Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality | Hacker News Reader

Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality

livescience.com

96 pointsBrajeshwar125 comments

They are not operating from the full DNA, but "enough DNA to piece together functional genomes."

However, even if we had pristine copies of mammoth DNA we could not re-create a mammoth.

Complex organisms like mammoths (or humans) are not fully defined by DNA. They are an ecosystem of bacteria and smaller organisms. We don't know the number for mammoths, but about 40% of the cells in the human body are not human. They don't have our DNA. Without them, however, we could not even process food. We get those organisms, not from DNA, but from other humans and the environment around us.

These scientists may be able to create something, and hopefully something that will not suffer horribly, but de-extinction is not nearing realty.

You're ignoring the elephant in the room: frozen mammoth dung.

To restore the gut health of humans, there is this thing called "fecal transplant" [1]: use another person's poo to bootstrap the growth of your own gut microbiome.

There is an abundance of mammoth dung in the northern permafrost. When thawed, its microbiome becomes active again, producing methane. [2]

So resurrecting the woolly mammoth as a species is the hardest part. Equipping the first individuals with a proper gut biome will be really easy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/melting-permaf...

Axenic (bacteria-free) mice (and other species) are bred and raised in labs everywhere and are not very different from wild mice, so while it could make a difference for a de-extinct mammoth, it may not.

OK. You sent me down a new rabbit hole. It was fun. Thank you for that!

It is really interesting that a mammal can survive without its fauna. The fact that it's possible at all is important.

Axenic mice, however, need to be bred and maintained in isolators and they need to be fed a carefully prepared diet to keep them alive.

In practice, particularly in the context of de-extinction, the overall point still stands. Having the DNA does not mean we can create a viable organism. Is an elephant's fauna "close enough" so the calf can pick it up from the mother and use it?

Maybe?

But we are looking at micro-organisms separated by 10,000 years and from two very different climates, so I'm not sure if the odds are favorable.

== Edit :spelling

Defining what is and isn't part of a species based on their gut microbiota seems nonsensical.

That would imply newborns start out as not human and then turn into humans when as they develop a gut biome and people that have distinct biomes are a separate species.

> Defining what is and isn't part of a species based on their gut microbiota seems nonsensical.

OP never said this. They said complex organisms are not fully defined solely by their DNA. That is a finer point than the one you're engaging with.

40% of the cells but much less of the mass: bacterial cells are much smaller.

The point is not how much they weigh, but that we can't survive without them.

It's not just the digestive tract. Our eyes, out lungs, even our skin rely on a huge diversity of specialized and symbiotic organisms to function correctly. This ecosystem evolved in parallel with our DNA, and it's been lost for the mammoth.

Yes, it seems we have the technology to create something with this DNA, but it won't be a mammoth as the organism existed in the past. It may not be viable, and it may suffer horribly.

Part of the point though was for some reason the number of them. If we didn't need the large amount in the digestive system but still needed it for lungs and eyes, looking at the number and saying it's only 1% wouldn't have any real implication for whether the offspring would be viable if it would have messed up lungs and not be.

Aside from that though, it may be important, but there are also lots of cross-species animals (ligers, mules, etc.) that don't get the full bacterial dose from the father of which half of their genetics come from and that doesn't seem to be a main cause of any of their problems that I've heard of.

Would borrow all this flora from their mothers without "suffering horribly".

Does that mean you are no longer human if you take antibiotics and kill the ecosystem of bacteria? I think there could be some legal loopholes there.

I think it's a world of difference bringing back a species for which we have actual DNA, instead of creating a "wooly-mammoth-like" creature via guesswork. I'm not opposed to the effort, if privately funded, just weird to consider the pointlessness of it in my eyes.

Not necessarily pointless - it could help mitigate climate change, by re-creating 'mammoth steppe' across much of Siberia. From Smithsonian (2018): "Can Bringing Back Mammoths Help Stop Climate Change?" [1] (Full disclosure: I am a supporter of the Long Now Foundation which has advocated for mammoth reintroduction to reduce climate change. [2]

1.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-bringing-b... 2.https://longnow.org/ideas/reviving-woolly-mammoth-solve-clim...

