In a book about the future of artificial intelligence, MIT professor Max Tegmark proposes an absurd and frightening scenario: If we couldn’t communicate our goals accurately, the machines could take over a very distant target. of our interests, such as We turn all the atoms in the universe, including the atoms of our own body, into metal clamps. The mechanical mind, criticized for the extravagance of its purpose, could be excused because it was trained by observing its creators. In recent decades, human intelligence has achieved an unprecedented expansion of the species, thanks to the use of ingenuity to convert, with frightening homogenizing efficiency, other living beings into food to feed more people and into products that allow them to live happier and more comfortable lives. This species, whose ancestors experienced critical moments when there were just over a thousand individuals, already represents 36% of all existing mammals. Another 60% are animals such as cows bred to feed humans, and only 4% are wild animals .
Despite humanity’s impact on terrestrial ecosystems, we only make up 0.01% of the planet’s biomass. However, humans continue to advance, reducing the space for other animals and becoming increasingly lonely. This sixth mass extinction is the first caused by a single animal, following others caused by meteorites, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs, or extreme geological processes. And the impacts are not just limited to isolated species. Entire branches of the evolutionary tree are being mutilated, according to an article published today in the journal PNAS. Animals such as the Tasmanian tiger and the Yangtze dolphin were the last of their genus, a concept that groups together several related species.
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The work, led by Gerardo Ceballos, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, examined 34,600 species of 5,400 vertebrate genera over the past 500 years, using databases such as those of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. During this time, 73 genera died out 35 times faster than would have been expected if they had died out at the same rate as in the previous 65 million years. Without human influence, it would have taken 18,000 years for so many genres to disappear. According to the authors, at least a third of known vertebrates are losing population and becoming cornered in ever-smaller ecosystems. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 10 million elephants. Today there are fewer than half a million, and they have disappeared from many of the countries where they lived until recently.
The loss of an entire species can affect the functioning of an entire ecosystem. The homogenization of our environment imposed by humans also destroys a balance that is beneficial to our existence and changes the course of evolution. “In the eastern United States, large predators, bears, cougars, and wolves, disappeared, and white-tailed deer, as well as mice, proliferated stratospherically.” Deer and mice are hosts to ticks that transmit a very serious disease, Lyme disease. This has resulted in millions of cases per year in the United States,” explains Gerardo Ceballos. Paul Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford University and co-author of the study, says less pragmatically: “We are losing the only known living companions in the entire universe.”
Loss of biodiversity and over-exploitation of wild areas encourage the spread of disease between animals and humans, as was the case with Covid, but also destroy resources that can be used to improve human health. One of the lost genera is the stomach-brooding frogs (Rheobatrachus), which lived in the tropical forests of Queensland, Australia. These animals had a special reproductive system. The females swallowed the fertilized eggs and turned their stomachs into uteruses in which the tadpoles grew. Because frogs had to shut down acid secretion in their stomachs to protect their young, they were an interesting research model for diseases such as gastric reflux and related cancers, which no longer exist on Earth. Animals like these, despite their small numbers, can also play an important role in maintaining ecological balance.
Ceballos explains that his data is a call to action and that “if we do not act to the extent necessary, there will be a collapse of civilization.” “Humans will not become extinct, but there will be situations out of apocalyptic movies where only the Survival of the fittest,” he adds. In the past, after each major extinction event, which sometimes wiped out more than 70% of life on Earth, the tree of life was rebuilt through the slow emergence of new species. “But it took 15 or 20 million years and humanity cannot wait that long,” warns Ceballos.
To prevent or mitigate collapse, the authors call for unprecedented investment, with particular attention to protecting tropical forests, the places with the greatest biodiversity. “That would cost maybe $400 billion, which is a significant amount, but if we continue as we are, there will be a much broader collapse than we are experiencing,” Ceballos warns. Despite the level of understanding of the problem that studies such as the one published today by PNAS provide on the scale of the ecological challenge facing humanity, the only known intelligent species in the universe is increasingly close to choking on its own ability to breed .
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