All Species Inventory: Preserving Larger Ideas
By Kevin Kelly

If you take my suggested equivalency with ideas and species and technology - that basically technology is an idea, and that technology and species are similar, then all three of them share some attributes, then you can think of species as ideas.

All the information and knowledge and structure that has gone into evolution over the millions of years is contained in a species, and a species is actually a very big idea, and in some way it is an idea that is bigger than ideas that we can come up with and that is one of the reasons why we should preserve them. It is not the only reason, but one of the reasons is to preserve this idea and because of that, I think it is very necessary for us to make an inventory of all the species, because we have no idea even what species there are on earth.

We're trying to do ecology, we're trying to run the planet more biological like and we don't even have the list of parts. We don't even know all the ingredients, and so I think it is worth doing as a first thing is to make a catalog inventory of every living species on earth.

We need to have technologies that will allow us to actually answer questions at the global level and that is one thing that this will also do.

What do you think we might learn from that process of cataloging?

There are lots of things, lots of consequences of knowing all the species on earth.

First of all, having this baseline of all the species is the first step towards understanding how many of them there are so then we can determine whether they are endangered.

We can also find out about their general behavior, their general role in our ecology, their general role in our own lives and unless we know who they are, we cannot discover any of those things.

There are also the commercial spin offs. We know that many pharmaceutical and biological compounds occur or basically are invented by these species and so there is a great big idea bank available for us to borrow from and thirdly, the process of developing this global species thing will be useful for determining and answering other things on a global level. Basically anything we want to ask about the planet at a global level, the answer right now is we don't know. We need to have technologies that will allow us to actually answer questions at the global level and that is one thing that this will also do.

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