Preposterous. I used to claim playing computer games was "educational" back in the day, but it sure didn't convince my immediate ancestors who had clear views on the value doing homework instead.

There are a myriad of semi-effective ways to mitigate climate change, both at the individual level and corporate/political level.

Breeding up a load of Wooly Mammoths ain't one of them.

They seem to have quite a lot of actual wooly mammoth DNA. In the linked document:

> The final dataset consists of 23 woolly mammoth genomes (22 Late Quaternary and one Middle Pleistocene), with 13 at medium coverage (2.3–4.13) and 10 at high coverage (10.4–28.63)

The efforts to make dinosaur like things more fits your description.

> The efforts to make dinosaur like things more fits your description.

They sell grow your own kits at a country store near you

Personally I’m curious how they taste. A Mammoth burger could be succulent for all we know.

Doubt we’re much closer to that. When was the last time you had an Elephant burger? Definitely the closest alternative that isn’t really accessible today for a bunch of good reasons.

"Mammoth burgers" are basically here (and have been for over a century). Siberian explorers have eaten frozen mammoth. The Atlantic, "What Happens to Meat When You Freeze It for 35,000 Years". And a startup demo'd a mammoth meatball last year.[2]

1. [archive link] https://archive.is/QkS7J 2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-massive-meatb...

What are the good reasons? I assume we're talking about a situation where we could create the elephants "on demand", like with these mammoths.

Well for one, a rate limiting factor is gestation period which is proportionally long for elephants.

You’d probably be better off farming Homo sapiens or maybe reviving some other species of homo. Put them in gestational pods to harvest their metabolic heat energy. Maybe run mental simulations of various things via neural link.

https://www.bbcearth.com/news/elephant-gestation-period-long...

"Better off" doesn't mean much. We would be better off doing neither of these, but being better off is not the goal - the goal is to eat an elephant or a mammoth.

Seems like the gestation period would make it more of a luxury.

Like the mammoth, other species of homo disappeared when sapiens arrived. Like the cousin comment’s conjecture that mammoth might be very good eating, maybe these other species were likewise delectable.

Sure, if that is so, then it might be an option too. Though I have never heard about that, while children are singing campfire songs about mammoths... Marketing matters - "Eat a prehistoric human" doesn't sound as cool as "taste the food of the prehistoric human"

You need to have seen the film "The Matrix" to get the joke.

Oh I got that part of a joke, but that doesn't mean I don't want to continue discussing :)

I'm wondering as well, there should be sufficient supply of those dying old age or accidents to have at least some going around. The long gestation cycle and comparatively long time to maturity reasonably make them inefficient, but still some supply would be expected.

Do we need a good reason? It sounds really cool, and I dont see why not.

Untold misery on a new species we brought back from extinction.

Species don't experience misery, individuals do. We farm billions of animals every year, how could a few individuals of a de-extinct species living a mostly free and protected life pose a moral issue?

Given what we know about elephant intelligence and community, I'd be morally horrified by any level of systematic and ongoing "farming" of elephants for food. You may rightly accuse my of getting ahead of myself for extending the same feelings towards the mammoth for which we know less, but nevertheless I feel the same about them at the moment.

Of course, but this not what we are talking about. The gp objects to de-extinctioning the mammoth per se, not to farming it for food. As if the recreated mammoths would feel some unbearable sadness at the thought of being out of their time, or as if they missed their dead relatives from 10000 years ago.

I totally get this. Each person has to decide, where do I draw the line? My girlfriend won’t eat octopus, for instance, but is fine with beef or pork.

Choosing to eat piglets and veals instead adult octopuses at the end of their life cycle seems unfair and immoral.

>> Definitely the closest alternative that isn’t really accessible today for a bunch of good reasons.

