Genuine question. I was talking to someone recently and they asked me this and while I had some answers (mentioned below), I didn’t have confidence in my answers.
I know climate change is a threat to biodiversity and that it’s important to preserve it but I was never told why biodiversity is important. Is it to keep ecosystems in check (I feel like this is probably one of the most important reasons)? Is it to just give humans a bunch of species to look at and appreciate? Is it to ensure that if the human population died, some forms of life would remain that would be fit for whatever catastrophe affected human populations and keep life going?
Is it all of these things? Any other reasons?
Thank you!
In: Biology
>Is it to ensure that if the human population died, some forms of life would remain that would be fit for whatever catastrophe affected human populations and keep life going?
Everybody else has provided good answers on the main point so I will just expand a little on this: it would be virtually impossible to wipe out life on Earth.
We could set off every nuke ever made and we’d certainly wipe out a massive number of species but life would carry on. Radiation would pose a risk for decades, not to mention the effects on climate that would likely linger beyond this, but these effects would be extremely brief on a geological time scale and life would just start evolving again from whatever survived in the deepest nooks and crannies of the planets surface, oceans and even in the Earth’s crust.
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