this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
1107 points (98.7% liked)
Memes
45589 readers
1510 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The best way to never go extinct is to be usable by humans
Best way to go extinct is much the same.
Shrödinger's extinction
Underrated comment
I actually thought about that and changed "enjoyed" to "usable"
Dodos were tasty and Vaquitas are cute but chickens, wheat, potatoes, rice etc. are a borderline infinite food glitch for humans compared to most food sources so they naturally get cultivated in huge numbers
Mmmmm, tasty Dodo bird.
For every dodo there's a cow and for every chicken there's a giant tortoise 🤷
Hemp / marijuana is arguably the most successful plant at this. It enjoys a high degree of biodiversity where as most plants we cultivate suffer from monoculture problems. Why is hemp / marijuana so successful? Probably because of its multiple uses. It makes strong fibers, you can make milk from it, you can make all sorts of consumer products like lip balm and hair conditioner, and you can get fucking ripped bro
See also Brassica Oleracea aka wild cabbage which we've cultivated into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, gai lan.. etc
we've even cultivated it into magical artefacts, romanesco broccoli
I love the texture of cooked romanesco, it's as if potatoes and broccoli got together and decided to have a fractal baby
Fun fact, apparently nature can only do fractals 4 levels deep. This works for romanesco, fern, and tons of others. I am yet to find an outlier.
Both by using it as a protien supplement and a psychoactive chemical.
Where did you find that about hemp? I can only find info about recreational marijuana and can't find anything about agricultural or industrial hemp. And the recreational marijuana numbers I could find are all just like "top 30 strains to try today"
Leafly lists 6,822 cannabis strains. Though 'strains' or more aptly cultivars are often not reflective of the actual underlying chemical nature of the plant [source]. They are ultimately not very meaningful in general.
Based on this database, Europe has 104 varieties of hemp registered.
Canada has 87 but there is probably overlap.
Though potatoes and cannabis aren't really a fair comparison for many reasons. There are a lot of different species of potatoes with major chromosomal differences but cannabis only has 3 species.
Yeah its a major problem in particular with the Idaho Gold being far and a way the most commonly grown potato to meet McDonald's demand for long fries that stick up out of the little fry nest
It depends, silphium was potentially an effective contraceptive that was harvested to extinction.
The difference in survival probably stems from a single hyphen.
Mint grows like a fucking weed. Silphium grew like a fucking-weed.
Similar is happening to Western Yews for cancer meds, I think. Whether it survives depends on how easy it is to tame if only intensive agriculture will supply the demand. And then there's the question of whether it's still the same thing -- looking at you, broiler chicken.
Task failed successfully