"Today, all species of elephant are hunted specifically for their meat. This occurs notably in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. During ivory hunts by poachers, meat may be taken as a by-product for eventual sale, or to feed the hunting party. As of 2007, wildlife experts expressed concerns that the major threat to elephants may become the demand for meat rather than the ivory trade. Organisations such as the WWF and TRAFFIC are campaigning to reduce consumption levels as this, along with the ivory trade, leads to as many as 55 individuals being killed a day."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_meat

Possibly but humans basically hunted Mammoths into extinction and they consumed them to the last bite. They must have been delicious compared to elephants. Just like different breeds of cow or pigs, etc, have vastly different marbling, flavor, and texture. Humans ate them out of existence they must be good eating!

I can’t think of many historical scenarios where a human was faced with the decision between hunting an elephant and hunting a mammoth.

> Possibly but humans basically hunted Mammoths into extinction

No, they didn’t. It’s a myth.

https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/humans-did-not-cause-woolly-mammot...

How does an elephant burger taste? I'd imagine mammoth would be even more difficult to come by.

On the heat period, probably horrible

My grandfather knew. It was not unheard of when he and his father mined gold in the early 20th century. At least that’s the family lore. He died around the time I was born, so I never got to question and went with firsthand knowledge.

Why does "privately funded" make a difference?

Presumably because they would be opposed to tax money being used to fund a project that they consider pointless.

Pointless, and for a certain category of people (on all sides of the political spectrum), a "moral" issue. The right doesn't want people to play God (the same religious types who think IVF is a sin, or embryonic stem cells are murder). The left side of things, invoking nature as a god, using a similar argument (or fears of unknown results).

I don't know if it's pointless, and there's plenty of room for "pointless" research (because we learn so much in the process). But I do wonder if it's prudent. I think it's cool either way.

That seems short sighted. I live in Denver, CO. I consider it pointless to fund roads on the east coast. I'm never going to drive on them.

That's silly. Goods arriving at East coast ports travel via systems I have no clue about.

The sense of pointlessness in this case isn't "I'll never take advantage of those roads", it's "this feels more like someone wanting to cosplay Jurassic Park than it does a serious effort to do something useful for biodiversity".

Cloned wooly mammoths aren't a public good like roads

Was landing on the Moon a public good?

Science often brings unexpected fruit. Cloning woolly mammoths may as well.

And so does blowing wind. You never know. Where do you put the limit? Pouring a trillion dollars into war sure has more benefits, like local hiring, finding out about microwaves, cheaper petrol, etc. But is pouring a trillion dollars into that, a good thing?

The moon landing was a propaganda stunt against the USSR. We have no need to revive literal mammoths.

> Why does "privately funded" make a difference?

Because is not subject to political time of four years intervals. Politicians lie often about where the funds will arrive, or change their minds after a while. I you can afford it, is much safer this way.

Is it a mammoth or an elephant that looks like a mammoth:

"To produce the calves, Colossal scientists will first identify the genes encoding the woolly mammoth's most emblematic physical traits, such as shaggy hair, curved tusks, fat deposits and a dome-shaped cranium. They will then insert these genes into the genome of closely related, and therefore genetically similar, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus)."

They're not actually taking a full mammoth set of DNA and inserting that into an elephant egg to grow into a mammoth, which they'd done with earlier animals referenced in the article.

Also - how do they know the mother can actually handle it? Seems pretty cruel to make the mother carry an edited child that she might not be capable of handling.

if it’s actually an elephant that looks like a mammoth, shouldn’t it develop in the womb much like an elephant would?

I imagine they would perform a c-section to extract the baby in order to save both mother and calf if it was growing too large.

Curious - the entire objection to this endeavor as mentioned in the OP was, "What's gone is gone" according to some 'expert'.

Now, new species are often disruptive in lots of ways. No reason to think an old one, reintroduced, would be less disruptive. But no mention of real issues like that.

I think the writer was just fishing for something provocative to say.

It’s more than that. They also say:

“Both Asian and African elephants, which Colossal plans to use as surrogates to grow mammoth calves, are endangered, and every elephant gestating a "mammoth" calf can't grow babies of its own. "That's going to reduce population size," Lynch said.“

We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species.

Well, it's not as if the surrogacy would continue indefinitely, putting a continuous strain on elephant reproduction. They would need surrogates only long enough to establish a breeding mammoth population, and there's even the possibility that, should elephants get even nearer extinction, future mammoths could return the favor, so to speak, by performing as surrogates themselves.

