Extinction makes us sad, but doesn't have serious side effects

[RememberMee]

Originally Posted by Memphis1979

It doesn't matter how short a time, we are the apex predator on the planet.

Since you use the word "evolution" and evolution takes very long time to select a specie that can survive in a changed environment, it does matter. Humans went berserk only for about 150 years, it's not evolutionary scale. The rise of the humans is a planetary disaster not unlike an asteroid strike. It wipes out species and ecosystems regardless of their "fitness". As I said before, a specie that can survive in an environment dominated by humans must live off human scraps, tolerate human pollution and breed profusely. Amount of food scraps and waste available for cockroaches and mice far exceeds anything available in the wild combine that with decimation of their natural predators and you got yourselves companions: cockroaches, mice, rats, crows, carp ...

T-Rex got eaten by other stuff sometimes, but they were still at the top of the food chain. Orca's eat Great White Sharks, but they are seen as top of the food chain. We evolved, we did it quickly, and we are at the top thanks to our large brains and a lot of luck, thats evolution.

As individuals we de-evolved it's our civilization that evolved. We can survive only in the sterilized & "civilized" enclaves. We live like alien colonizers, if to think about it. We are super-specialized and dependent on the clock like work of the global & national supply chain for our survival. Most of us don't know how to survive outside of "civilization" and simple knowledge is useless (for us as a specie) since embracing civilized path (i.e. domination and control of environment and each other) placed human kind on the ever accelerating treadmill, going back to basics would require billions to drop dead on a spot. On the other hand, running an accelerating treadmill usually ends up in one being tossed off treadmill regardless. You pick.

I guarantee that minor disruptions of supply chain would greatly affect your rosy attitudes (provided you would survive the ordeal).

We do have plenty of places to go. There are large swaths of land that are uninhabited.

Land without water and energy (as the very least) is good only for extremal tourism, it's not fit for habitation. If you have water and energy but soil/climate is less than adequate, that means that food producing areas must generate extra food to be shipped (more energy and pollution).

Not because they can't be lived in, but people don't want to live there because they are cold or dry. We also have the oceans to colonize.

Space without energy, water & good soils can't be lived in. Energy, water and productive soils are in short supplies. Oceans are not teeming with life (to put it mildly), it's more like a water desert with minimum of life that can survive open ocean waters. Most of aquatic life is concentrated in shallow seas. Unfortunately, humans are about to collapse the most productive marine ecosystems because of pollution and/or overfishing. So what's the point? Colonization = increase of energy use & pollution, the energy we don't really have.

I said we would go to space when needed.

Are you a shaman or a sorcerer to make promises like that? It's not just needed right now, it's an urgent need. So please, do your abracadabra ASAP.

And necessity is the mother of invention.

Imagine a plummeting plane. Do you think that because of the sudden increase in demand for parachutes, R&D and markets will magically supply everyone with a parachute before the plane hits the ground? Most of human inventions is 100% accidental, sorry. A new invention generates 10 of new problems & outright disasters for every problem it solves. It's a snowball doomed to fall apart. Historically speaking there are surprisingly few examples when "necessity leads to invention" and there are countless examples when inventions lead to necessity .

How have we exterminated or killed off roaches and mice? We try, but we can't keep up with their birth rates.

We (over) feed mice & cockroaches, we protect mice & cockroaches by exterminating their natural enemies, birth rates have nothing to do with anything, neither mice nor cockroaches are among the top most prolific animal/insects. Do you really think that mice & cockroaches in the wild tend not to breed as frequently as city mice & cockroaches today?

Elephants are another prime example of a species who is going to die off, because they don't produce enough offspring fast enough.

I thought it was habitat destruction that starves elephants that were already born. I guess even more elephants born would magically jump start an elephant civilization that would invent elephant weapon technologies capable of wiping out human competition and reconquering lost feeding grounds.

We create new mice habitat in the most unexpected places and we destroy elephant habitat thus dooming them to starve. I thought it's pretty much obvious.

[Phil P]

I was only specifying extinction of already endangered animals, but let me clarify that to be non-human caused endangered species. Excessive poaching falls outside of natural endangeredness. A better example of the original species I had in mind would be all those insects that are supposedly going to go extinct in the Amazon when the planet warms one degree.

The first point I am making is that if a species is already naturally pushed to the edge of extinction, the push over to extinction won't damage the ecosystem that much.

A second point I would like to make is that extinction, even of somewhat critical species, is almost always a negative feedback loop, not a positive feedback loop. Sure the extinction of one species will possibly severely upset the other species in the food web, but in the long run, the ecosystem will re-balance to another food web, albeit a usually less productive one.

[sandman249]

The extinction of certain species such as large predators and pollinators may have more devastating ecological consequences than the extinction of others. Cannot go into too much depth here, but the mesopredator-release hypothesis outlines several scenarios where extinction of large mammals has a devastating impact on the ecosystem.

Coextinctions between interdependent taxa have occurred, but sadly, many of them have gone un-noticed. Ecological processes disrupted by extinction of species decline may also lead to cascading and catastrophic coextinctions. For example:

Frugivorous animals and fruiting plants on which they depend have a key interaction linking plant reproduction and dispersal with animal nutrition. Thus, the two interdependent taxa are placed in jeopardy by habitat degradation. Many trees produce large, lipid-rich fruits adapted for animal dispersal, so the demise of avian frugivores may have serious consequences for forest regeneration, even if the initial drivers of habitat loss and degradation are annulled.