I'm not sure if I'm making my point in a way that it is clear enough, so let me re-try.
Mosquitoes and chestnuts notwithstanding, the fact that there are species that we can miss does not automatically extend to 'we can miss all species except those that we can domesticate'. Ecosystems are complex, not very well understood and messing with them typically has disastrous and unforeseen consequences.
Because of this species going extinct should worry you because one day a species might go extinct that you directly depend on without knowing it. It's like playing Russian roulette, only you don't know how many holes there nor how many bullets.
So far nature has been able to patch the holes in an admirable way, life tends to re-inforce. But there is a critical point at which that re-inforcement no longer holds. Of course sticking your head in the ground and singing 'lalala' will not make the problem go away but it at least affords you the luxury of ignoring it. This is a very large problem and it is sad that clever people like you won't lose sleep over either a lack of bio diversity or the destruction of old books. Resilience is a good thing to have, not a liability. Our dependence on nature is as large as it possibly could be and our knowledge of nature is surprisingly limited, especially of the intricate interplay between species.
A single species so obscure as to be unknown to us could very well be crucial to our survival. Let's hope that such species become known before we find out they were crucial after all.
This is not a game of single datapoints invalidating theories, this is gambling on a scale that we can't even begin to afford until we've moved off-planet and have multiple, completely independent biospheres capable of supporting complex life forms. And once that's established we could try to reduce the biodiversity in one of them on purpose to see how far that envelope could be reduced.
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I'm not sure if I'm making my point in a way that it is clear enough, so let me re-try.
Mosquitoes and chestnuts notwithstanding, the fact that there are species that we can miss does not automatically extend to 'we can miss all species except those that we can domesticate'. Ecosystems are complex, not very well understood and messing with them typically has disastrous and unforeseen consequences.
Because of this species going extinct should worry you because one day a species might go extinct that you directly depend on without knowing it. It's like playing Russian roulette, only you don't know how many holes there nor how many bullets.
So far nature has been able to patch the holes in an admirable way, life tends to re-inforce. But there is a critical point at which that re-inforcement no longer holds. Of course sticking your head in the ground and singing 'lalala' will not make the problem go away but it at least affords you the luxury of ignoring it. This is a very large problem and it is sad that clever people like you won't lose sleep over either a lack of bio diversity or the destruction of old books. Resilience is a good thing to have, not a liability. Our dependence on nature is as large as it possibly could be and our knowledge of nature is surprisingly limited, especially of the intricate interplay between species.
A single species so obscure as to be unknown to us could very well be crucial to our survival. Let's hope that such species become known before we find out they were crucial after all.
This is not a game of single datapoints invalidating theories, this is gambling on a scale that we can't even begin to afford until we've moved off-planet and have multiple, completely independent biospheres capable of supporting complex life forms. And once that's established we could try to reduce the biodiversity in one of them on purpose to see how far that envelope could be reduced.