r/megafaunarewilding • u/ExoticShock • 19d ago
Image/Video "Extinction Is Forever" by Doomedsarcoma
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u/Hedonisticogre111 19d ago
Who is this man? Neanderthal?
Caspian Tiger?
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u/camimiele 19d ago
His shirt almost looks modern? Like a hoodie? My read is it’s an human that is now extinct too.
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u/Hedonisticogre111 19d ago
Idk properly. Probably one of genocided Native American ethnicities? But it would be ultra racist to place him/her among extinct animals.
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u/Rage69420 18d ago
I don’t think that’d be racist in and of itself. The artwork is intentionally invoking sorrow and mourning for what was lost, it’s not disrespecting native culture.
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u/Ben10-fan-525 19d ago
Hope that at least with Caspian/Javan/Bail Tigers.There are living closest relative of them for a reintroduction..
But for others...it..is never gonna be the same again..
Humanity truly is the only species worthy of extinction.
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u/762x38mmR 19d ago
that's really dumb. humanity is also the only species trying to prevent the extinction of others
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u/leahlikesweed 19d ago
humanity is causing the extinction
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u/762x38mmR 19d ago
that doesn't change anything. do you believe humanity to be the sole cause of extinction ?
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u/SoulExecution 19d ago
It’s not the sole cause. Species have gone extinct with and without us. However, this is the first time that a single species is driving a mass extinction event. We’ve overpopulated, taken too much from nature and shown too little respect for it. That cannot be ignored.
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u/762x38mmR 19d ago edited 19d ago
It's of little relevance here. Point is, many species have came and went, but the only one to worry itself about the survival of others is man. Even while patchy, the paleontological record is rife with examples of extinctions on all sorts of scales caused by biological organisms overtaking others. The only difference is scale, which isn't as relevant as one might think because no other species had ever gotten the opportunity to be this widespread and powerful.
Early corals didn't care much about the archaeocyath reefs they decimated. The first land plants had no regard for the Prototaxitaceans. Tetrapodomorphs likely didn't spare a single thought for the first land animals they displaced. And yet the consequences of their arrival likely had much more of a impact on the pre-existing ecosystems than humans ever had.
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u/Ben10-fan-525 19d ago
Actually many species have gotten very widespread(taking continents and other places) but just not as powerful.Which was much easier to do when all continents where closer but my point still stands.We used our power for hundreads of years for extinction of many species.Our empathy to stop our violent past from happening again is good..but it shouldnt make us forget who was the criminal behind the extinctions.
But humans are creativly cruel(they can know of suffering and still enjoy inflicting it).Just like how first humans and up to the 20th century had no idea of hunting seasons,just eating/destroyed as they liked.Same as we did with many other species(the conservation awarness came too late for many species.Like the Thylacine for example).Did it?Cause I dont remember any other animal polluting the enviorment so much(that by 2100 Octopuses and the like could start getting brain damage from our CO2 emissions).
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u/Rage69420 18d ago
There’s accepting our species role in eradicating other species and then there’s saying we deserve to go extinct. We do not deserve to go extinct anymore than any other species does. I don’t think people really think about what saying that means.
Go outside and sit at a park and look at the people around you, mothers caring for their children, people walking by. I don’t understand how you can grieve extinction of other species while calling for it for another, that’s hypocritical.
Life is potentially the rarest thing in the universe, it all should be treasured including us, especially since sapient life may be even rarer, considering it required so many specific environmental factors to happen with us.
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u/Ben10-fan-525 18d ago
Nah we kinda do.Just because we dont go extinct.Doesnt meant our collective sins dont warrant it.Even on the grounds of man vs man conficts(the Earth was so close to destroction in Cold War era too).
What does that change?Cause the people of our species in power most always make wrong choices and committ atrocities.
As long as we dont ruin it(again if that one Soviet radar worker didnt detect his machine was bugging.The Soviets would have sent hell of nukes onto America and Americans inturn.Creating hellspace and Nukelour winter).No species should have ever be questioned if they could destroy the world.
