Kyle Harper

But it's –

It's because a species isn't just a genome.

A species is an organism that inhabits a food web and an ecosystem.

And we could bring the woolly mammoth back, but there's nowhere for them to live.

The mammoth step that they need to thrive is not there.

And there's really very little point in bringing an animal back from extinction.

Just to put it in a box at a zoo to sort of like, you know, satiate our curiosity about it.

So without the ecosystem, you can't have the species.

And really part of one of the themes that I try and get at in the book that I'm trying to finish is like we need to think about living systems, ecosystems.

And the extinction question is very much a question of like what kinds of systems will exist on the planet.

And I think, you know, whatever happens technologically in 100 years, 1,000 years, the impacts that humans have on biodiversity is going to be very, very long-lasting.

We're part of a species that has been impacting biodiversity for over 10,000 years.

And there's things we can't do.

There's things we can't undo.

There's things we can't change about the past.

But we're making decisions right now that will be binding on the future whether our descendants like it or not.

And so we need to think very hard about like what choices do we want to make to keep intact the kind of variety and vibrancy of living systems.

that in 1,000 years, 10,000 years, that will be a huge part of our legacy.

Like the impact that we make on the stream of macroevolution will be one of the really big things that our species does.

And it can sometimes be very hard to recognize that in like our individual lives, but collectively it will absolutely be part of our forever legacy on Earth.