Nothing bad will happen, as long as they spare no expense.
It's all fun and games until you're being chased down in your Jeep by a dodo.
Your financial problems are not my concern!
The world they lived in is long gone along with the food they ate and the rest of their species. It seems almost cruel to bring them back.
Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).
I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.
Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.
I’m fairly certain they are working on the thylacine as well?
Different group, I think, and not as close to success. The thylacine has a better chance at long-term survival if we do bring it back, though—it isn't an ice age creature, and it was surviving despite competition from other creatures in a similar niche until humans started aggressively hunting it down.
It's not that long gone. There were still mammoths around when the pyramids were built. Plus there's still huge swaths of tundra and taiga that they could live on, with a lot of the same plants, even if it's quite a bit warmer.
In the grand scheme of things the pyramids were built relatively recently, but I'd still consider it quite long ago
Measured in human life it’s long ago. measured at universal scales, it was nothing.
Not advocating for restoring the mammoth, but this is a dangerous line of argument.
With climate change and ongoing mass extinctions, many current species are or will soon be in the same situation that re-introduced mammoths would be—and you could use the same argument to say that trying to preserve them is cruel so we should kill off any current species facing environmental stress.
They were here pretty recently, their food is still here. It was cruel that we extincted them.
Well pumpkins and avocados still exists at least and apparently they were grazers.
Nah. It’s still the same place. They died out within the time frame of completely modern humans.
I've said this a million times before, but if we're playing gods anyway, can't we make them dog sized also?
I would totally get one or maybe two.
Yeah you say that until you get a tusk in the crotch
They'll be wearing stylish pool noodles on the tusks to minimize furniture and gonad damage.
Or we create them with softer tusks. Maybe that's better, the. They'll also be worthless to poachers.
I don't want to live in a world that has wooly mammoths with floppy tusks. It just seems wrong.
I hope they have put a substantial amount of thought into potential problems that could arise. (Not that it will actually be like JP)
I hope whatever species that comes after us doesn't bring us back
No! They did it! They blew it up!
And then the apes blew up their society too. How could this happen?
And then the birds took over and ruined their society.
And then the cows. And then...I don't know, is that a slug, maybe?
Noooo!
But why? We have no iceage anymore.
"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should"
I remember reading about this in 5th grade. 25 fucking years ago. I'll believe it when I see it..
just like nuclear fusion, it was 10 years away 10 years ago, it's 10 years away now and it will be 10 years away 10 years from now
But now we have AI! Both and many more problems will be solved any time now...
Everything outside of cities should be a nature reserve and we should clone extinct megafauna to put in zoos
Maybe in 100 years, with how underfunded research in vertical farming is.
- Step 1: acquire genetic material
- Step 2: supplement material with closely related extant species <- We are here
- Step 3: Get an egg cell with your Frankenstein-DNA to survive and divide
- Step 4: Produce a healthy baby
- Step 5: Get a small population in a Zoo/Park
- Step 6: have a permanent wild population in a specific area
- Step 7: have enough of those areas to declare repopulation a success
Is fixating on the mammoths here first-world centrism? The article mentions 4 other species that have way better chances. Also, given how far we are from actual wild mammoths, that "it can solve climate change" argument is just wrong the way it's been presented.
we have no idea what happens next
Make a variant with multiple butts
Or make is exactly the size on the picture, where the mammoth fits in a petri dish.
I have an idea: Mammoth burgers
Worked in the docudrama "the Flintstones"
Poachers. Poachers are next.
We bringing poachers to extinction?
"We have no idea what happens next."
Scientists: we know almost exactly what will happen.
Does anyone else feel like this is irresponsible? Like, I get it, humans have been destroying the ecosystems of endangered and extinct animals for awhile now. But the world is actively warming up. And even if this is successful, how do we create enough of them to survive and procreate without defects etc. And where the hell will they live? I just have some concerns.
That’s crazy cause I think it’ll be here tomorrow
So we're talking about de-extinction at a time when 70% of the planet's biodiversity has been lost in the last 50 years?
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