If, as I've been told, grasslands are a better carbon sink than taiga, and mammoths are capable of converting the latter into the former, I'm hopeful for efforts like this.

The range of the Mammoth currently includes massive chunks of Alaska, Canada, and Russia where few people live. They might thrive in that environment much more so than the Asian and African elephants we have alive today. Maybe would even give them more breeding partners in the long term.

I found this an weird argument. Does anyone really think we'd round up herds of wild elephants to use the females as surrogate mammoth mothers? Obviously one would use domesticated (Asian) elephants, and if there ever was a plan to raise a large number of mammoth, the elephants to support this plan would have to be bred fist, idependently of wild populations.

The elephant population is about 500,000. Using one or two as surrogates isn't going to change things much in itself. It's humans multiplying and taking their land which is more the issue.

They just need one or two surrogates? The scope described in the article made it seem MUCH larger.

That's interesting! If we value an existing species over one forth millenia gone, then that would be a negative. Quite a lot of discussion possible there.

For instance, existing elephants are already obnoxious destructive animals to have roaming a landscape inhabited by people. It's only fair to include that in the analysis. All part of the equation.

Somebody wanted to reintroduce wolves to Iowa but that got squashed by popular objection. Everyone would have been at risk.

Aren't the wolves in Iowa a bad example since that in fact should reduce risk to the general population? I mean, there are studies that predators reduce traffic collisions with deer due to making those more wary, which far outweighs any real danger imposed by wolves themselves. Hence, as always, looking at the whole picture is necessary to get a full view of what is at stake. And popular objection is not a good argument for that at all times.

How many deer collisions or caused accidents are fatal for people? I see an estimate of 150 a year for the whole US. Broken radiator vs eaten by a wolf I can see the objections.

There are probably bigger risks from large deer populations, like Lyme disease, but also other ways of reducing deer populations. And are there other ways of spooking them if that's all it takes to make them more wary of automobiles?

Wolves don't eat 150 people each year, so is a false dichotomy.

To put things on context: Around 2.1 million deer-vehicle collisions occur annually on USA

Each year, they account for 59,000 human injuries, 440 human deaths and more than $10 billion in economic loses.

If we introduced enough wolves throughout the nation to save all 150 people would that still hold?

If we look at the number of people killed by wolves on Yellowstone since 1970, yes, most probably. The number of people killed by deer since 1970 is bigger by a mile. Data shows that wolves are much more safe than deer for humans.

Other way to see it is that we would be raising the number of protected elephants on captivity by +1.

>We risk putting existing endangered species at more risk to try to bring back these past species.

Well, if the currently endangered species go extinct, we'll have the technology to bring them back too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Further into the article, there's a section dedicated to the main objections ("Unintended consequences").

> For one, de-extinct animals may be sickly, given that the pool of available DNA for each species is relatively small.

> It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong.

> Reintroductions can lead to clashes between humans and wildlife.

> The makeup of the reintroduced population matters too

> There's also no guarantee that animals will stay where we release them

I have the impression that while each single point may be unlikely, there are (too) many unknowns in the project.

In addition to the biological objections, there are the ideological ones, primarily:

> Instead of using that money to bring back three extinct species whose ecological impact is unknown, the funds could be put toward saving roughly 100 species that are currently facing an uncertain future

I agree that this is ultimately purely driven by profit:

> "If they're successful — and I have no doubt that they will be — they're going to make a ton of money," he said.

My 'gut' objection to the endeavour is that they're creating a new "genetically modified" creature without any consideration for the ecosystem which surrounded the originals. Not just the plants and animals that made up the Arctic ecosystem 10k years ago, and now, but - more importantly - the ecosystem (parasites, gut biota, etc) that used to live on/in those mammoths. The gut flora in particular will be critical if they want these Indian-elephant born mammoths to thrive in the Arctic - will the creatures even be able to digest what they eat?

If we have to revive something elephant-related, then I'd much prefer them to concentrate on (one of) the Madagascan elephant bird species. The eggs alone would offer a potentially robust revenue stream for whichever God bought the beast back from the dead.

