Woolly Mammoth Revival

The page also lists that they are coordinating projects and bring together specialists, so umm... it sounds a lot like Mars One.

Well, I mean, going to the moon was another "because it's there." I don't see anything wrong with trying to do incredible things just because they're incredible. We learn a lot along the way.

Not to mention, reintroducing a subarctic species while we're busy melting the permafrost is just mean.

"Rational" has a very loose definition so "because it's cool" is also a rational reason.

Megafauna are going to have low birth rates and be easy to track and cull. So the risk seems fairly low compared to say insects or seeds or bacteria that can never be reigned in once they are out in the world.

As a counterpoint, there are examples where the introduction of species has been spectacularly successful for ecosystems.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/25/yellowst...

personally I think we should be placing any prehistoric megafauna into some kind of fenced-off island zoo, where they can be monitored by scientists and visited by tourists. I can't see anything going wrong with that approach.

It's the precautionary principle that's irrational. The status quo isn't inherently desirable. It's not true that "know one knows what would happen." We don't know everything that would happen, but we do know a lot. We also know what is happening now, with an important ecological niche unfilled.

Humans have historically had enormous effects on the planet, in all sorts of dimensions. At this point there's no avoiding it, but we can be more thoughtful and deliberate in how we manage our environment.

It's one of the first known species that humans caused the extinction off. Starting here seems fitting.

They're giant slow breeding herbivores - if they're present a problem we'll have no more problem wiping them out than we are with the elephants.

The primary concern should be the welfare of the beasts - they're ice-age animals, and are fundamentally incompatible with the climate as it is, let-alone the sweltering wasteland/dessert/tropics that we're turning the world into.

Feral children are sometimes raised by a species like wolves, more different from us than mammoths are from elephants. Some of them can never acculturate with other humans, but they are generally viable creatures. They are still human. That's better than extinction.

To be honest I didn't even realise this was the goal. Surely the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance? Although, I guess you could take a herd of elephants and splice some woolly mammoth DNA into their genome and get the genetic variance that way.

To your question though, presumably they could slowly reintroduce them to the wild in a controlled way? If humans gave them everything they needed to begin with then gradually restricted their food supply, etc? Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient?

With time they would rebuild that knowledge.

Culture is not static. Yes, the clan rituals of all the mammoth families from 4,000 years ago are forgotten forever, but most, if not all, of it would have been lost by now anyways. Instead, new cultures develop and will develop if we release cloned mammoths in the arctic. It will take generations to return to a natural like state, but it could get there.

As for salmon, yes, the farmed salmon does not remember the stream it spawned. Nevertheless, you can take the progeny of those salmon and relocate them to a river that has been renaturalized, like it is happening in many places in Europe. Sure, the salmon will not be the same, but once the bears recognize it as a food source again, they will play the same role in the ecosystem as their distant relatives once did.

They also don't have the pasture they would expect. Nor the gut biome to digest it.

A living organism is also an entire context. Just look at the trouble we have getting wild animals to thrive in a zoo, where we can control the environment. The idea that an extinct megafauna could be released into whatever environment and survive, is unlikely.

But their offspring would figure that out before long.

The argument is that the wooly mammoth actually helps counteract the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere:

"When the herds of northern megaherbivores were killed off by humans ten millennia ago, Zimov says, the largest biome on earth, called the “mammoth steppe,” converted from grassland to boreal forest and tundra. In these days of global warming, thawing tundra is releasing greenhouse gases, whereas grassland fixes carbon." [0]

There is a really great documentary about Stewart Brand, We Are as Gods, that also covers this project. [1]

[0]https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh... [1]https://www.weareasgods.film

Climate was a factor but not the primary factor in their extinction.

Like the vast majority of all ice-age megafauna, they could not co-exist with the rapidly expanding human population and were driven from the land that sustained them and/or hunted to extinction.

Check out the, serious, Pleistocene Park project: https://pleistocenepark.ru/

The basic argument runs like this: reintroduce still living species (and then megafauna), megafauna turn forests into grasslands (see what modern elephants do to trees), grasslands keep snow on the ground longer and contribute to a cooler climate.

One good reason is that existing species are in some danger of collapsing from the extinction of keystone species.

