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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

That's the direction things are heading.

It's (past) time to start collecting genomes and marrow samples from as many critically endangered species as possible. Unextinction is a difficult problem, but without the necessary material, it's impossible.

Sure, that's going to favor charismatic megafauna. But we like those, it's right in the name. And it's no substitute for building wildlife corridors, managing park lands better, extirpating invasives, and all the rest. But it doesn't draw resources away from those things either.

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Another pseudo-intellectual "solution" in the same realm as... let's go to Mars!

This planet is made for us, we are made for it. We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.

They aren’t mutually exclusive - believe it or not.

> We need a top down approach to limit damage to nature and make sustainability the "GDP" of tomorrow.

I'm ready to say that most us know, instinctively, what the solution needs to be. It's just that we are morally obliged not to even consider it, let alone propose it.

Thanos lacked ambition.

It doesn't really matter if we collect the genetic material if we aren't reversing the actions that caused it to become extinct. For example, arable land is shrinking and population growth as well as an increase in consumption will not leave much (if any) suitable space for some types of wildlife.

Which is why I specifically said that those actions are important also.

But it does matter regardless, because rewilding in the future is distinctly possible. If we're able to rebuild an acceptable habitat, and we have the genetic information on hand, we can conceivably unextinct a species and reintroduce it. Without the genetic material, this is impossible.

It's similar to the logic of cryostorage, although I would estimate the odds of it working for wild species to be much higher than those for frozen humans, let alone their brains.

I guess you're just much more optimistic than me when it comes to shrinking the population below the current level and reducing consumption.

The second derivative of population is decidedly negative, as is the slope throughout the high-consumption regions of the world; optimism on that front is rational.

We'll all be long dead before that results in a population less than today's, so I guess it's a moot point either way.

Bio-banking is worthwhile in some cases, but generally speaking it's on par with escaping to Mars in terms of practical utility. Genomes without a hospitable environment would be mostly anachronistic.

What you propose is like putting humpty dumpty back together, except you're also drunk, blind-folded, and one of your arms is handcuffed to a hippo. I think gene-banks are a novelty, nothing more. Definitely not part of any serious wildlife conservation strategy.

... wait, how is what you’re suggesting different from zoos?

In a zoo, we take an animal out of the wild, and keep it alive. Ideally breeding them as well.

In my suggestion, we tranquilize an animal, take a blood sample, and extract marrow from the hip. We then perform a full genome sequence on the blood, and freeze the marrow down, with compounds which vitrify the cells such that they can be revived at any point in the future.

We should do both. But the latter has advantages: the animal stays in the wild, it scales better, and the only ongoing input is a bit of energy to keep the cells cold.

We don't have the technology to print a whole genome from a file, but I expect we will. Stem cell cloning is well understood, and will only get better.

Doing this to as many individuals as possible will preserve genetic diversity. It's insurance, basically.

It's like a zoo where everything's dead. Which actually simplifies things quite a bit for us. There are many animals we still haven't figured out how to keep in captivity, because studying wild animals in the wild is very expensive. Crazy expensive. Especially ocean animals.

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