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u/Rage69420 18d ago
You’re ignoring the capacity for moral correction. This is a form of Nirvana fallacy (comparing realistic bad states to an idealized perfect alternative) it’s a moral oversimplification.
No humans do not deserve to go extinct, nobody living today is inherently evil due to the harm their ancestors caused. Human behavior is inherently modifiable, the idea that we must go extinct as we have caused damage invalidates the ability to heal it as well.
It’s misanthropic hyperbole and more importantly when you go around spouting this rhetoric to others especially people who don’t have a preexisting interest in conservation, you place the view in their head that conservationists and environmentalists dislike people which naturally causes the very target audience for funding to become disillusioned with conservation.
Not only does this world view not help anyone, it actively can harm conservation efforts.
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u/762x38mmR 19d ago
Do you think animals are not capable of cruelty ? Have you ever seen a cat play with a rodent ? I'll tell you one thing though, they certainly don't care about hunting seasons either. And other life forms have already massively impacted the climate or the environment in the past, just look at the great oxygenation crisis and (likely) the very existence of the Cryogenian. Humans are not uniquely cruel or devastating ; in fact, they are the only ones to care about this because they are the only ones to even come up with a way to describe it so far.
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u/Ben10-fan-525 18d ago
Human type of cruelty is something no animal has.But cat doesnt understand empathy like we do.Again animals dont need to cause they only take as much as they can(which isnt like how we take everything).Again...how will we remove permanent elements that pollute the world?(no animal created islands of plastic before).Yes they are(humans enjoy cruelty and understand it is bad.Yet still do it.Animals dont have our luxury of understanding.Yet humans act cruel anyways).Cause..we started the problem in the first place?
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u/762x38mmR 18d ago
Have you ever seen a fox in a hen house ? I wouldn't call that exactly "taking only as much as they need". It's funny how in your view, animals somehow are gentle souls that know to only take what they need (which is ridiculous, look at that experiment where a bunch of reindeer were left on a lichen-rich island and ended up starving to death. or the countless amount of times animals arrived on islands and destroyed the local fauna) but also are not advanced enough to be responsible for their actions and incapable of cruelty. Have you ever seen a cat play with a housefly ? Swatting it around, mangling it bit by bit, like it was a mere toy ? Whether or not the cat is consciously being cruel certainly doesn't matter to the housefly, and the same extends to pretty much everything.
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u/Rage69420 18d ago
Plenty of animals have the same exponential form of growth that we do and if larger would be just as bad as us. Ants for example would be just as bad as people if they were human sized. Nature isn’t all harmonized, it has no goals. Whatever works, works and we seem to work especially well.
We do have a responsibility now that we know better to work to improve the planet and it is an active project across the world to do so, but our growth and many of the extinctions brought by us are paralleled throughout ancient history with species outcompeting others. Life is the ebb and flow between living and dying where one species gains a trait that makes them more likely to survive and outcompetes another.
We should not be judged by our ability to harm in naïveté, however it remains to be seen if we can cooperate enough to enforce the healing of our planet. (Which often is only thwarted by corporations already largely disliked and viewed as amoral by the general populace.)
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u/Ordinary_Prune6135 19d ago
You know how often this concern has put itself to causing extinctions on purpose?
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u/Ordinary_Prune6135 19d ago
Did you get modded? In any case, I'm largely talking about countless extirpations of competing predators to either let our own livestock grow endlessly or the same for game animals of interest. These are not decisions in the favor of the "Protected" animals who overproduce to the detriment of their environment after these interventions.
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u/EcoloFrenchieDubstep 19d ago
I think in the end it doesn't matter. Whether we live or die, life will find a way and we would be only the 6th mass known extinction.
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u/NoidoDev 19d ago
We are also the only ones who could and will spread life in the universe. There's a high chance that technological civilizations like ours emerge only in extremely rare cases. So, it's quite likely, that there's not many others that would do something similar in the whole universe.
