Woolly mammoth will be back from extinction within 2 yrs say Harvard scientists

telegraph.co.uk

10 points·petethomas··5 comments

It's pretty cool that they might be able to bring something like a mammoth, or rather mammoth-elephant hybrid to life, but I'd rather see them use this technique to preserve highly endangered species, rather than something for which there is no natural habitat --that is, if released into the wild, the perturbations might lead to unintended consequences in other species as it has not existed in nature for thousands of years.

But if we must, I'd like to see the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian tiger.

The capability of being able to "respawn" extinct species is rather important, though, since we may be causing a mass extinction event via human-induced climate change. At some distant future date, it may be possible to revert much of the damage we're currently causing to the Earth.

It seems frivolous and silly, but I think this is actually very important research. You can't store species the way you can store seeds the way they're doing in Norway.

I agree this is vital and fascinating, but maybe we should get the Elephant out of the danger zone.

I wonder if we'll ever bring back Neanderthals too.

>I wonder if we'll ever bring back Neanderthals too.

No, not while we all live on one Earth. We can't even coexist peacefully with our same species, can you imagine having another apex species we'd see as direct competition not only to resources, but to our pre-eminence?

The alternative to bring them to life for scientific research would be an ethical non-starter.

"Actually,it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits."

Big difference.

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