Comment on Bring them back!!!
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 day agoIt’s Frankenstein… scientists creating life from the parts of dead animals without any regard to the consequences.
Zoos can be poorly built and which can create horrible conditions for animals, but at least with with living animals we know what they eat and how they live in the wild and attempt to construct a micro-habitat for them to have decent lives in. With dead animals brought back to life, we wouldn’t know how to do this.
What does a Triceratops eat? Why is that Triceratops sick? Will a T-Rex be happy living in a paddock being fed goats, or will it be trying to escape? Certain animals are very skilled at escaping enclosures and you have no idea which animals fall into that category. Which animals are going to be afraid of humans? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them, maybe some of them? If the goal is to make a zoo where people can actually see the animals that might be relevant to how the zoo is designed. Which animals will throw things at people, or spit at people?
I think you’re showing the hubris of science that both Frankenstein and Jurrassic Park are warning against. There’s a whole science involved with designing a zoo and they often get things wrong like the maximum height a pissed off tiger can jump. With genetically engineered animals that resemble dinosaurs, there would be more unknown variables than known variables. You’re assuming you know those variable are irrelevant because apparently “good engineers” don’t need to care about factors they don’t understand?
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 day ago
No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
There’s the hubris. You’re assuming “we got this” on something that isn’t going to be understandable until after the animals escape.
Science is about trial and error. Zoos function because over a very long period of time mistakes have been made and we learned from those mistakes. We’ve learned these lessons over centuries.
You’re talking about a zoo where every animal in it we have zero experience with handling.
You’re thinking handling animals we have centuries of experience with is the same as handling animals we have zero experience with because there’s a tendency in the science community to be reductive towards other disciplines. Just as you might think that running a zoo is super easy - barely an inconvenience, an expert in genetic engineering (but no experience in running a zoo) might think the same. And the guy running the company might think “well he’s an expert that saying it’s no problem” and think they don’t need to put any effort into studying the behavior of the animals. The “clever girl” dude warns Hammond they should put just down the velociraptors because he spent time watching the animals and studying their behaviour (they never attack the same place twice). But I don’t think that guy had a PhD, so he was ignored.
Right now we have occasional one off story about a tiger jumping higher than tigers were known to be able to jump, getting out and mauling some people. That’s one mistake on one animal. An animal we have centuries of experience in handling, and we still get things wrong sometimes.
A zoo trying to contain many different animals that we have zero experience in handling would have these kinds of events happening constantly, and possibly have multiple issues happening at once possibly resulting in a cascading system failure. Which is what the story portrays. But all it takes is one scientist acting like they’re experts in a subject they look down their nose at other disciplines (how many zoos have you run that qualifies you to say it’s not a problem?) to convince an owner there is no need to worry about those naysayers who aren’t brilliant genetic scientists.
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
In addition to what you’re saying, a big part of the movie is why are we doing this? Is there anything to be gained from it? We’re currently having that conversation with the “dire wolves” that Colossal Bioscience has created. They’re not actually dire wolves, in any sense of the word, so all we’re learning is how to genetically modify creatures. We’re not learning anything about the creatures themselves. There’s no purpose to doing the same with Dinos, there’s no dna left to match against and the environment is completely different, they wouldn’t act the same at all.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!