No time to classify, even to count the species, even those living; of Earth’s estimated thirty million species of plant and animal and insect, only a million had been identified and named by all the generations of biologists that had ever worked. Last chance to see.

There were problems, of course.

There was a lot of vertebrate bias, for instance, in the strategies for rescue. The big mammals and pretty birds were always top of the list, followed by other vertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, fish — even though many of the reptiles, for instance, were already literally drowning in the moisture-laden air that had followed the final melting of the ice caps, and the evaporation of so much ocean water.

And nobody could agree on the corner cases. Biodiversity or not, was it right to preserve the last samples of anthrax, or the Ebola virus, or the last tsetse flies?

And there were the bad guys. Like the cartel who had hunted down and wiped out the last elephants — before the geneticists managed to collect embryos for cryostorage — in order to get an all-time monopoly on ivory. Not to mention the reports, many substantiated, of crazies who were deliberately spreading the Moonseed, accelerating its propagation…

There were lots of reasons to do this, to evacuate the biosphere.

The new Moon needed to be colonized, of course, by the right creatures to coexist with mankind, to flesh out a new biosphere. And looking further ahead, a lot of people muttered vaguely about biodiversity. Nobody knew what benefits might be waiting to be discovered: new foods, better medicines, waiting to be derived from plants and animals yet to be catalogued.

And then there was the potential of species, far beyond their economic value to humans. It would have been hard to extrapolate the rise of mankind from the tree-dwelling mammals that hid from the dinosaurs seventy-five million years ago. Who could say what great societies might arise from the beetles and reptiles and birds, if they were only given the chance?

But for Henry there was a deeper sense of ethics involved.

Homo sapiens was one of the newest species on Earth. Maybe it was homo sap’s fault that this calamity had been visited on the planet; maybe it wasn’t. At any rate, wasn’t there an obligation on the species that commanded most of the planet’s primary production to save as many of the other, older species as it could?

But in the end, maybe it was going to make little difference. For there just wasn’t enough time.

Upcoming was the greatest extinction pulse of all, dwarfing even the end-Palaeozoic. This time there would be no recovery, no slow million-year clambering back to diversity, no reconquest of abandoned ecological niches. Now, evolution on Earth was at an end; now, whatever wasn’t sampled or collected was lost forever.