Everyone keeps saying its like a list, how does that work?? Do you have like a pokedex where the undiscovered species appear in grey or something like that???
In: Biology
first they can science the shjit out of it and basically say “given what we know, species containing [These DNA patterns] should definitely exist, we just havent found them yet” and other wierdness like that, but im pretty sure thats the minority.
most of it is extrapolation and educated guesses.
lets say you run a business selling balls for ballpits. You have like a billion balls spread out over a hundred warehouses, but its all the balls.
Some random guy decides he wants to buy all the balls that are red and ONLY red, because he is wierd like that.
You dont know how many of your balls are red, so you go to the first warehouse and count the first thousand balls. out of 1k, you have about 100 red balls.
You go to the second warehouse and count a batch of a thousand balls. You have around 100 red balls.
You go to the third warehouse and again have about a 100 out of a thousand.
you could go and count every single ball in every single warehouse, or you could extrapolate that you have about 10% red balls and go with that with a fiarly high degree of certainty, without needing to know EXACTLY how many red balls you have.
you have a billion balls, so you know you have about 100 million red balls, give or take a few million, even if you have never in your life seen more than a few hundred of them in your checks.
same thing with checking for animals, generally.
If every place you check has around 9 species you discover for every one you knew about, you can kind of assume most places you havent already checked are going to have around that much too on average, and from that you can further guess roughly how many species are around that we havent found yet.
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