What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
Basically if we bring back dinosaurs it will be to torture them for our amusement and curiosity. Even if unintentional. The movies make us think Jurassic Park but the reality would be more like a slaughter house or medical experiment lab. The movie wouldn't be exciting if every scene was the same as that sick triceratops. Its actually hilarious if you think up a version of the movie in your head where they just walk around watching animals dying and laboring to breath.
"they're hunting us!"
"lol JK you should have seen your face. No they would pass out after two steps if they tried to chase us. We have to feed them through tubes because they don't even have the energy to chew"
"...large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28."
Volcanic activity in the Cretaceous enabled these high oxygen levels.
"The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... One of the problems that people have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more than enough to essentially combat wildfires."
https://profjoecain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/robert-e-...
There are all kinds of animals today we cannot keep alive in captivity because they require some sort of unknown sequence of environmental triggers to activate or deactivate various processes in their body.
For instance cheetahs are nearly impossible to breed in captivity because their mating process requires running for many miles to exhaustion. Without this the pregnancy rate is in the abyss even with artificial methods. There are endless examples thats just one off the top of my head.
For wildfires, I would expect the proportion of oxygen to matter much more than other gasses not involved in combustion.
Perhaps there's a difference in humidity levels, and therefore specific heat of the air?
If you wanted to terraform Venus, you would need to make diamonds out of the air so the carbon wouldn't just burn again. The oxygen you release would then react with the dirt and rocks to make more familiar minerals, and more CO2, of course. For a long time.
The whole surface would be a mile deep in diamonds before you finished. Hardly any water: the solar wind, not deflected by a magnetic field, carried most of that off. She probably had a field when she still rotated fast enough.
Earth gets to keep her water because the moon keeps us rotating enough to keep a magnetic field. Mars lost his because he is too small to keep a liquid core to generate the field with.
Is there a graph somewhere of Earth's mean sea level atmospheric pressure over time? Was it significantly different e.g. a billion years ago?
https://lru.praxis.dk/Lru/microsites/hvadermatematik/hem1dow...
I can’t usefully comment on most of the actual science in that paper, but I already had reasons to expect significant changes to the total mass of the atmosphere before reading it — the difference between today and the pre-oxygen apocalypse era (~2.4 Gy) implies at least a change of either 0.21 bar (if the oxygen came from the water) or 0.07 bar (if it all came from CO2).
I have no idea what to also anticipate from geology, impacts, or other things life might do besides the GOE.
The mass has reduced over time, due to solar wind blowing away our atmosphere. But compared with the mass of the friggin' earth, my intuition says atmos pressure has reduced only slightly
First part is also why Venus, with a lower mass, is able to have about x89 Earth's atmospheric pressure.
High-altitude genetic adaptations have been the subject of a fair amount of study; there are three major groups bearing such adapations: Tibetans, Ethiopians, and Andeans.
The Andean adaptation suite is noticeably more primitive and lower-quality; this is generally thought to be the result of having evolved only very recently, after humans made it to the Americas.
The Tibetan suite is so effective that part of it has been proposed to be the result of interbreeding between arriving homo sapiens and a different hominid species native to the Tibetan plateau.
My anecdote is I travelled in Bolivia for 3 weeks. Never under 3700 meters. One day we climbed Uturunku (6008 meters) as part of a jeep tour, You start at 5100 meters, so it's less crazy than it sounds.
Of the 6 tourists starting, only 3 made it up, with some real struggles.
Meanwhile, our native guide seemed to just have a relaxing walk...
1) Confirm that all beings are not answering with a Stockholm Syndrome
2) Confirm what is the subjective experience of the dinosaur
You hit me with Stockholm Syndrome; I respond with Typical Mind Fallacy. Just because your life is largely suffering, you assume that all humans lives must largely consist of suffering. This is not true.
I meant that dinosaur are not biologically capable of living in this time period or this environment of earth. They would have to be on life support from birth. Even than it would take many years of trying before we figured out how to keep them alive. Which means they would start dying a slow agonizing death from the moment we create them.
