De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

>Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species, rather than de-extinct animals that have been dead for thousands of years. Maybe that’s true, but it’s extremely unlikely that this $150M would have gone to conservation otherwise! If rich people want to spend their money on de-extinction, and bolster reproductive technologies in the meantime, then we say “let ‘em.”

There's a French idiom for that, "pompiers pyromanes", which means arsonist firemen. Seems appropriate.

Re: De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

#6

Post by sebastianconcpt » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

Don't we had a lot of movies explaining how bad this could go? Don't we had enough self inflicted catastrophes to keep us entertained that we need another disruptive one?

Re: De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

#7

Post by ramraj07 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 3:11 PM UTC

I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil - it’s as evil as the concept of death itself; killing something is evil (or is it not? Outside humans even this isn’t considered unnatural), but something dying naturally is not.

Clearly many animals have gone extinct because of humans (many memorable ones before humanity developed a sufficiently profound collective consciousness that could ponder about this), but I don’t see how there’s any moral, ethical or natural urge to repent and offer reparations for this. Species die, that’s the natural order of things for species in general and if this round of mass extinction is humanity induced then we should focus on reducing its scale instead of trying to go undo it as if that absolves us of anything.

This says nothing about the scientific ability to do this, anyway, which as this article points is mostly BS. My general experience is if you try to do something that doesn’t make full logical economical and moral sense, you end up with this charlatan group. Crypto is another example of the same.

Re: De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

#8

Post by tokai » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 3:13 PM UTC

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #6

Don't we had a lot of movies explaining how bad this could go? Don't we had enough self inflicted catastrophes to keep us entertained that we need another disruptive one?

Not a single one of those movies are an actual argument against a real de-extinction project.

Re: De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

#9

Post by mkoubaa » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

It isn't what the author intended but I come away from reading this more confident that mammoth de-extinction will happen.

Re: De-Extinction? Surely You’re Joking

#10

Post by sklivvz1971 » Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

> Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species

Ah, ye old whataboutism canard... it seems to be forgetting that this technology would have an immense value by itself!

> True de-extinction is nowhere near possible.

I'm not sure I can parse the convoluted English here. Are we saying it's impossible? I see no evidence in the article that it is correct. Are we saying it's really hard? Sure, but no one claimed otherwise.

I am not the kind of person that tends to have starry-eyed faith into any appealing idea, and perhaps it is truly hard to "resurrect" a dead species. However it seems to me that it's obviously doable at some level: Craig Venter has created a synthetic bacterium so I don't see why a particularly simple life form can't be "de-extincted".

I realize though that multicellular organism are much harder and quite far away from our current capabilities, but impossible? I don't see why.