The people who want to revive the woolly mammoth want to release them into the Siberian Steppe to restore grassland to fix carbon into the earth.
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh...
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh...
They would be trying to resurrect the mammoth either way, so it's not like there's any real incentive to actually research whether it will work.
Yes, it is critical to not let your focus split, and always stay true to the most important goal.
If you're a robot.
"Doing cool stuff" is one of the major, most basic drives behind progress of science and technology. Definitely more honest than "doing it for the money" or "doing it for social status", where you can always find ways to cheat if the going gets annoying. "Doing cool stuff" is up there with "doing it to save ourselves from an imminent, lethal threat" - the other highly reliable motivator that has little tolerance for bullshit, and was responsible for most of the rapid progress thorough history. Of the two, I'd prefer the one that doesn't involve violence and fear of death. It's probably more sustainable, too.
See also: something something Feynman on having fun in research.
Consider also: Most progress happens in small increments; the set of people motivated by wanting to solve climate is small, so it doesn't really hurt to also add the people motivated by doing cool shit in parallel. The chance of getting critical increment doubles; the chance of any one in any of the two groups having the full solution is ~zero.
> Life is very efficient.
I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.
When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
I worry that they can use the climate change argument to deflect from the ethical arguments around whether it's even a good idea to resurrect a highly intelligent social animal like this. Imagine bioengineering a resurrected "Neanderthal" into a world without Neanderthals. There's something bleak about it. If the breeding/release idea doesn't work out you've just intentionally created some endlings[0] with no real future.
I think that in the near future we'll wealthy weirdos start to clone their ancestors, and things like native groups in colonized places like Canada or New Zealand start to clone their ancestors to buff up their population and strengthen their legal claims to territory. Think about what we'll be able to do with artificial wombs.[1]
As for your neanderthal endlings it probably will be pretty bleak for a lot of these hominids, but who knows, maybe some of them will end up being smarter than your average human and they'll have a role in society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-...
as it stands right now, cloning of any organism requires at the very least living fibroblast cells. Of course, you cannot get these from deceased mammals. Colossal's strategy is to essentially blast the host genome with fragments of the subjects DNA (which you can get from deceased/fossilized tissue) and hope that the end result is an elephant cell that's been reprogrammed into a mammoth-like cell from which to do cloning.
imo if they really wanted a mammoth, they could just make a hairy elephant. that would be 10x easier. but the whole idea is being able to resurrect...mammals.
But people in general don't want to live completely utilitarian life, and your "vanity" is someone else's "exploration of the possible" or "lifting up human mind". Both of you might even be right at the same time.
Doing stuff because it would be cool is great, it's just kind of dumb to pretend you're doing it for a practical purpose. Just say you want to do the big thing because it would be fun, or inspiring, or you have a trillion dollars and can afford it.
It’s no different than reintroducing beavers into areas to reduce wildfires. Nothing we’ve invented so far is a better option.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/19/fighting-wildland-fire-wi...
That doesn't mean the justification that they found is necessarily invalid, but the reason why solutions in search of a problem are problematic is that the chosen solution is rarely the optimal one because it wasn't designed for the problem—the problem was designed for the solution.
You present no evidence it won't work, but you oppose it because you think the method might be... sub-optimal? Maybe?
Ironically it sounds like you started with opposition to this project (I blame Jurassic Park) and then worked backwards in search of a justification for your opinion.
One can easily argue that Mammoths ought to be able to survive - they survived periods with climates similar to our current one and there are a lot fewer paleolithic hunters running about now. But we won't really know unless we try.
Modern poachers with modern technology beat paleolithic hunters, hands down.
Technology works, as it turns out... :D
Anyways, in this scenario we have the means of producing mammoths at will, so why would there be a market for mammoth poaching? If people do kill a mammoth, just add another mammoth. Technology works.
>why would there be a market for mammoth poaching?
> maybe
I don't even have a dog in this fight one way or another, I just call out terrible and weak logical arguments when I see them. This thread is rife with bad arguments.
It seems people here thought "Jurassic Park bad," then twisted themselves into knots to come up with something to complain about. Bad form guys.
If you want to fool people (in a durable way that's immune to logic), write a book or movie they watch as a kid.
Maybe they are coincidentally right and it will work, but they definitely seem less interested in rigorously investigating whether it will work than investigating the cool parts of engineering a mammoth.
"Really about" climate change is a different issue from whether or not it works. You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy (for which you clearly have no evidence, only insinuation).
Instead of bringing back mammoths, maybe help genetically engineer existing species to help them adapt faster, like people are doing with coral. I don't know, but "resurrecting the mammoths" is probably far down the list of useful climate change projects these people could be putting effort into.
That's the thread, folks! Thanks for finally admitting your lack of a real evidence-based argument.
Specialization of labor within a project is hardly a new concept.
If it does work, that would be awesome. A wooly mammoth certainly sounds cool and it's not my money, so whatever.
> You're again trying to change the subject to the distraction issue of original intent, not actual efficacy.
Come back with a real argument please. Until then we have nothing to talk about.
The wheel and combustion engine weren't invented as a bespoke solutions for automobiles and trains. The internet wasn't invented as a platform for e-commerce.
History is full of examples of technology leading the application, with curious or enterprising individuals adapting the technology to a productive use.
EV batteries is still unresolved at scale and cars are still made of tons of extracted metals and oilchemestry. They are fun and new tech sell well and oil price go up. That’s the reasons EV were invented. Branding them as green works great because it’s look plausible and we all want to have greener cars (and/or continue using them, which is correlated).
What would you consider positive a climate change outcome? I think there are tons of positive outcomes, but agree there is a lot of greenwashing as well.
Moving from coal to natural gas has a enormous positive outcome. PV is as well. US CO2 per capita and total emissions are down 25% in the last 20 years, which is a massive positive outcome. Global CO2 per capita has gone negative, which is another massive win.
It is too soon to tell, but we may even be at or have passed global peak emissions, which will be another massive milestone.
We didn’t, and coal consumption even double since 80’s. What we did is add oil to it and then gaz [0]. Some could argue that without oil and gaz, coal might be even higher today. In that sense gas is more a “less bad” than a good one : it did not diminish the coal consumption neither out energy need.
[1] Co-founder of colossal, the company that is attempting the mammoth de-extinction.
So then this becomes an exercise in cruelty, bringing a creature to life only for it to suffer a painful, short existence. Reminds me of Frankenstein, honestly.