Leonardo da Vinci died on this date 500 years ago, what would he have thought of the world today?

Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He died on this day five hundred years ago.

If Leonardo could see the world today he would no doubt have been impressed by the technological advances made by human kind. I doubt though he would have been happy with the damage that humans have caused to the planet, wildlife and the environment. Although he did view the character of man with some scepticism: "Man has great powers of speech, but what he says is mostly vain and false; animals have little, but what they say is useful and true". 

Leonardo had a love of animals as pointed to in the account of the life of Leonardo by Georgio Vasari in his book commonly known as Lives of the Artists first published in Florence in 1550. He wrote: "He took an especial delight in animals of all sorts, which he treated with wonderful love and patience. For instance, when he was passing the places where they sold birds, he would often take them out of their cages with his hand, and having paid whatever price was asked by the vendor, he would let them fly away into the air, giving them back their liberty".

I think we can guess the feelings of Leonardo had he read the recent draft United Nations report on species extinction. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report is set to be unveiled on May 6 and  warns of “an imminent rapid acceleration in the global rate of species extinction.” They point out that to up to 1 million species face extinction due to human influence. The pace of loss “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years,” it notes. “Half-a-million to a million species are projected to be threatened with extinction, many within decades.” Scientists estimate that Earth is today home to some 8 million distinct species, a majority of them insects. A quarter of catalogued animal and plant species are already being crowded, eaten or poisoned out of existence. Nearly half of land and marine ecosystems have been profoundly compromised by human interference in the last 50 years.

Leonardo da Vinci would have been horrified, but nevertheless he had an idea of the destructive nature and stupidity of mankind. I wonder though if even he could have comprehended the scale of human ability to kill other species and to destroy the planet on which they live.