One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Humanity wiped out multiple species' social history and that change is irrevocable.
I'm not religious myself (agnostic comes close-ish), but I would think, based on the evidence I'm aware of, that there must be an important function that spirituality and religion fulfill, especially to people not living in a 21st century first world society. After all, up until very, very, very recently, every group, society, people we today have any knowledge of, in every remote corner of the planet, had some sort of spiritual or religious framework. Atheism and a-spiritualism as a mass phenomenon is (to the best of my knowledge) a very recent phenomenon, and even most of the atheists I know have something that feels to me personally like a bit of a "replacement spirituality". If everyone's doing it, shouldn't there be a good reason for that?
Traces of such activity go back a long way in time, too. Use of ochre goes back almost 300 000 years, and while we don't know what they used it for then, later finds make a pretty solid case for it to be used in some spiritual context [1]. Neanderthals built structures that may very well have been connected to spirituality 176 000 years ago [2]. We have lots and lots of Venus figurines from the ice age Homo sapiens [3], we have lots of amazing cave paintings that may have been just naturalistic studies, but really don't look like it (like this 13 000 years-old chimeric guy: [4]). And then there are statuettes of lion-headed humans and lots of other art that doesn't appear to be naturalistic at all [5], probably right up to today, unless the very few uncontacted tribes are areligious exceptions or don't create spiritual art.
That sort of thing is costly. Effigies are costly, art is costly, rituals are costly, all the more so if you're living in an ice age environment that makes today's northern Siberia look kinda decent, or on a resource-starved island. Sacrifices are very costly, and they have been a part of lots and lots of cults and religions since time immemorial. There must be a reason why we kept doing this, and why people seem have such an enormous innate need for such things that they pick up such practices on their own again and again.
Actually, I'd say there must be some pretty huge upside to this, given that cataclysmic events and very hard times invariably deepen people's religiosity, despite all the selection pressure acting under a volcanic plume or in an icy summer or during devastating epidemics. They may shatter organized religions, but there are no atheists on a foundering ship in a storm, and all that.
That's not to say that our huge organized religions are a great thing, and should be kept as-is forever. Religiosity certainly has been and is being used as a means to deplorable ends. But there is, and probably always has been, another arguably much larger dimension to this, and people without churches probably wouldn't be steadfast atheists who never believe anything they haven't seen a peer-reviewed double-blind study on.
I'd speculate that if someone actually did that experiment and set some machine-reared Homo sapiens children loose on a pristine second Earth, and if by chance they'd actually make it through the first couple of generations, a complete lack of spirituality would probably be a disadvantage to them, and they'd probably fill that void before long. They'd have to hit the big existential questions at some point, after all, and if there is another way to answer them, I don't know it.
1: https://www.livescience.com/64138-ochre.html
2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neanderth...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine
Some of the most committed against slavery were its religious opponents, for instance: http://web.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/...
If you want to discuss the evils of politicized religion, or state mandated religion then I’m all ears.
But religion is a convenient scapegoat for more simple truth: Without fail every movement, party, or group that gains influence sooner or later overreaches and becomes the oppressor.
Religion is a red herring.
Meaning you disagree, but you're neither willing to discuss, nor to "agree to disagree"?
I didn't catch anything overly uncivil in GP's answer, and they did present arguments and clarify their position, so I'd say this kind of reaction isn't warranted. I also don't think this extremely shallow dismissal does your views and opinions justice, but if you're not willing to engage in open-minded discussion, why not say nothing at all?
On the other hand trying to save species that haven't gone extinct makes sense as you are trying to protect their way of life.
E.g. restoring mammoths would add a bulldozer that would trample trees in the north and bring the place back to its natural state of grasslands, that protects permafrost and CO2 stored in it
Instead of trying to save this planet, we fetishise escaping towards a dead, uninhabitable rock.
If a human standard was applied it could be described as drugging and sexually assaulting an elephant!
A noble goal however, the planets biodiversity is in a death spiral.
Except man.
And it's sacreligious, especially here, to even talk about people having less kids.
"The economic system counts on babies, and we need more!" which I have heard here so many times.
I don't want to debate. I'm a nobody. I just think there are too many people on this planet, and we are ruining it for the rest of the animals.
Population growth is declining in rich countries already, and in many middle-income ones.
We don't have to convince people to have less kids as they already do if they're wealthy, educated and their kids don't die.
https://bootstrappable.org/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots...
I don't think the Bootstrappable Builds folks are interested in touching proprietary software/firmware, so it is likely they would not be using UEFI or similar.
A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.
Non-metaphorically, I vaguely remember something about using elephants to gestate cloned mammoths.
It's basically the idea that we want to bake a cake, we have the recipe but don't know the kind of oven we need, nor the temperature, and only have a vague idea of how the result should look like.
We may get a cake by trial and error, but it's not guaranteed.
Also again: we're doing this looking at a working plan, it's different from guessing how one for an extinct animal may look like.
Because such a thing is non-trivial to invent and does not yet exist.
Says you. Are you a subject matter expert?
> non-trivial
> does not yet exist
One cannot substitute confidence for domain expertise.
Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.
I think you two are at a philosophical impasse - staticassertion is something of an optimist about technology with the viewpoint that anything that actually exists a working replica can be built of it with enough data as to how the thing actually works (perhaps requiring extensive years of research) and enough money and time to do the replication.
Your perspective seems to that the time to research, and the money and time to replicate are unknown variables of such potential size that we cannot know if we would ever make the investment to have it come to pass.
I personally suppose that as time goes on an artificial womb will become a more alluring prospect because of problems like this that it would help solve and as such the money and time required would be at found. But I am also an optimist about technological progress - although a pessimist about climate change so my assumption is based on us solving something I don't think will be solved.
Yes, sorry, your exact words:
> does not yet exist.
I don't know why that's semantically important, but there you are, for posterity.
> when your confident statement
Yeah I'm literally quoting you. So if you're saying that it will "almost certainly not" happen "some day", so be it, but you followed that up with "yet" and "non trivial" as opposed to "never" and "impossible".
From the way technology advances over time, someone will figure it out eventually, and when they do the announcement won’t be met with audible gasps, but rather a shrug of the shoulders and a passing comment of “Huh, so they figured that out.”