Welcome to Pleistocene Park | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Pleistocene Park

theatlantic.com

55 pointswaqasaday14 comments

I was shocked by the casual mention of genetic engineering:

"using crispr, the genome-editing technology, they began flying along the rails of the Asian elephant’s double helix, switching in mammoth traits. They are trying to add cold-resistant hemoglobin and a full-body layer of insulating fat. They want to shrink the elephant’s flapping, expressive ears so they don’t freeze in the Arctic wind, and they want to coat the whole animal in luxurious fur. By October 2014, Church and his team had succeeded in editing 15 of the Asian elephant’s genes."

Sure, this project is toying with making an elephant more cold resistant. But if the technology spreads, how long until we get sharpened pathogens and pests ?

You have probably no idea how wide-spread CRISPR is by now. There are in the order of at least hundred thousand independ research projects going on right now world wide, this one project does not make much a difference technologywise aside of applying gene editing to elephants as well.

If you want to stop gene editing, you have to travel back to ~2011 (and then you are late to the party), at any later point it was pretty much unstoppable.

Next step, make them tiny! (a la the phyletic dwarf elephants in Peter F. Hamilton's "Great North Road").

John Hammond used a tiny genetically-engineered elephant to impress investors in "Jurassic Park".

http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Pachyderm_Portfolio

There are extinct elephants that were already quite small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_elephant

Pathogens and pests tend to replicate quickly enough that traditional methods of genetic engineering (breeding and selection) would work decently well I think. Since we avoided bioweapons so far I'm fairly confident that we will be able to do so in the near future as well.

If you're interested in this domain, I'd highly recommend watching the following Defcon Talk from Intel's Chief Medical Officer (who'd've thunkit?) which is illuminating and borderline terrifying..

'DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

"Modify the genomes of elephants like those, as nature modified their ancestors’ across hundreds of thousands of years, and you can make your own mammoths."

Yeah, right... They make it sound like putting together a child puzzle.

The differences between those 2 genomes can be vast and even if we did know it 100%, it would take a lot of effort to "craft" this DNA into a usable one and after that how would you have variance? You would need to craft at least a couple dozens randomly changing it so they can breed or would we clone the same one over and over again?

I think it's interesting to bring it back, I would even like to see it but it is one weird of a project to say the least.

I've re-upvoted your post because of its relatively substantive core, but please don't lead with snark like "Yeah, right" in comments here. It degrades the community and encourages others to do worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fun fact: The first definition of "snark" is an imaginary animal...

...which is also, coincidentally, the subject of the comment :)

But, on a serious note: I don't consider "Yeah, right...", followed by an explanation, to be too snarky.

Yes, however you could just have a long haired elephant quite easily. It is conceivable that you might end up with a slightly genetically modified elephant that fills the same ecological niche without genetically being a mammoth. Its easy to see why the author and even the geneticist might choose the term over "genetically engineered elephant" when explaining the concept to the average person.

Is this a precursor to a real life Jurassic Park?

No need to "clone".

A wooly mammoth is just an elephant that spent several generations in colder than average weather.

Evolve the wool to insulate.

I have no idea whether this will work or not, or if it will have unintended side effects.

I'm more interested in another topic briefly touched on in the article. Has anyone produced a theoretical map of a post-apocalyptic "hot Earth?"

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