One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save • Hacker News Board

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#21

Post by na85 » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #18

na85 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that artificial wombs do not currently exist should be evidence enough that they are non-trivial to invent and perfect. One cannot substitute confidence for domain expertise.

No idea what you're talking about. You said yourself it's non-trivial and we aren't there yet. So "some day it might be possible" seems reasonable, not "almost certainly not".

>we aren't there yet.

Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#22

Post by staticassertion » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #21

staticassertion wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea what you're talking about. You said yourself it's non-trivial and we aren't there yet. So "some day it might be possible" seems reasonable, not "almost certainly not".

>we aren't there yet. Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.

> Those are your words

Yes, sorry, your exact words:

> does not yet exist.

I don't know why that's semantically important, but there you are, for posterity.

> when your confident statement

Yeah I'm literally quoting you. So if you're saying that it will "almost certainly not" happen "some day", so be it, but you followed that up with "yet" and "non trivial" as opposed to "never" and "impossible".

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#23

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:40 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #21

staticassertion wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea what you're talking about. You said yourself it's non-trivial and we aren't there yet. So "some day it might be possible" seems reasonable, not "almost certainly not".

>we aren't there yet. Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.

>dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass

I think you two are at a philosophical impasse - staticassertion is something of an optimist about technology with the viewpoint that anything that actually exists a working replica can be built of it with enough data as to how the thing actually works (perhaps requiring extensive years of research) and enough money and time to do the replication.

Your perspective seems to that the time to research, and the money and time to replicate are unknown variables of such potential size that we cannot know if we would ever make the investment to have it come to pass.

I personally suppose that as time goes on an artificial womb will become a more alluring prospect because of problems like this that it would help solve and as such the money and time required would be at found. But I am also an optimist about technological progress - although a pessimist about climate change so my assumption is based on us solving something I don't think will be solved.

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#24

Post by spijdar » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #3

nynx wrote: post #2

Fascinating. I wonder if it'll someday be possible to clone an animal from just their genome, without needing to store physical samples.

Almost certainly not. The genome is not the only information you need. You also need the gestation environment. It’s kind of like trying to compile gcc from source without a working gcc.

While I appreciate the analogy, like others have pointed out, it's kind of broken as gcc is designed to be buildable by other C compilers, or at least, it's not impossible to bootstrap from a simpler C compiler.

A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#25

Post by xwdv » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 6:13 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #10

xwdv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not géstate in some sort of artificial womb?

>artificial womb? Because such a thing is non-trivial to invent and does not yet exist.

A lot of things were non-trivial to invent, what’s your point?

From the way technology advances over time, someone will figure it out eventually, and when they do the announcement won’t be met with audible gasps, but rather a shrug of the shoulders and a passing comment of “Huh, so they figured that out.”

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#26

Post by halotrope » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 6:19 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #3

nynx wrote: post #2

Fascinating. I wonder if it'll someday be possible to clone an animal from just their genome, without needing to store physical samples.

Almost certainly not. The genome is not the only information you need. You also need the gestation environment. It’s kind of like trying to compile gcc from source without a working gcc.

What a great analogy!

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#27

Post by option_greek » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 7:11 AM UTC

Lets say a species is extinct. By trying to bring the species back, are we doing them any favor? Somehow sounds more like something that humans would do out of vanity than to serve any real purpose.

On the other hand trying to save species that haven't gone extinct makes sense as you are trying to protect their way of life.

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#28

Post by drran » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 7:26 AM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #19

xwdv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not géstate in some sort of artificial womb?

We have no idea how the artificial womb should look like. It's basically the idea that we want to bake a cake, we have the recipe but don't know the kind of oven we need, nor the temperature, and only have a vague idea of how the result should look like. We may get a cake by trial and error, but it's not guaranteed.

See it there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk0RZgDOkgM

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#29

Post by drran » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 7:27 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #10

xwdv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not géstate in some sort of artificial womb?

>artificial womb? Because such a thing is non-trivial to invent and does not yet exist.

2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMhgfD-Ib7U

2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt7twXzNEsQ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbgHbYXs3cM

1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1pLqVyMEBA

Re: One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save

#30

Post by helsinkiandrew » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #27

Lets say a species is extinct. By trying to bring the species back, are we doing them any favor? Somehow sounds more like something that humans would do out of vanity than to serve any real purpose. On the other hand trying to save species that haven't gone extinct makes sense as you are trying to protect their way of life.

The reason species are going extinct is (generally) because their natural habitat/climate/food source are being destroyed - I'm not sure that preserving species so they can survive in some artificial zoo like ecosystem for our amusement achieves much - as you say the effort would be much better spent preserving the living species.