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Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple reasons, one of which is that once a species is gone there is no way to get it back. Also, consider reasons that people want to save historical structures, or preserve old / rare works of art. Or why someone would pay money to a vet to save their pet.

If you saw a fire spreading and was threatening someone's house, would you call the fire department, or otherwise attempt to stop it? Why or why not? Do you back up the data on your computer? Do you wonder why anyone takes pictures in order to preserve a moment in time, and would be upset if all their family photos got destroyed?

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Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is needed?

> Would storing genomes be enough, similar to backing up data until it is needed?

I don't think so, because many of the endangered animals are representative of entire ecosystems. Consider orang-utans and the forests they inhabit (many of which are being destroyed to collect palm-oil). If the animals have gone, it is even harder to make people want to preserve their environments in the face of relentless commercial pressure. Some endangered animals also help shape the ecosystems, e.g. when they are apex predators.

Once the animals are gone, recreating their communities is significantly harder. As stated elsewhere, most animals are better raised by their own species rather than humans outside the cage. For primates (e.g. woolly monkeys) individuals that have been raised in isolation in captivity also don't make good parents when they do eventually breed, sometimes abandoning viable young.

Only if you assume that being reared by older animals of the same species doesn't matter.

Protecting endangered species isn’t just about protecting a specific set of DNA, as per the article about reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone.

if that's the only reason we could just digitize the animals and archive them somewhere waiting for holographic display to enter consumer markets.

the real issue tho is that those species are part of a larger ecosystem, we're currently having large issue in Europe for having eradicated most boars' natural predators.

If we spoke to someone 1000 years ago and told them in the future we've eradicated bears and wolves, they'd think the boar problem would pale in insignificance to the triumph of removing bears and wolves.

I'm not saying extinction is a good thing, but contextually it sounds weird to talk about us suffering from large issues from eradicating those predators.

When big predators are wiped, medium sized predators explode, big herbivores explode taking all plants and soil and finally many types of diseases will take the place targetting humans.

If you spoke to someone 1000 years ago, they would also believe the earth is flat, diseases are caused by humors and bloodletting could cure the cold, and that it was ok to burn heretics at the stake. You might have heard but we have progressed a little in the last 1000 years, maybe taking their advice about science based decisions isn't a good plan?

I think you're waving away my point. I was trying to say that people 1000 years ago disliked bears and wolves because people would die. Roads weren't safe. The problems with boars pale in significance to the problems bears and wolves caused. OP said "we're currently having large issue in Europe for having eradicated most boars' natural predators" - but these issues aren't larger than the problems that boars' natural predators caused, which would've been obvious to anyone who lived at a time when they still existed.

I’m not waving away your point, I’m saying your point isn’t a good one to consider in the context of the discussion about eco-systems. The problems with boars in NO way pales to the problems that bears and wolves cause. In an unbalanced eco-system boars (or deer or elk) cause massive problems to the whole system, eating certain plants to local extinction, destroying crops, boars themselves are extremely dangerous to people, large populations carry and mutate diseases that easily transfer to both human and livestock populations, etc... Simply put people 1000 years ago didn’t understand science or the larger world around them in th way we do. They weren’t stupid and they lived in the natural world the most of us don’t now but that knowledge only goes so far. Making modern eco-systems decisions based on the “wisdom” of 1000 years ago is a horrible idea and the issues that removing boars natural predators cause are in fact much MUCH larger than co-existing with those predators.

Maybe "let's ask someone from a thousand years ago" isn't the best way to manage an ecosystem. Hell, ask someone in the 1950s if smoking is dangerous and you'll see the faults in the approach.

My response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309857

heck, around here our grandpas did a large fest out of killing the last wolf around their village.

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