How to safeguard against the coming extinctions

I was reading that one of the most heavily fortified facilities in the world is the Seed Centre in the Arctic, which preserves flora & fauna biodiversity so that if the day ever comes that we are threatened with mass crop extinctions (the cavendish banana, which is 90% of the world production & consumption, is threatened by a virus that wipes out the crop, each banana is an identical clone of another) we have a bio bank to start over.

During my travels it’s increasingly obvious to me that English is the new Latin. Maybe a millennia from now different planets will spawn their own Vulgar English dialects that will emerge as lingua Franca in their own right. But as of right now the ongoing linguistic consolidation (the Tesot mother speaks Luganda as a first language and will only speak to her children in English) means that Uganda’s tremendous linguistic & tribal diversity (in the dozens) is soon going to become Luglish (Luganda + English. Hinglish is not an isolated phenomenon..

Perhaps we need a linguistic bank where we record native speakers and record their language to store (after all our data capacity is rising on a geometric if not exponential level, apparently the internet weighs a millionth of an ounce) for the long years ahead.

Of course Baha’u’llah for saw this and cautioned us 150yrs ago to set an auxiliary language so that we both have global unity but maintain local diversity. But while we wait for the New World Order it may be prudent to save the bulk of the 6,000 or so languages that will soon diminish to a few hundred..

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Brown Pundits Archive

Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive