And the empirical evidence for this is? The "100 species go extinct per day" claim was an off-the-cuff comment by some environmentalist whacko back in the '70s that has been taken as gospel by an credulous media ever since. Truth be told, there is no way to determine the number of species that may go extinct at any given time, and the 100-per-day claim means that 36,500 species go extinct each year (36,600 each leap year). There are between 1 million and 4 million species extent on the Earth right now. If the claims of the whackos were correct, in the last 30 years (since the claim was first made) somewhere between 25 percent to 100 percent of all species on the planet would now be extinct -- this is something not supported by the empirical evidence.