A good example are joshua trees. As I understand it, giant sloths distributed joshua tree seeds. (i.e. they ate the huge seeds, wandered over the next hill, and crapped them out in a big pile of fertilizer). Without giant sloths, joshua trees can't migrated outside of their existing habitats. That's all well and good while the climate isn't changing dramatically, but we're not in that world any more. The current estimate is that unless some substitute animal can be found, joshua trees with be extinct within the next few hundred years.

So restoring ground sloths would save an existing species from extinction.

There’s already Elephant Revival

I think this should literally be brought to market.

If you did lab grown extinct animal meat (as opposed to beef), the interest would be a lot higher. No one would mind that the woolly mammoth meat on offer is not quite a good steak.

> We do not recommend or endorse the consumption of this item. It is not food. It is a display piece.

Someone has probably done this to warrant such a message

Hard to be scared of an animal we've already hunted to extinction once back when we were working with spears.

at least in the first one didn't it require active sabotage of multiple systems (power security IT...) by a trusted insider with little to no supervision simultaneous with a freak storm for that to happen though? and as i recall there were few if any redundant systems you would expect along, the whole thing being run by a skeleton staff.

also at least based on the movies depiction its obvious no one involved ever studied zoo construction or best practices. a power outage should never cause a zoo exhibit to fail open. a tree should not be were it will could fall and let a animal out. also every pin for anything that you wouldn't allow in a petting zoo should have not just had a electric fence (which should have each had a backup generator) but also a ditch, moat, and shear face far enough back to prevent escape by any animal making a running jump.

the whole park was pretty much as a death trap just based on the way it was built.

Hammond should have been convicted of criminal negligence.

>Not to mention whatever other reasons they went extinct.

correct me if i am wrong but isn't the current consensus that the reason they went extinct was because we found them tasty and had recently invented pointy sticks?

Mammoths can be found frozen. I expect it's easier to find valid DNA in frozen mammoths then in tasmanian tiger skeletons.

Because other people are working on the Tasmanian Tiger. Probably best that people in Australia do it too, as it might not be a great fit for the northern arctic ;)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/thylacine...

So many extinct species, difficult to know where to start.

Actually, besides Jurassic Park style exhibits, hunting and eating is probably the killer app.

There could be millions in game hunting and serving this at high-end restaurants.

Note: I'm NOT advocating this. It's just that hunting and culinary would be a killer app.

Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore people that they're going to change tack and use all of their brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead. They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as protected as it is now.

I would agree with you if we were playing with a fixed pot of money, but I think this project could bring support from an entirely new audience. I think a lot of people have a hard time conceiving of environmental protection as something positive and exciting. They see it as an essentially negative aspiration, like someone who sees healthy eating as an essentially negative application of discipline, pointlessly denying yourself doughnuts, because the positive benefits are too doubtful or abstract for them.

Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could excite people who groan at traditional environmental initiatives.

I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.

Even putting aside the whataboutism here -- the limitation is not "enough money exists on earth" -- it's not actually true that keystone megafauna goes extinct every year.

I think you are right on a moral level. But on a pragmatic level these genetic projects are perhaps promising also for conserving existing species. Conserving a species in the traditional way, by conserving it's ecosystem, is costly and often failed. Especially if the ecosystem in question is competing with farmland, cities or heavily impacted by global warming and pollution. Storing some DNA is cheap and will get cheaper. Doing tricks with this DNA will also get cheaper if we do it more often. I know it is unrealistic to think we can restore an entire ecosystem from a jar of DNA, but we can maybe repair a damaged ecosystem this way. We may also be able to keep small populations, normally impacted by inbreeding, more genetically diverse. This may be our chance to domesticate and protect what is left of the biodiversity on earth.

umbrella species are useful.

This argument is so frustrating. It's commonly seen with space projects, like a space hotel. It assumed several things that are usually not true:

* The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all resources available to the problem space

* Everyone agrees on what the problems are

* Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that need to be tackled

* There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or plastic surgery research)

* it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on working on the highest priority problem on some global list of problems.

It's very flawed logic IMO.

The disappearing species are boring.

Well, they are also working on helping the black-footed ferret recover and they started on that project before doing mammoths, so maybe cut them some slack?

Honey the mammoths are in the trash again. Did you lock the lid like I asked you?

What is the risk you are worried about?