things go very well for humanity, the economy will be growing very fast, gobbling up a lot of land, and probably putting out a lot of weird new kinds of pollution. (Of course, we could ask the ASI to try and mitigate these environmental impacts, but even in a totally utopian scenario there might be very strong incentives to go fast, eg to more quickly achieve various sublime transhumanist goods and avoid astronomical waste.) By contrast, the world will have a LOT more capital, and the cost of detailed ecological micromanagement (using sensors to gather lots of info, using AI to analyze the data, etc) will be a lot lower. So it might be worth brainstorming ahead of time what kinds of ecological interventions might make sense in such a world, where land is scarce but capital is abundant and customized micro-attention to every detail of an environment is cheap. This might include high-density zoos like described earlier, or “let the species go extinct for now, but then reliably de-extinct them from frozen embryos later”, or “all watched over by machines of loving grace”-style micromanaged forests that achieve superhumanly high levels of biodiversity in a very compact area (and minimizing wild animal suffering by both minimizing the necessary population and also micromanaging the ecology to keep most animals in the population in a high-welfare state).
A lot of today’s environmental-protection / species-extinction-avoidance programs aren’t even robust to, like, a severe recession that causes funding for the program to get cut for a few years! Mainstream environmentalism is truly designed for a very predictable, low-variance future… it is not very robust to genuinely large-scale shocks.
It’s kind of fuzzy and unclear what’s even important about avoiding species extinctions or preserving wild landscapes or etc, since these things don’t fit neatly into a total-hedonic-utilitarian framework. (In this respect, eco-value is similar to a lot of human culture and art, or values like “knowledge” or “excellence” and so forth.) But, regardless of whether or not we can make philosophical progress clarifying exactly what’s important about the natural world, maybe in a utopian future we could find crazy futuristic ways of generating lots more ecological value? (Obviously one would want to do this while avoiding creating lots of wild-animal suffering, but I think this still gives us lots of options.)
Obviously stuff like “bringing back mammoths” is in this category.
But maybe also, like, designing and creating new kinds of life? Either variants of earth life (what kinds of interesting things might dinosaurs have evolved into, if they hadn’t almost all died out 65 million years ago?), or totally new kinds of life that might be able to thrive on, eg, Titan or Europa (though obviously this sort of research might carry some notable bio-risks a la mirror bacteria, thus should perhaps only be pursued from a position of civilizational existential security).
Creating simulated, digital life-forms and ecologies? In the same way that a culture really obsessed with cool crystals, might be overjoyed to learn about mathematics and geometry, which lets them study new kinds of life.
There is probably a lot of exciting stuff you could do with advanced biotech / gene editing technologies, if the science advances and if humanity can overcome the strong taboo in environmentalism against taking active interventions in nature. (Even stuff like “take some seeds of plants threatened by global warming, drive them a few hours north, and plant them there where it’s cooler and they’ll survive better” is considered controversial by this crowd!)
Just like gene drives could help eradicate / suppress human scourges like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, we could also use gene drives to do tailored control of invasive species (which are something like the #2 cause of species extinctions, after #1 habitat destruction). Right now, the best way to control invasive species is often “biocontrol” (introducing natural predators of the species that’s causing problems) -- biocontrol actually works much better than its terrible reputation suggests, but it’s limited by the fact that there aren’t always great natural predators available, it takes a lot of study and care to get it right, etc.
Possibly you could genetically-engineer corals to be tolerant of slightly higher temperatures, and generally use genetic tech to help species adapt more quickly to a fast-changing world.
A couple more “out-there” ideas for ecological interventions:
“recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species”—yup, but it probably takes more than just DNA sequences on a USB drive to de-extinct a creature in the future. For instance, probably you need to know about all kinds of epigenetic factors active in the embryo of the creature you’re trying to revive. To preserve this epigenetic info, it might be easiest to simply freeze physical tissue samples (especially gametes and/or embryos) instead of doing DNA sequencing. You might also need to use the womb of a related species—bringing back mammoths is made a LOT easier by the fact that elephants are still around! -- and this would complicate plans to bring back species that are only distantly related to anything living. I want to better map out the tech tree here, and understand what kinds of preparation done today might aid what kinds of de-extinction projects in the future.
