Okay, remember the story of Noah’s Ark from the bible? God gets mad at humanity and decides to reset civilization, but spares Noah and his family who build a giant wooden boat with two of every land animal boarded on, the world floods over completely until the waters subside, you already know all of this. Although this cautionary tale is a fictitious one, the story of Noah’s flood is still very symbolic in modern culture, hence the analogy I’m going to use. Let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, there was some great cataclysm that rendered our biosphere severely damaged to the point of no return. How would we determine what species to save in such an event, and what would we require to do so? Welcome back to your irregularly scheduled slop, this time instead of aliens, its some environmentalism stuff with a side of apocalypse prepping. Although this video is mainly meant as a thought exercise, it does have some tentative value for conservation, as figuring out what course of action to take to prevent species extinctions can be quite useful in the real world. But first, we must establish what it is we are trying to accomplish here. We want to create a robust storage base for a minimum viable version of Earth’s biodiversity, like the Svalbard seed vault but for more than just crops. Alternatively if cryogenics is too difficult, we could go the route of building a giant vivarium for our species to live in, and hopefully they form breeding populations that can then be exported back to the wilderness or wherever else you may want them, an approach called ex situ conservation. Importantly for this, we cannot include every species on Earth, both because there are way too many species on this planet, and because some forms of life are actively harmful to the well-being of others, whether it be parasites, pathogens, or the nebulous category of pests, which can include a whole number of organisms considered problematic to human endeavors, be it benign or severe. There’s also many famous large species such as the blue whale and giant sequoia that we wouldn’t be able to raise in captivity due to their exorbitant needs, or organisms that live in habitats like the deep sea that are hard to recreate. With that said, if we eventually get good enough at cloning technology, the live organism step could be skipped entirely, as you would only need the genetic sequence stored somewhere that could then be printed out and grown into a new organism, but this technology is far from fruition currently. A valid criticism levied against these methods to wildlife preservation is that it’s basically just an excuse to destroy the world’s ecosystems for short term profit in hope that they may be rebuilt in the future by AGI or whatever the techbros believe in nowadays. This take is something I agree with for the most part, even if it’s not good to assume everyone is automatically capitalistic, but I hope that I can avoid the mindset of shoving everything into a purely economic framework when it comes to propagating the natural world. One might also address the moral concerns of doing cloning and probably genetic engineering as well on such a massive scale, but I won’t get into that just yet as that deserves its own video. For the sake of making things fun, let’s assume we’re constrained keeping everything as a live breeding population and we have only a minimal amount of resources to work with, meaning we can only have 60 macroscopic species that all must be small enough to sustain on a shoestring amount of energy and space. Contrary to the public’s infatuation with charismatic megafauna such as pandas, the bulk of species we should be interested in selecting are not large vertebrates, but rather a myriad of plants and unassuming animals that will serve as the ecosystem’s major components. Here’s a rough list of species I picked in order to give a fair coverage of various taxa, making sure that the chosen species grow well in captivity and that many of the flora are edible. Now in order to figure out the cost of this operation, I’ll do some rough guessing to figure out the resources and space required. A small 2 meter tall spruce is roughly 30 kilograms, and we need at least 50 of them for a bare minimum to avoid inbreeding depression. Meanwhile, the average daisy is only about 5 grams and needs comparatively little to house enough of them to form a successful population. For our animals, the most expensive is the bamboo shark, requiring some 700 liters of saltwater and a steady supply of meat to sustain, times that by 50 sharks and the cost begins to mount for our budget ark, though some fauna like crickets can be fed a wide variety of food plants in addition to requiring much less area to reside within. In total for our 60 species, you’d probably need 642500 litres or roughly 642 tons of water and an area a little under 1 hectare for the 3000 individual organisms, smaller than even the legendary Biosphere 2. I don’t know enough to estimate the financial cost, but it’s probably somewhere in the high thousands or low millions range for building and operating such a project. If we change the parameters through genetically engineering the species, you could hypothetically cram most if not all non-parasitic animals and plants into the system by making them smaller, easier to feed, and less intensive to grow. But at that point, can you really call a dog-sized elephant a pure representative of the wild Proboscideans? Regardless, that’s about it for this installment of whatever this video series should be named. I hope this video was as engaging as the last. See ya.