A pet peeve of mine is “science” stories hand-wringing some new study statistics on how many species are going extinct in some time-frame.
Assuming 10-Gazillion species exist, I’d expect 2-Gazillion species to be recently evolved and looking for a foothold, 6-Gazillion species to be relatively stable populations going through normal eco-balancing cycles, and 2-Gazillion species to be on their way out.
(And you can compound up the Pareto analyses from 80/20 to 84/16, 95/5 98/2 and so on … as well as back to 68/32, 64/36 and 50/50, etc, etc, etc.)
And any one time half would always be the wrong side of normal / average.
How hard can it be? Numbers (size / scale) are irrelevant, it’s dependencies in the distribution tails that matter to us and the cosmos.
Sub specie aeternitatus.