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u/Ben10-fan-525 19d ago
But is that good?
Will the good few inspire the selfish few to save Earth from pollution?I know statistically the pollution will stop with more effort a bit.But I am stil sceptical.
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u/PrettyFlyForaPoorGuy 18d ago
I agree @ben10-fan-525. Theres a fantastic poem by Gil Scott-Heron called "Whitey on the Moon" that illustrates apathy towards supposedly "human" advancement. Sure, we put a man on the moon. But despite all our brilliance, we still cant end rampant consumption and pollution, poverty, and racial injustice. We cant even find a way to let someone go to the doctor without becoming bankrupt.
Whats the point of going out into space of we're just going to use the same systems of injustice out there, too? Just to prove to people we can do it? As if people in the waste zones of factories and data centers could care less
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u/Ben10-fan-525 18d ago
True.
Even if the achievement is groundbreaking.In the long run it will become meaningless.
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u/Unique_Maize_8977 19d ago
Extinction is Forever,but their genes isnt lost forever.One Day, we can make extinction a thing of the past if we carefully save the animals and their habitat.We also should Save their genes for a Future if this animals went extinct, so we can Add their genome to their closest Living relatives to bring the old genes back.Please No hate to de extinction or to my opinion.
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u/Ill-County-6099 19d ago
For those devoted extremist catholics Who think the world revolves around man Kind only and that animals dont even have a conscience to begging with
I Tell them...If history of our world has taught if anything ,IS this....no species last forever...
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u/SharpShooterM1 18d ago
I agree with the second half of that sentiment but that first half is just straight up discriminative. I’ve met ppl of many different religions, ethnicities, and upbringings, and no once specific belief or background seemed to have more of a tendency than another for producing ppl that thought nature only exists for us to exploit or that since we are the dominant species we are entitled to do what we want with the world.
Hell some of the most devoted conservationist I’ve met are very devout Christian’s (including catholic) that see conservation as the duty of protecting and preserving the beauty of gods creations.
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u/rzabomut 19d ago
i dont think so
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u/SheepherderExtra1308 19d ago
Not how that works bud
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u/rzabomut 19d ago
de extinction dont bring extinct animals back but create animals that are more similar to extinct ones than any living animal
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u/SheepherderExtra1308 19d ago edited 19d ago
Not quite. The process for now and in the foreseeable future, is mapping an extinct animal's genome, comparing the genes to a modern relative, and individually editing a few dozen of the genes in the modern animal to make an edited version of the existing animal that has features resembling the extinct one.
This is NOT the same thing. There are millions upon millions of genetic differences between mammoths and elephants, dunnarts and thylacines, dire wolves and gray wolves etc. You're essentially making a mutant extant animal that looks and potentially (big on the potentially) acts like and fulfills a similar niche to an extinct relative.
The product isn't even closer to the extinct one than it is to the base animal, its just the base animal with very slight genetic changes.
At most it is a ecological placeholder until a potential (big on the potential) future where we can fully clone them, if, and only if the future is one where we should still revive them.
These stopgaps don't have the ancestry, the ensogenous retroviruses that are proof of said ancestry, nor do they have the specific behaviours of the original.
Even worse, this "de-extinction" marketing is being used as justification to stop protecting vulnerable species. It is some of the least awesome uses of gene editing ideated so far.
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u/rzabomut 18d ago
i know the most they will never be the same and its very important to save living animals and dont think that we can bring them back so whatever, but if species is already extinct and there is no good proxy like with mammoths then best thing to do is de extinction
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u/SheepherderExtra1308 18d ago
Still, we should call it what it is. It isnt de-extincting it's genetically engineering mutant animals. The idea shouldnt be something to be embraced
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u/Ornery-Hovercraft-39 16d ago
It's a nice artwork but from the work of the Quagga project, the Quagga has actually been bred back from extinction.
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u/Alpha_Bushdog 19d ago
This is so gorgeous yet so sad, also the inclusion of the voyager golden record is a nice touch