Yes, an underlying motivation of the project is simply to fund more biotech research. Which, if it comes to fruition as imagined in sci-fi novels, could radically upend ecosystems and societies alike, in far more dramatic ways than discussed here.

That cow is already out of the barn. There's precious little ecosystem left on this tired old iron ball that hasn't been radically upended.

Funny how any effort to arrest the runaway catastrophe that's been caused is met with resistance that calls it 'further damage'. Like we aren't already facing tremendous risks by leaving it unchecked.

In addition to that, societies and ecosystems could also upend differently if we do not develop this technology. As every technology, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad. But simple banning (or 'moratoria') do rarely stop a novel field from developing, and just end up pushing it in the less open grey zone of top secret research projects.

The good ol' False Dichotomomy, rearing it's irrelevant head.

Save existing species, go right ahead. That the effort being made to do {absolutely anything else} takes money too, is no kind of argument whatsoever. The aren't exclusive activities.

In specific instance they aren't totally independent. The plan is to use endangered elephant surrogate mothers, removing them from the breeding pool of their own already threatened population.

This doesn't seem any different from the reintroduction of horses to the Americas. Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now. This isn't like bringing a brachiosaurus back where there's no realistic way for them to live in the current biosphere.

The risk to elephants in using them for this is a real concern though.

> Humans get along with similarly massive pachyderms now.

Some humans do on a single continent which has a human population density half that of Eurasia, and even that not particularly smoothly:

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_spec...

It seems the de-extinction efforts help reinforce the rewilding and land conservation efforts. If an area has been populated by these reintroduced species it may be more resistant (politically if not physically) to human development.

Well the thing about a large mammal like an elephant is population control is easy and the effects generally more understood

Unlike a zebra muscle which one it’s in your local lake goooooood luck ever removing them and now your lake may die a toxic blue green algae death

You would think that, but we can't even agree to eradicate the hippopotamus from the Americas. Why? Animals rights groups think it is apparently an issue to just exterminate them. These are literal invasive species brought in by a drug lord.

If it turned out that mammoths were actually a problem, we'd never agree to actually control the population.

There's no reason we should be able to agree. Some people like them and want them protected, other people hate them and want them gone. If it were really clear that they were harmful, shooting them all would be super easy, I could probably do it myself. Why would the fact that the guy who introduced them is a drug lord matter? Hippos can't inherit original sin.

Your comment made me laugh, but to actually answer:

It matters from a Chesterton's Fence perspective: We know that the hippos were not brought for any good reason, inevitability, etc.

Probably one of the few actual wins of human activity.

Why?

The camels in Australia would like to (very impolitely) disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_feral_camel

The camels don't have valuable tusks though...

I feel like the main objections would be in terms of animal welfare. You're almost certainly gonna harm a lot of animals in the process. Not just animals born deformed but also dangerous pregnancies.

We do that all the time of course. But I'd kinda like to take at least a moment to consider how we minimize suffering before we plunge ahead.

And even if you clone a perfect mammoth on your first try, then what?

We know elephants are very intelligent, emotional, and social animals. I see no reason to assume mammoths are significantly different. And of course what they're working aren't even mammoths, more like "hairy elephants".

Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness. It would be nothing short of cruel.

So you managed to clone a herd of hairy elephants, then what do you do with those? The mammoth steppes they once roamed no longer exist. There is no ecosystem to save or improve because that ecosystem is gone. That's what they meant with "what's gone is gone".

Can you just re-introduce them to the wild? These are huge animals that need a lot of space. Other animals and people live there. You can't just have a bit of land; you need a huge amount of it.

Cloning mammoths is just dumb. None of the logistics really work out and a bunch of mammoths spending miserable lonely lives in zoos is basically the best-case outcome we can hope for and after a few decades of this everyone will all realize it was pointless and mammoths will be extinct once more. All these notions are rekindling a lost ecosystem are nothing more than flights of fancy.

For some other animals there is perhaps a slightly better case to be made; I don't know. But for mammoths the case is pretty bad.