It would be like dropping people off on Venus and saying make the best of the sulfuric acid atmosphere.
Have you ever seen a killer whale in captivity with its top fin floppy/not standing up straight. They have no idea why that happens in captivity they cannot figure out even after many decades of them being captive. Now imagine that with millions of years of difference.
What about not bringing back dinosaurs but changing the dna of say a chicken to resemble that what we'd consider to be a dinosaur without it actually being any historically known dinosaur?
Theoretically geologists could predict high altitude plains or areas of generally high ground, probably, and it would be interesting to see reported fossils in those known lower PP-O2 areas. Fossilized vegetation evidence in the area of dino fossils could indicate higher altitude for both.
Sure, intuitively most dinos would thrive in hot swampy jungles. But there's so much delicious higher altitude land covered in pine trees waiting to be eaten... The cold argument is serious, but plenty of animals migrate, so given great forest of edible food, something should have evolved to eat its way uphill in the summer ...
Life has found a way - we are it!
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Evolution works by having creatures that can’t handle the new situation die. Preferably before they are able to reproduce.
And it may have escaped your attention, but the large non-avian dinosaurs? They all died out.
However if you want dinosaur-like creatures, you're basically talking giant flightless birds. So, start with something like an ostritch or a rhea, and use CRISPR to make selective edits aimed at increasing leg size and bone density. This would require a comprehensive understanding of development in these species, of course, and that's probably not there yet. You'd also want to create a fairly diverse source population so the new species wouldn't suffer from inbreeding issues.
Once you got the leg strength and body mass up, it's time to go for big sharp teeth. Increase spine strength and musculature, and then reactive that talpid2 gene with modifications that allow the embryos to survive to adulthood:
https://www.science.org/content/article/mutant-chickens-grow...
Now, would this giant mutant toothed ostrich be a dinosaur? For all intents and purposes, yes. Would doing this be a good idea, would you want these things running around suburban neighborhoods devouring stray cats and terrorizing the local human population? Maybe not.
You could get the common ancestor of birds, dinosaurs, and a living reptile if you just go to the common ancestor of, say, a chicken and a crocodile. That’s also the ancestor of pterosaurs as well as dinosaurs though.
That would only cover theropods. There are a lot of other dinosaurs.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll bring back dinosaurs." Now they have two problems.
The original article is actually promoting inventing new animals that look like dinosaurs. Or rather what we guess they looked like. We might be able to do that, someday.
Anything that looks like a sauropod would need solutions for all the problems anything sauropod-shaped would necessarily have had, and solved. There is no reason to think our solutions would match what they had, but we could anyway determine whether they were plausible solutions. My bet is on two-chambered auxiliary hearts all the way up the neck. (The null hypothesis is a volkswagen-sized heart and very, very thick artery walls, assuming new circulatory structures were out of reach.)
The vw sized heart was in a dinosaur show when I was a kid. Either David Norman or Bob Baker stood below a brachiosaur and told the audience about the heart. wow 30 years. Time flies.
For those in the back, sauropods, despite appearances, run with the tyrannosaurs and birds, not the triceratopses and hadrosaurs. Or anyway walk. Or did.
My solution to their energy problem is eusociality: big Mama stays put and is fed by the small fry who range far and wide. They also tend her eggs. She eats their first-level output, then they eat her better-digested leavings. The digestion scheme is like rabbits, and addresses the problem that absorbing nutrients through a 2D intestinal wall scales badly to a 3D animal. If she doesn't need to heave her bulk around the forest, her energy needs are lessened. Meanwhile, the small fry don't need to digest everything all the way.
The small fry are no bigger than elephants.
And lets say you bring the dinosaurs back, what was the air and temperature like for them? back >65mya earth had 30% oxygen(its 21% today) that much oxygen would be hard to deal with for humans today(cuts would heal in a day though!), also forest fires would be uncontrollably bad. And what about the temperature? It would be 10 degrees warmer than it is today. So you would have to alter the climate and atmosphere significantly for your newly cloned dinosaurs to survive, or perhaps they could adapt to our current conditions, who can say?
