Around the year 1000, it's a reasonable guess to assume that emergence of new species and species extinction were roughly in balance, so net extinction rate was indeed around 0.
Today, it's well-established that this net extinction rate is as horrible as is described. A few new species emerging here and there are not enough to compensate for the mess that we are causing on the extinction front, by orders of magnitude.
I might have not expressed myself well in the previous comment, but when I say that "New species are also continuously emerging", it is to prove that the background extinction rate is not zero, not that we don't have a problem.
The curve that he fitted is not the net extinction rate. It's simply the total number of extinctions.
The graph he plots shows the total number of extinctions at year 1000 being 0 or almost 0. This is an assumption. In the absence of humans the extinction rate could be 1,2,10 per year, whatever, it's some small number. The point is that when you are fitting an exponential curve to 3 data points, the resulting curve will be very sensitive to small changes in the value of that point at year 1000. In particular, choosing a value of 0 will force the model towards the steepest possible gradient that the model can allow. i.e. it's biased towards alarmism.
EDIT: Although, when I think about it a little more, a reasonable model would model the extinction rate as an exponential plus a constant value, which would change things. Though a reasonable model probably wouldn't assume an exponential model at all based on 2 data points
Simply looking at the net species over a year doesn't really tell the full story of it.
You can lose megafauna like the American Bison or Steller's sea cow. Smaller fauna like the thylacine are also lost. Such species aren't going to re-emerge in the timescale of humanity. What I named off are just 3 species. If 3 species of ants happen to replace them, that's not really making up the difference. The world has plenty of ants in plenty of species already.
Also please don't drag out the "American Bison isn't extinct!" argument. There were less than a thousand at some point in the 19th century, so all the genetic diversity they had is gone. They've been bred with cattle to the point that the remaining herds are basically all hybrids, despite claims to the contrary. They're also functionally extinct in North America, as all herds are dependent on management at this point.
And then pay somebody to guard it. Aka the "pay someone else to do it" option that your sibling comment talks about (and of which there are many different flavors, S3 being another one).
> And it's overwhelmingly likely S3 will still exist in an easily readable form in 30 years time.
There is no indication that this statement holds true. Not even remotely.
Businesses fold all the time. How many services still exist today that existed 30 years ago? Not in some archive, but still operational?
In addition to that problem, tech half-life continues to decrease. 30 years in the future is likely more comparable to 60 years in the past. Hello punch-cards.
> There is no indication that this statement holds true. Not even remotely.
Well, over 30 years I'd bet on S3 over blu-ray or magnetic tape at the very least :)
For one thing, S3 itself is already 16 years old - and Ceph, B2, GCS and Azure all offer extremely similar products, indicating there's solid demand for this product.
Second, it's not clear to me that 'tech half-life continues to decrease' - granted, there's huge churn in javascript web frameworks, but for PCs and laptops? Very little has changed in the last 5 years.
And thirdly, some technologies stay around for absolutely ages. Right now, you can buy a brand new data projector with a 15-pin analog VGA port - and a motherboard with a VGA output. You can get a motherboard for a 64-core ThreadRipper processor... which has a PS/2 connector.
To add to this, the core of the S3 argument (specifically with AWS and Azure) is based on the premise that AWS/Azure (AA from now) are too big to fail and to go anywhere, but I don't think that it has any bearing on whether the specific services will continue "as-is". The idea and concept should be that they're fine for storage, but keep in mind like any service, you need to keep an eye on it, no matter what they tell you now. It's impossible to predict what changes they may introduce even next year (or month for that matter) that makes AA S3 storage not feasible/usable.
Furthermore, keep in mind with this, once your data is in AA, it's no longer your data, it's AA's. Sure, you can pay to retrieve it, but that's the catch -- you gotta pay the toll. Unexpected bills or hidden fees or changes to fees may make the retrieval process simply not fiscally possible after a time if your account is delinquent. (I've seen this with _many_ clients; they tried to squeeze out every coin of the budget and didn't have flexibility with AA, and they ended up with a delinquent account and lost access: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/react...)
