Hi, it depends on the calculation; from what I gather, extinction rates had reached 3-4 an hour. It's unclear how many species there are; take fungi for example - very few are known percentage-wise and one book I have estimates the total will be somewhere around 30,000,000. As Science News also points out, it's unclear at times, given hybridization and rapid development (some species have branched in a few decades), what constitutes a species in the first place.
In any case, these stats, whichever are used, are horrifying, especially when you consider the fact that every species ultimately goes back billions of years...
- Alan On Tue, 14 Nov 2017, marc.garrett via NetBehaviour wrote:
// Project announcement: The Extinction Gong // The Extinction Gong is a ceremonial automaton for the Sixth Mass Extinction, the human-induced process of planet-scale biological annihilation first formally recognised by scientists in 2014. Taking the form of a large traditional 'Chao Gong' its rear-face is fitted with a mechanism that beats to the rhythm of species extinction, estimated by eminent biologist E.O. Wilson to be about 27000 losses a year, or once every 19 minutes. The significance of this figure (and those like it by other scientists) cannot be overstated: for millennia the average 'background rate' of (plant, animal and insect) species extinction has been between 1 and 5 a year, right back to the 5th Extinction that took the dinosaurs 65M years ago. Should biologists declare a new species extinct while the Extinction Gong is active it will receive an update via a 3g link and perform a special ceremony: four strikes in quick succession alongside a text-to-speech utterance of the Latin Name of the species lost, resonating through the gong. Seen at its front, the Extinction Gong hangs in a large metal frame and bears the stark neo-primitivist image of the Extinction Symbol, the official mark of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Seen from the back however it is a work of engineering, complete with mallet, electro-magnet, audio transducer, embedded computer and 3g downlink. This diametric expresses a brutal and contradicting irony - while advances in science and technology augment the devastating impact of human endeavours over wild habitats, so are they our best means of studying and understanding it. https://extinctiongong.com/ //<------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Globally warm regards, -- Julian Oliver https://julianoliver.com https://criticalengineering.org PGP https://julianoliver.com/key.asc Beware the auto-complete life Marc Garrett Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield. Art, technology and social change, since 1996 http://www.furtherfield.org Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQ http://www.furtherfield.org/gallery Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
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