The goal of the project is absolutely to release them into the wild. And their historical range is still largely empty of humans. There is enough space for everyone if we are willing to do it.

> Cloning a single hairy elephant and keeping it in captivity would consign it to a miserable life of loneliness

Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants. Small elephants bond also with humans.

> Easily solvable if you put it with other elephants.

Would it be that easy?

Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves.

How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language?

They might very well be totally unable to cooperate or survive at all, without a preexisting society to guide them.

Even if they don't have societies as developed at humans do, I can imagine the same would happen to different degrees with elephants, mammoths, dolphins, crows even.

> Imagine a handful of wild humans, having never had any contact with other humans, no education or anything, just put somewhere and left to themselves.

> How many centuries would they need to even develop an actual language?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sig... https://www.nature.com/articles/34646

I'd say less than 0.1 centuries.

Neo-mammooths obviously will learn the language of their modern elephant mothers without any effort.

A species that was eliminated by hunter gatherers or sailors with clubs is going to have a hard time getting out control.

There's a real (small c) conservative bias where we should keep things as they are rather than changing them for all sorts of reasons. People who want to actually change the world are a bit of a rarity.

I am unconvinced that we know enough about life’s engineering to do something like this safely. I am doubly unconvinced that private industry will take the risks seriously. This sort of project is steeped in classic misguided pie in the sky human thinking - let’s live on the moon or terraform mars instead of fixing our mess on this planet! Let’s resurrect an extinct species instead of saving the ones we’re about to make extinct!

And then the idea that if the population gets out of control, well, we could just cull them. What, because we didn’t do a good enough job the first time?

What’s “safety” here? I don’t intend the question to be trolling. What’s the risk of bringing back a wooly mammoth?

Sure it could die of a weird disease bc we didn’t have the full genetic code. And yeah I’m equally unconvinced from the article that we actually can do this, but it’s unclear to me what the risks are if we can and do?

Scenario: Bring back one to one hundred wooly mammoths and… X worst case scenario happens. What’s X in your view for the wooly mammoth? I can’t think of any that seem actually bad but maybe my creativity is lacking?

As a few others have pointed out, animal welfare is one. As you point out, disease is annother. And another is the instabilities that can arise by introducing a new species to an ecosystem. Do we really have an understanding of where the mammoth fit into the food chain? How it fit into its environment? I’d expect the answer is a resounding “no” because we don’t even fully understand this dynamic for plants and animals that live today.

> What’s the risk of bringing back a wooly mammoth?

I imagine a big one is the needless and possibly intense pain and suffering for the surrogate mother elephant, and her experimentally-GMO'd calf. Elephants are highly social and by all accounts quite empathetic animals.

Also the opportunity cost - elephant populations are highly endangered and every pregnancy cycle used up for this research is one less actual living elephant.

> let’s live on the moon or terraform mars instead of fixing our mess on this planet!

Why not both? We are 8 billion on this planet, we can fix our mess and do all these crazy things.

And I don't think "de-extinguishing" species is particularly unsafe. Generally, the risk with messing with biology is that things can get out of control, but here, we are talking about extinct species, they went extinct because they were not adapted to the environment we thrive in. By far the most likely result if we screw up is that the specie become extinct again.

That's the thing: we're _only_ 8 billion and amongst that we only have so many researchers and people who have the knowledge to do anything like that. We have limited capital to pursue any major initiative, so wasting it on unfeasible and non-beneficial initiatives like starting a Mars colony just wastes time we could do doing something more useful i.e. reforming deserts, stabilizing ecosystems, developing cheaper materials for various industries, etc.

I'm not sure how dangerous "de-extinguishing" a species would be, but we've had numerous faux paus with destabilizing ecosystems by introducing non-native species (i.e. lionfish, as an invasive species). These cause extensive environmental damage and can be irreversible if not contained in time. The worst thing that could happen is losing control over the population of de-extinct species and damaging an ecosystem(s).

That all being said, I'd be stumped if we somehow lost sight of a woolly mammoth... and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to see one myself, so...

At least they're re-creating something big. Jurassic Park notwithstanding, large animals are far less of a threat to humans than something small that could become an invasive species. Humans have tens of millions of RPG rounds in stock.

