A species on the brink of extinction isn't going to reverse after only 30 years.

We need to find out more about how stripers live. Stripers came close to the brink of extinction 25 years ago. Other species are still in trouble. Rutgers is leading the effort along the Jersey Shore to study our fisheries. I hope Net Free steers clear of nets and won't end up on a dinner table. We have something to learn form Net Free and the other tagged fish.

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

This is an exciting year ... witnessing a population on the brink of extinction exhibit signs that it might actually make it, that it might have a fighting chance.

Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.