Abstract
Humanity is at a turning point in its history: it is rapidly reaching the limits of its development in its current form. The whole of humanity now faces a situation which several human societies encountered in the past: their success depended for a long time on unsustainable exploitation of their ecosystem, which they thereby destroyed. Many of those societies perished, typically at the height of an exponential growth. However, some of them changed their ways, and survived for a long time in equilibrium with their environment. There are many well known reasons for us to do the same and change course as quickly as possible. In this essay I want to stress a further such motivation: we need to save the biodiversity of our planet from the mass extinction we have triggered. The reason to do so is, apart from our immediate survival, the fact that on a very long timescale we will end up valuing this biodiversity more than any other resource present in the Universe. In fact Terrestrial Life is a unique feature of our planet, not to be encountered anywhere else in our Universe, while all the other (energetic and mineral) resources we consider so important are absolutely abundant. We value them only because they are hard to get with present technology. But in the future, if we survive the impending ecological collapse, we will have to colonize and `terraform' other planets, and the huge diversity of life forms on Earth will become the most precious thing in the Universe, for it will be necessary to create functioning ecosystems on other planets. Life forms which we have little regard for now, and we are bringing to the edge of extinction while pursuing our immediate needs, might turn out to be essential for our survival in the future.
Flavio Mercati