> Humans have tens of millions of RPG rounds in stock.

What is this, Horizon Zero Dawn? Will we have to steal parts from the mammoth's cauldron facilities for our survival, while the mammoths continue to get stronger and stronger in an unstoppable paperclip optimizing loop?

By paperclip optimizing loop did you by any chance mean https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html?

The game I mentioned has several paperclip optimizing scenarios unfolding at the same time, including one where terraforming robots (some of which are designed like mammoths & serve a similar environmental purpose) keep getting stronger and stronger to protect themselves from robot hunters while the AI's central command system has gone missing. It takes place in a completely "reset" world, so from the perspective of humans the robots have always been part of the natural environment. Not the most realistic AI story, but very fun.

The same idea that is referencing.

And yet Australia "lost" the Emu war.

First of all, no one even lives in the places Mammoths would live. Second of all, they can't be any more destructive than the Argentine fire ants that I deal with every year. You can't get rid of them; you only need to slow them down with bait. They're literally everywhere and spreading.

Bringing back a large species that went extinct by our hands into a climate it isn't built for is a new kind of cruelty we can add to our list.

Cruelcruelcrueltycruel. Please stop flashing the cruelty card here. Is ridiculous

Being alive is better than not being alive, right?. Even if you experience pain or feel bored. Every animal experiences pain somewhere. Is fine. Is a part of having evolved pain receptors. Those receptors are here for our well-being and safety.

There is nothing special about pain. Is part of our biology.

We have methods to alleviate the pain at birth, why just assume that veterinarians will not use the tools that they have? because vets-bad-duh?

All this pseudo-religious movements that say that all pain must be eliminated at any cost seem totally unhinged. They made promises that can't be fulfilled and they know it.

> It's also worth considering who would be liable if large-scale mammoth reintroductions went wrong. "The ecosystem has been adapting to the absence of mammoths since mammoths started going extinct," Lynch said. "What if there's an unintended consequence and something bad happens?"

> Other experts echoed these concerns. "To get some impact, you need to have a lot of animals," Sophie Monsarrat, an ecologist and the rewilding manager at Rewilding Europe, told Live Science.

The target species are all ones that humans (and exceedingly primitive humans, in the case of the mammoth) hunted to extinction, and inadvertently, at that. If there are unintended consequences, why couldn't we just hunt them to extinction again? The species listed in the article are all large, and all mammalian and non-flying avian (Dodo). It's not like they can hide or get away from us easily.

> The question isn't so much whether we can resurrect lost species but if we should.

I see what you did there, and I approve.

Delusional technohopium to cope with the fact that we are only increasing the rate at which we are annihilating biodiversity globally. Just today the government of Namibia announced they are going to cull wild animals amid drought (https://www.dw.com/en/namibia-to-cull-wild-animals-amid-drou...). This is e/acc delusion akin to entropy pipe dream that is atmospheric carbon dioxide removal.

Zeno's mammoth is what I'll call it until I see one breathing in front of me.

Cool, but why would we want to do this? Is there any practical value?

There are species that are important to our current ecosystem that are going extinct, why are we bringing back mammoths instead of fixing that?

The economical value just as domestic animal for frozen areas is invaluable. But, the males would be most probably very complicated to manage. Also would help to fix those ecosystems in some way.

We are trying to fix that - there are eight billion people on this planet and we as a species are capable of doing more than one thing at a time.

The article says that trying to bring back mammoths is endangering other elephant species, so in this case it is mutually exclusive

This claim does not stand a minimum logical analysis.

More animals in captivity means that you are increasing the habitat of this species. You can fit more animals from this species in the planet than before.

Rich Russians have a hammer, and this is a nail.

I know the entertainment industry is obsessed with reviving old franchises, but this is going a step too far!

Nice just in time for the end of ice by anthropomorphic warming.

I hope this is for real and they make progress to their goal.

It's a bit crazy to think that we're bringing back a wooly mammoth just in time for record temperatures. Science is amazing... would be amazing if political forces would do something about climate change.

How many times have I heard this in the last 40-something years? Just get on with it.

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