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Opinions on Jurassic Park as a Zoo

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fossilesque@mander.xyz⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩

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  • Makeitstop@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Also, the book makes it clear that Nedry isn’t just some greedy asshole, he’s someone getting screwed over and financially ruined. Hammond hired him as the lowest bid for the job of setting up the systems, with a contract that explicitly stated that support was not included, only for Hammond to threaten to sue him until he goes broke and ruin his reputation so no one else will hire him unless he provides free support. He’s being dragged to the island and working around the clock and he’s not even getting paid for it. Of course he’s going to take the opportunity to get paid for screwing over Hammond.

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    • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, “we’ve spared no expense” is a dramatically ironic line in the book, because the reader sees Hammond cutting costs at every single opportunity. Every single time Hammond drops that line, it’s almost immediately preceded or followed by an example of him cutting corners to save money.

      Book Hammond is sort of a cross between Trump and Musk. He takes all of the worst techbro “I want to sound smart by telling people I’m an engineer, but I’m actually an idiot with zero engineering education. But I hold the purse strings so I can tell the engineers how to do their jobs” aspects of Musk, and combines it with Trump’s infamous “do it my way (as cheaply as possible; we won’t even pay a lot of the people who worked on it) or you’re fired” business attitude. The man is a bully who threatens to ruin anyone that doesn’t go along with him.

      Nedry was a good example of that. Nedry had to bid on the contract basically blind, because they wouldn’t tell him anything about the project until after he won the contract and signed an NDA. They just told him it was a basic database management program, so he bid the job as such. All of the park automation stuff was revealed after he won the contract. And Hammond basically pulled a Vader “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.”

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      • bufalo1973@piefed.social ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Now this could be a nice use of AI: deepfake Trump as Hammond, voice included.

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  • tux@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Was always why I loved the books so much, every single step highlights poor management and going cheap for profit sake after having invested so much money in the cloning technology.

    It’s like buying a brand new super car and then throwing the cheapest used tires you can find on it.

    Dr. Wu tries to push Hammond to use slower, calmer, easier to contain dna modifications but Hammond ignores him, Wu can’t quit cause he was sniped as a post-doctorate and can’t publish any of his work so every employer would see a worthless resume

    Muldoon demanded better weapons to handle the dinosaurs if something happened, Hammond doesn’t let him have anything more than a single tranq firing rocket launcher because “he doesn’t want the dinosaurs to be hurt”

    Nedry was the lowest bidder but then they refused to give him good specifications and requirements “due to secrecy” so of course the code had bugs, which he was not supposed to be on the hook to fix for free, but Hammond went and slandered him to all of his other and future customers, basically blackmailing him till he came and did a ton of free labor.

    Dr. Harding, the only veterinarian, (who also was the father of Sarah Harding in Lost World), wasn’t allowed to dissect any of the animals to study their physiology, so when they tried to sterilize them with radiation they had to guess where the reproductive organs were.

    John Arnold (hold onto your butts) was overworked and the only person who know how to use the systems, creating a single point of failure. He also was ignored when he insisted that the park needed more testing before they open the park but was ignored by Hammond, because it would take too much time. He also said they relied too much on automation, but was ignored due to costs and cool new tech.

    Hammond was an asshole who portrays the typical tech bro attitude even though he’s an old man. He was mostly a fundraiser not the brains behind the project. His former partner who was the genius behind the cloning tech (and Wu’s former teacher) died of cancer. But even during the fundraising he was a total fraud, they had made a pigmy elephant and used it as a demonstration of the cloning tech, but it actually wasn’t a clone or any dna modifications that made it. And on top of that it had a shitty temperament and would get sick if people touched it. Dude was a total snake the entire time. And he ultimately dies at the end by a bunch of Compys after the park has been mostly restored.

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  • jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’d never considered how much this applies to the general “tech bro” mindset beyond the chaos theory parts of the book

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    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.

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    • grill@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I never even considered that Jurassic Park was adapted from a book.

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      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).

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      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        The Lost World (the second movie) is also based on a book by Michael Crichton [pronounced cry-ton], but it diverges from the book even more than the first movie.

        It’s worth a read, as is Disclosure by the same author (pretty much all of his books are good).

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  • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    here to recommend Dinosaur Sanctuary .

    About a dinosaur zoo, and they do all that stuff properly.

    it’s cowriten by a paleontologist, and they treat them as animals not movie monsters.

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    • Akrenion@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I second this. There are letters explaining interesting facts of paleontology by the consultant. This is made out of love.

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      • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        so much fucking love in there.

        it’s overflowing with positivity and love and care.

        I used to work in a zoo when I was younger, and it so reminds me of that.

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  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.

    I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.

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  • happybadger@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They had hundreds of animals and no staff ecologists. They had 1 veterinarian. Instead of having paleontologists on staff, they had a big game hunter. All their biologists worked in the lab. They built everything like theme park rides because automation kept labour costs down and made secrecy easier.

    Me screaming about urban park design to no one in particular.

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    • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Image

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      • happybadger@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Me screaming that Fred Rogers had a preeminent jazz pianist improvise every episode’s theme song to no one in particular.

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  • vzqq@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be fair, standards for zoos were also quite a bit lower thirty years ago.

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  • nialv7@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Would dinosaurs even get prion disease? I think birds don’t.

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    • notthebees@reddthat.com ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Anything with proteins can get prion disease. Since they’re reptiles and their genome is a lot older than ours, there’s a pretty good chance something that affects us might not affect them in terms of proteins. I don’t think birds get prion diseases bc it hasn’t been really well studied yet.

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  • yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I have always hated the “mr. DNA” cartoon. Because everything in that “ride” is just a flattened exposition dump / cheap setup for what was a revelation or twist in the book.

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    So basically it’s the dinosaur king

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Let’s never go back to Dinosaur Island.

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