Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Novel Biodiversity

The are several categories relating to the Tree of Life which I consider important.

The first category includes all extant creatures. By adolescence, we are familiar with thousands of animals. Scientists estimate there are somewhere between 5 and 100 million species altogether. Most are probably insects and arachnids, including over a million species of both mite and beetle.

The second category includes all species that have ever lived. This number is somewhere between 10 and 100 times greater than the number of extant creatures, therefore somewhere between 50 million and 10 billion. To me, making sense of the first category requires understanding the second. I am fascinated by the second category because most people don't know too much about it, and it's like visiting an alien world -- there are so many unusual and fascinating creatures in the fossil record.

The third category includes all species that could ever theoretically exist. We can really blow this up to huge proportions, including species based on something besides DNA, including non-carbon-based life forms, if they are physically possible, which seems likely. In this category I include alternate evolutionary paths.

In my view, there is a strong element of randomness to the specifics of evolution. In a parallel universe, Earth may have been inhabited by entirely different intelligences, born from an entirely different Tree of Life. Sauropsids may have become intelligent instead of synapsids, or something even more radical.

I like to draw my "circle of empathy" large -- so large, in fact, that I can go so far as to say that any form of self-reflective general intelligence with subjective experience is worthy of value, regardless of the biological context it grew up in. We can go even further and include non-conscious animals, though these may be considered as deriving their value from the appreciation of conscious beings.

When biotechnology advances to the point where can synthesize animal-sized genomes from scratch (we've already gotten to the level of bacteria), humans will surely create entirely new animals, both for study and pleasure. Leaving aside issues of regulation, I think that the first category will expand to include many elements of the second and third categories. Eventually, we will recognize that members of the second and third categories have the same inherent value as members of the first, and all will share the matter-energy resources of the local area.

So, as an environmentalist, I care about preserving existing biodiversity, but as a transhumanist environmentalist, I also care about the creation and preservation of de novo biodiversity. These creatures will provide an interesting accompaniment during our journey greening the Galaxy.

This may sound futuristic, but the first synthetic life will be created in a lab this year.