I suspect though that not only would breakdown of DNA still happen on it's own, but atomic decay within the rock would be enough to destroy the DNA.
On the flip side, just with breeding, we've seen what variance can do to bee populations (africanized bees), and how a lack of diverse pollinators are less effective than honey bees alone.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
Ask an aussie how much damage something as innocuous as a rabbit or a frog can do when in an ecosystem they weren't meant for.
> unless the host country collapses and no one cares.
Matter of time. Human life timescale too, not evolutionary timescales
> it will just go extinct again, after causing some damage.
Sounds real fun, I totally want that to happen /s
I don’t hear much about cloning recently. What happened?
Why be sad for your dog’s death when you can just clone him.
--Commisionner Pravin Lal
(Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, when finishing The Cloning Vats secret project)
Maybe as biology hacking becomes the new frontier in the coming decades we'll be able to work back from a bird to something impressively dinosaur-like, but I'm not optimistic about growing one from DNA fragments or whatever. Even with a complete genome I think it'd be damn difficult.
The earliest dinosaurs experienced 22-hour days.
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/11/28/3642932.h...
Synthetic biology has bigger fish to fry. For example we are very likely to find that humans are really bad at living in space or on other planets. Fixing that problem has more practical implications.
That's also when we can debug consciousness, given that our simulation is accurate enough. I have no idea how many years we'll have to wait. Maybe 50 years?
We can't know what will be in the realm of possibilities in 100 years, let alone 1000 years or tens of thousands of years.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if we'd be able to recreate dinosaurs in a couple hundred years. And whether it's a good thing isn't really the issue. If Man can do something, he will.
The only thing I'm pretty sure about is that it won't be in our lifetimes. Unless we conquer aging and death that is.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard ANYTHING about this. Did they bury this or something or has anything been released about this since then?
DNA's short half life (relative to geological time scales) means we likely won't be recovering enough information from fossils. DNA is a reactive species (it has to be to undergo the incredible mechanics it does). I'm not going to calculate the number of samples we'd need - it's a lot.
Any future "clones" will leverage the wealth of information we gain from our current biodiversity. Really advanced computer-generated approximations of what the biochemistry, developmental biology, etc. could have been.
"FIV cross-species transmission: An evolutionary prospective" is an interesting paper as an example. It seems FIV infects all cats in the cat family. That paper has a long discussion of the old and new world cat problem as relates to FIV. I'm well aware that saber tooth tigers are not dinos but if we brought saber tooth tigers back they would probably be screwed over by FIV either instantly or at least very soon.
An interesting google search phrase is "diseases of farmed crocodiles and ostriches" and apparently there's a reason our supermarkets are full of the livestock we eat; raising meat crocs looks like a HUGE disease headache. Imagine a giant 400 foot long dinosaur suffering from Caiman Pox.
Raising disease free reptiles that we already have experience with seems to be a big headache; I predict it would be pretty tough to raise dinos.
Certainly it's somewhat unlikely (but not impossible!) for them to be susceptible to a virus.
Bacteria/fungal/etc though? They are perfectly susceptible to all those "germs". Strep doesn't really care if it's infecting a human or an animal. It just needs a hospitable environment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953823
clever-hans 4 hours ago | undown [flagged] | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
I agree that ChatGPT/generated responses should be banned on HN. It undermines the integrity of the platform and goes against the spirit of genuine discussion and collaboration. Let's not turn HN into a spammy bot-infested wasteland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship
>"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" is the second episode of the seventh series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. It first aired on BBC One in the UK on 8 September 2012 and on BBC America on the same date in the United States. It was written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Saul Metzstein.
>The episode features alien time traveller the Doctor (Matt Smith) and his companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) accompanied by Rory's father, Brian (Mark Williams), Queen Nefertiti (Riann Steele), and John Riddell, a British big-game hunter (Rupert Graves). The group lands on a large spaceship that contains dinosaurs and discover that it is a Silurian ark, though the Silurians have been murdered by Solomon (David Bradley), a black market trader who is intent on finding something of value.