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Open Species Database Breaks Half-Million Mark
ferienhausversicherung writes "Biologists estimate that about 1.75 million species, from bacteria to blue whales, have already been identified on Earth. But there may be anywhere between 3 million and 12 million more yet to be discovered. An online catalogue of all known life on Earth now has half a million species in its freely available database. Another promising effort is Wikispecies. Started in August 2004, this is an offshoot of the Wikimedia group, whose free online encyclopaedia is constructed by users themselves." (And Wikipedia itself is about to publish its 500,000th English entry -- if you hurry, perhaps it will be yours.)
Wouldn't it be more usefull integrated with the Open Species Database?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Not the other poster, but I heard a CNN interviewer asking NASA folks about the possible religious impact of finding life on mars.
The whole "religious impact" meme surely didn't just pop out of thin air. There is probably a minority of people out there who insist that Earth is the only planet with life in the universe.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but the fact is that there are millions of species on Earth, and as part of the natural process of evolution hundreds of new ones evolve every year - but the other side of that coin is that hundreds go extinct every year. We have to balance environmentalism with a healthy dose of logic. We can't cry over every extinct species, and we can't preserve them all.
Obviously, I'm not talking about successful species that are hunted to extinction by humans. I know I'm going to get 50 replies from people who swell up with emotion and react to my words rather than thinking about them, who are going to say, "yeah, but humans cause extinctions." I know that. Thanks. My point is that there are millions of species on the planet and extinction and evolution is a natural process that occurs whether humans exist or not.
I just finished reading Bill Bryson's excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. There's a great story about a tiny island off the coast of New Zealand. The first human to ever live on that island was a lighthouse keeper. It turned out, he had a cat. Every few days, the cat would drag the carcass of a dead bird into the house. The lighthouse keeper sent one of these dead birds to a university professor who recognized that it was a new species, never before seen by science. The professor made the trip down to the island, but by the time he got there, the cat had killed every bird on the little island. Apparently, those birds didn't live anywhere else. They've never been seen again. In less than a year, one cat had made an entire species extinct.
Many an environmentalist will tell you that the point of the story is how destructive human beings are. But I think that if you look at this logically, you'll draw a different conclusion. Long before man arrived, that species of bird had failed to evolve a solid foothold in its ecosystem. With all of New Zealand right there, the best that bird could do was live on one tiny island. It's true, that cat wiped them out. But it's also true that, all by itself and without any human influence, that species had dwindled to down to a population tiny enough to be destroyed by one cat. Had the cat not come along, the next hurricane to hit the island would have made them extinct anyway.
So, there are millions of species on our planet, and I think we should study and catalog all of them. But let's also acknowledge the fact that no matter what we do, 99.9% of those species are going to be evolutionary dead ends.
TO some degree this is because they have not thought about it. Most people will not give you an answer because it has never entered their minds.
THe queestion is, what will happen IF we discover life, especially intelligent life out there. I once attended a discussion by fundamentalist Christians about the issue and they immediately stated that bringing the word to the Aliens would be an immediate priority. For most people first contact would probably be meaningless in any case especially if we find microorganisms in our own Solar System (which is much more likely IMHO)
The other thing about microbial life on Mars is that there would be a good chance that it would be a panspermic event, so it would have the same building blocks than our own. Ie, spores of them went there from here on a meteor. Which would make the hole philosophical debate moot.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism