this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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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.
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
Both by using it as a protien supplement and a psychoactive chemical.
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.
From what I can find there are 700 strains of cannabis
There's 4000 varieties of potato
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.
You aren’t kidding. I got four tiny spearmint plants this spring. They are growing kind of hydroponically because I have a pond.
In less than three months, those plants have exploded into huge nice-smelling bushes that are more than two feet in each dimension. They are planted in a line so there’s this walk of mint that’s almost 12 feet long.
But that’s not enough. The plants send out branches along the ground like freaking tentacles. They will spill out of a planter box, for instance.
The fast growth is why I chose this plant, but damn!
You're going to battling mint for decades to come.
My mom made that same mistake more than 20 years ago. The original plants are long gone but I am still dealing with mint in my garden and just everywhere. It takes over the lawn.
Fortunately it is isolated to what is essentially a big planter box full of gravel (a bog for the pond I mentioned) and I can trim any of the tendrils reaching over the edge.
If they release a lot of seeds or something, then it was nice knowing you. 🫡
The smell when you run the lawnmower, though... Heaven
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.
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