Normal environmentalists worry about climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and other prosaic, slow-rolling forms of mild damage to the natural environment. Not on their list: nuclear war, mirror bacteria, or even something as simple as AGI-supercharged economic growth that sees civilization’s economic footprint doubling every few years. I think there is a lot that we could do, relatively cheaply, to preserve at least some species against such catastrophes.
For example, seed banks exist. But you could possibly also save a lot of insects from extinction by maintaining some kind of “mostly-automated insect zoo in a bunker”, a sort of “generation ship” approach as oppoed to the “cryosleep” approach that seedbanks can use. (Also, are even today’s most hardcore seed banks hardened against mirror bacteria and other bio threats? Probably not! Nor do many of them even bother storing non-agricultural seeds for things like random rainforest flowers.)
Right now, land conservation is one of the cheapest ways of preventing species extinctions. But in an AGI-transformed world, even if things go very well for humanity, the economy will be growing very fast, gobbling up a lot of land, and probably putting out a lot of weird new kinds of pollution. (Of course, we could ask the ASI to try and mitigate these environmental impacts, but even in a totally utopian scenario there might be very strong incentives to go fast, eg to more quickly achieve various sublime transhumanist goods and avoid astronomical waste.) By contrast, the world will have a LOT more capital, and the cost of detailed ecological micromanagement (using sensors to gather lots of info, using AI to analyze the data, etc) will be a lot lower. So it might be worth brainstorming ahead of time what kinds of ecological interventions might make sense in such a world, where land is scarce but capital is abundant and customized micro-attention to every detail of an environment is cheap. This might include high-density zoos like described earlier, or “let the species go extinct for now, but then reliably de-extinct them from frozen embryos later”, or “all watched over by machines of loving grace”-style micromanaged forests that achieve superhumanly high levels of biodiversity in a very compact area (and minimizing wild animal suffering by both minimizing the necessary population and also micromanaging the ecology to keep most animals in the population in a high-welfare state).
A lot of today’s environmental-protection / species-extinction-avoidance programs aren’t even robust to, like, a severe recession that causes funding for the program to get cut for a few years! Mainstream environmentalism is truly designed for a very predictable, low-variance future… it is not very robust to genuinely large-scale shocks.
It’s kind of fuzzy and unclear what’s even important about avoiding species extinctions or preserving wild landscapes or etc, since these things don’t fit neatly into a total-hedonic-utilitarian framework. (In this respect, eco-value is similar to a lot of human culture and art, or values like “knowledge” or “excellence” and so forth.) But, regardless of whether or not we can make philosophical progress clarifying exactly what’s important about the natural world, maybe in a utopian future we could find crazy futuristic ways of generating lots more ecological value? (Obviously one would want to do this while avoiding creating lots of wild-animal suffering, but I think this still gives us lots of options.)
Obviously stuff like “bringing back mammoths” is in this category.
But maybe also, like, designing and creating new kinds of life? Either variants of earth life (what kinds of interesting things might dinosaurs have evolved into, if they hadn’t almost all died out 65 million years ago?), or totally new kinds of life that might be able to thrive on, eg, Titan or Europa (though obviously this sort of research might carry some notable bio-risks a la mirror bacteria, thus should perhaps only be pursued from a position of civilizational existential security).
Creating simulated, digital life-forms and ecologies? In the same way that a culture really obsessed with cool crystals, might be overjoyed to learn about mathematics and geometry, which lets them study new kinds of life.
There is probably a lot of exciting stuff you could do with advanced biotech / gene editing technologies, if the science advances and if humanity can overcome the strong taboo in environmentalism against taking active interventions in nature. (Even stuff like “take some seeds of plants threatened by global warming, drive them a few hours north, and plant them there where it’s cooler and they’ll survive better” is considered controversial by this crowd!)
Just like gene drives could help eradicate / suppress human scourges like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, we could also use gene drives to do tailored control of invasive species (which are something like the #2 cause of species extinctions, after #1 habitat destruction). Right now, the best way to control invasive species is often “biocontrol” (introducing natural predators of the species that’s causing problems) -- biocontrol actually works much better than its terrible reputation suggests, but it’s limited by the fact that there aren’t always great natural predators available, it takes a lot of study and care to get it right, etc.
Possibly you could genetically-engineer corals to be tolerant of slightly higher temperatures, and generally use genetic tech to help species adapt more quickly to a fast-changing world.