On the Origin of Digital Species : : :
Digital Painting

The extinction of biological species is progressing, the Red List of endangered species is getting longer and longer. Even parasites are threatened. The causes of extinctions are interlocked and in sum devastating: rampant hunting and fishing, displacement by immigrant and superior competitors (neobiota), natural losses and unequal sex distributions, reduced genetic fitness, epidemics based on introduced pathogens, and ... climate change. Habitat destruction due to exorbitant soil depletion from monocultures, over-fertilization and poisoning, global deforestation and habitat islanding et cetera are driving more and more animal and plant species to the brink of final extinction.

Humans are the largest predatory organism since the Tyrannosaurus. We perfect the breeding of few but lucrative species, producing and devouring artificially deformed individuals in biomasses. Like aliens in blockbusters, we suck the earth dry and exploit, senseless, almost all organic matter: cattle, pigs, wheat, corn, .... As if there were no tomorrow, we slaughter and deforest. We plunder vast tracts of land and plow deeper and deeper sea beds. The reaching of the tipping points for the extinction of many living beings is not even assessed yet – we erase them as a precaution. People on the streets have heard of a last rhino and of bee extinction, but the more exotic species are “too far away”. “After all, the meat shelves are still full.” Last representatives of their species often only have a chance of preservation, if at all, in the zoo or through the genetic scissors.

What remains after an overkill of natural species? Perhaps in the end only the memory and imaginations in artificial parallel and technical worlds? The digital invention of species that don’t make a mess, don’t smell, don’t bite and don’t sting? What actually speaks against the extinction of real, disgusting jellyfish? What are real aquatic plants good for anyway? What do biologists have against the eradication of real ‘weeds’ and why are environmentalists even campaigning for ‘analog’ water fleas?

Why don’t we just design ourselves ‘metaverse’ representatives of real fauna and flora, borrowed from untamed nature? Let’s just dissolve the old order, forget Darwin, have fun playfully and enjoy ingenious gaming effects. Let’s let the AI calculate and select intelligently, after a reset in the ‘digital revolution’. Without a guilty conscience, fictional, fantastic, holographically animated by the breathed-in spirit of imagination. Frankenstein in beauty. Who needs ‘real’ orchids when virtual ‘flowers’ are even more fun?

Children have been playing for hours every day in virtual rooms, in ‘fully natural atmospheres’, with ‘cute animals’ and ‘colorful flowers’. Many of them have never seen a ‘real’ hedgehog or a ‘real’ cow.