I don't see the problem here, it's not like it's being harvested en mass to make jewelery or to make some other consumer product. Assuming a magical man in the sky does rapture his true believers away in 2012 or whenever people think the world is going to end this time, the rest of us are going to want to try to take care of this particular watery rock flying through space and we will need to learn more about it to do so.
In the grand scheme of things samples taken from slow growing corals for the sake of protecting them in the future are more than appropriate.. If you need something to get riled up about you can look at things like wild tuna, the decimation of virtually every species the Chinese consider novelty foods or claim have "medicinal" qualities, or the humanitarian issues plagueing the better part of Africa..
If researchers with legitimate work to do aren't allowed to do it we probably won't make it another 1000 years, but there's no reason a species that can get to the moon shouldn't last for as long as we keep from killing ourselves off.
In the grand scheme of things samples taken from slow growing corals for the sake of protecting them in the future are more than appropriate.. If you need something to get riled up about you can look at things like wild tuna, the decimation of virtually every species the Chinese consider novelty foods or claim have "medicinal" qualities, or the humanitarian issues plagueing the better part of Africa..
If researchers with legitimate work to do aren't allowed to do it we probably won't make it another 1000 years, but there's no reason a species that can get to the moon shouldn't last for as long as we keep from killing ourselves off.
