Lab-grown woolly mammoths could walk the Earth in six years
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Relevant snippet from Brand:
> Eventually, the rest of that story is that woolly mammoths could be part of the revival of what used to be called the Mammoth Steppe, which is the grasslands of the far north, which was once the largest biome on Earth … what [Mammoths] are good at is knocking down trees. Knocking down trees is good because it turns a closed-canopy forest into mosaic, and a mosaic is a much richer ecological environment for all kinds of species.
1. https://tim.blog/2018/02/03/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...
looks at extant life pointedly
Sure, some life finds a way, but 99.99% of it doesn't.
This is — famously — almost completely untrue.
This means that whilst outrunning a T-Rex might be difficult, it should work like a bull: you have zero chance when running away from a bull that's trying to attack you. So don't. However, if you just avoid the bull by going sideways (walking speed is more than enough, there is no real need or the showy stuff toreadors perform at bull fights) and let it attack you until it tires (and collapses), at which point you calmly walk over and kill it with a pointy stick ... yes it takes some practice but it's definitely going to be how such fights would go in practice.
Worse: it's not like humans are the only animals that are capable of figuring this out.
What ecological benefits would de-extincting mammoths and re-introducing them to the Arctic bring? Genuinely curious.
Mammoths were adapted to the ice age while we are in a climate warming crisis... apparently they lived in steppes called "mammoth steps" that are very rare today [1]. So realistically this would just be a tourist attraction a la Jurassic Park.
Those grasses would cool the ecosystem, in turn reducing the release of trapped methane gas from melting permafrost, a major contributor to global warming.