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

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

#41
post #32

Say humans went extinct and some alien species revived us from collected germ cells. Even if they could work out all the genetic quirks to make new population sustainable, 40000 years of social progress would be lost. Resurrected population wouldn't have benefit of any scientific advances, nor would they have any sense of rational thinking, philosophy, religion, social structures, not even language and writing. Human…

Animal culture, aka knowledge and behaviors passed from generation to generation, exists but is way simpler than human culture and societal progress. It feels to me it can be recreated much more easily.

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

#42
post #9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro, including GCC, starting at around 512 bytes of machine code, plus all the source code. I think they have had some success already: https://bootstrappable.org/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots...

Do those 512 bytes include the signed shim from Microsoft for Secure Boot?

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

#43
post #32

Say humans went extinct and some alien species revived us from collected germ cells. Even if they could work out all the genetic quirks to make new population sustainable, 40000 years of social progress would be lost. Resurrected population wouldn't have benefit of any scientific advances, nor would they have any sense of rational thinking, philosophy, religion, social structures, not even language and writing. Human…

Religion in that list makes what you're describing as progress.

Does it, though?

I'm not religious myself (agnostic comes close-ish), but I would think, based on the evidence I'm aware of, that there must be an important function that spirituality and religion fulfill, especially to people not living in a 21st century first world society. After all, up until very, very, very recently, every group, society, people we today have any knowledge of, in every remote corner of the planet, had some sort of spiritual or religious framework. Atheism and a-spiritualism as a mass phenomenon is (to the best of my knowledge) a very recent phenomenon, and even most of the atheists I know have something that feels to me personally like a bit of a "replacement spirituality". If everyone's doing it, shouldn't there be a good reason for that?

Traces of such activity go back a long way in time, too. Use of ochre goes back almost 300 000 years, and while we don't know what they used it for then, later finds make a pretty solid case for it to be used in some spiritual context [1]. Neanderthals built structures that may very well have been connected to spirituality 176 000 years ago [2]. We have lots and lots of Venus figurines from the ice age Homo sapiens [3], we have lots of amazing cave paintings that may have been just naturalistic studies, but really don't look like it (like this 13 000 years-old chimeric guy: [4]). And then there are statuettes of lion-headed humans and lots of other art that doesn't appear to be naturalistic at all [5], probably right up to today, unless the very few uncontacted tribes are areligious exceptions or don't create spiritual art.

That sort of thing is costly. Effigies are costly, art is costly, rituals are costly, all the more so if you're living in an ice age environment that makes today's northern Siberia look kinda decent, or on a resource-starved island. Sacrifices are very costly, and they have been a part of lots and lots of cults and religions since time immemorial. There must be a reason why we kept doing this, and why people seem have such an enormous innate need for such things that they pick up such practices on their own again and again.

Actually, I'd say there must be some pretty huge upside to this, given that cataclysmic events and very hard times invariably deepen people's religiosity, despite all the selection pressure acting under a volcanic plume or in an icy summer or during devastating epidemics. They may shatter organized religions, but there are no atheists on a foundering ship in a storm, and all that.

That's not to say that our huge organized religions are a great thing, and should be kept as-is forever. Religiosity certainly has been and is being used as a means to deplorable ends. But there is, and probably always has been, another arguably much larger dimension to this, and people without churches probably wouldn't be steadfast atheists who never believe anything they haven't seen a peer-reviewed double-blind study on.

I'd speculate that if someone actually did that experiment and set some machine-reared Homo sapiens children loose on a pristine second Earth, and if by chance they'd actually make it through the first couple of generations, a complete lack of spirituality would probably be a disadvantage to them, and they'd probably fill that void before long. They'd have to hit the big existential questions at some point, after all, and if there is another way to answer them, I don't know it.

1: https://www.livescience.com/64138-ochre.html

2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/neanderth...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer_(cave_art)

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art

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

#44
post #40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they copied YouTube too.

... at the price of the human colony muttering the words "don't forget to comment and subscribe" as a farewell ritual.

“today I’m reacting to you making me dinner...”

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

#46

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.

Instead of preserving the existing endangered species, we try to bring back the ones we've already destroyed.

Instead of trying to save this planet, we fetishise escaping towards a dead, uninhabitable rock.

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

#47
post #41
post #32

Say humans went extinct and some alien species revived us from collected germ cells. Even if they could work out all the genetic quirks to make new population sustainable, 40000 years of social progress would be lost. Resurrected population wouldn't have benefit of any scientific advances, nor would they have any sense of rational thinking, philosophy, religion, social structures, not even language and writing. Human…

Animal culture, aka knowledge and behaviors passed from generation to generation, exists but is way simpler than human culture and societal progress. It feels to me it can be recreated much more easily.

Way simpler from our perspective. I bet there are many intricacies that we haven't identified / cannot be identified through the human experience. Or maybe I am wrong, but I remain skeptical because we often don't give enough credit to other species.

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

#48
post #41
post #32

Say humans went extinct and some alien species revived us from collected germ cells. Even if they could work out all the genetic quirks to make new population sustainable, 40000 years of social progress would be lost. Resurrected population wouldn't have benefit of any scientific advances, nor would they have any sense of rational thinking, philosophy, religion, social structures, not even language and writing. Human…

Animal culture, aka knowledge and behaviors passed from generation to generation, exists but is way simpler than human culture and societal progress. It feels to me it can be recreated much more easily.

What if the aliens had access to culture? They could then maybe raise the clones as cultural humans that could be somewhat close to us.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion in that list makes what you're describing as progress.

Does it, though? I'm not religious myself (agnostic comes close-ish), but I would think, based on the evidence I'm aware of, that there must be an important function that spirituality and religion fulfill, especially to people not living in a 21st century first world society. After all, up until very, very, very recently, every group, society, people we today have any knowledge of, in every remote corner of the plane…

What you're describing can be replaced with philosophy. Believing, being indifferent, and or not believing in God isn't destructive. Religion is what's destructive if you examine what has happened to the natives, LGBTQ+ persons, disabled persons and anyone else throughout history that didn't fit the cult model of religion.
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