Now, of course this is considered "your responsibility", and it can be true of anything, but if the data size is that low, then I think just manually managing it probably is a safer and perhaps cheaper bet. S3 as a service is mostly fine, but a lot of people very much so underestimate the expense of it and never bother to test recovery scenarios, and it ends up with a real surprise. (at least a few customers let their AWS bill go delinquent until the next fiscal year allowed them to pay the bills, only to find the data deleted by the above mentioned policy).
Basically, the idea of "set and forget" backups is a pipe dream; if it's important, you need to maintain it, and it basically can be like a second job.
>30 years in the future is likely more comparable to 60 years in the past. Hello punch-cards.
this part is a pro for S3 not a con. In this analogy OP is trying to store the information held by the punch-card, not the punch-card itself. So giving the information over to a business means they will preserve your binary data by moving it from punch-cards to HDD to SSD, etc - they will handle the hardware changes and redundancy.
Maybe convince somebody then to have final storage for nuclear waste anywhere close to where they live. Once this crap is in your backyard, the armchair philosophers find excuses really fast.
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
Why not just mix human rights in China also into the discussion? Make everybody into vegans cause animal cruelty? Police brutality? School crisis?
Obviously different problems are always best tackled in combination! Practically guarantees success. /s
And obviously geopolitical bullies should just not be talked to. Hm so let's see who is left to talk to then. Russia, China, U.S., NATO, none of those won't an option anymore. Good to keep your principles. And good luck doing anything good to the climate with the strategy of only talking to yourself (assuming your country isn't a geopolitical bully itself, which is likely quite a stretch, given the odds.)
Sad that this is downvoted. The hidden cost of nuclear is one of the biggest issue the tech-affine crowds tend to ignore and not want to hear about. You may not pay it on your utility bill, but society and later generations will pay it.
Which is a good thing. Just converting energy sources is not going to save us. We need to tackle the energy sinks too, i.e., getting smarter about how we use the available energy, i.e., mostly being more energy efficient. ("We" as in "humankind".) Raising prices is the right incentive here. In the long run, +50% is not actually that bad. There is room for a lot more.
Funny, I had this exact discussion with a colleague at work the other day. She claimed this is nonsense and won't change anybody's mind.
Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient.
The _exact_ same person! Just 2 minutes after claiming monetary incentives don't work demonstrated that it actually worked for her!
I have high hopes that price hikes are what convinces people to change their behavior. Not ads, not appealing to ethics or conciousness or "the future of your kids" or pictures of dying polar bears. You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
> You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
In that case, we should make the price of power relative to your wealth, shouldn't we? I'm guessing you're an academic and work in tech or consulting, so you make two, three times the national average if you live in Germany. Trippling the price of power will barely register on your level, so you have little incentive to conserve energy. However, if we said that e.g. a kwh costs 1/15000 of your personal wealth, you'd have a lot of incentive, because even if you start the year as a billionaire, you'd be broke if you used 15000kwh.
I have a feeling that none of the -typically well-off- proponents of "we must make the people pay more so that they stop consuming" will be a fan of that.
Hybrids are not the same as electric. They get their fuel savings from the fact that they can convert kinetic energy from braking back to electricity. Plus the fact that electric engines are more efficient way to pull off (which is where the ICE wastes most fuel). None of those things require an external electricity source.
Maybe we should take step further. Make energy cost non-linear. Make it cost exponentially more with increased use. So if you do not use lot you pay base rate per unit. If you use lot you pay price multiple to the base rate per unit.
Arts and U.S. Ivy are missing key words in the title.
If you lift your eyes beyond the U.S., there are countries where the student does not pay tuition and the offered degree program actually contains really useful material with a high quality teaching experience.
But sure, let's just all watch 10min youtube clips and claim it's at least as good.
Around the year 1000, it's a reasonable guess to assume that emergence of new species and species extinction were roughly in balance, so net extinction rate was indeed around 0.
Today, it's well-established that this net extinction rate is as horrible as is described. A few new species emerging here and there are not enough to compensate for the mess that we are causing on the extinction front, by orders of magnitude.