Pantheraman
Well-Known Member
Scientists Are Reincarnating the Woolly Mammoth to Return in 4 Years
"The long-dead woolly mammoth will make its return from extinction by 2027, says Colossal, the biotech company actively working to reincarnate the ancient beast.
Last year, the Dallas-based firm scored an additional $60 million in funding to continue the, well, mammoth gene-editing work it started in 2021. If successful, not only will Colossal bring back an extinct species—one the company dubs a cold-resistant elephant—but it will also reintroduce the woolly mammoth to the same ecosystem in which it once lived in an effort to fight climate change, according to a recent Medium post."
This might not be a popular opinion, but personally, I think this is the stupidest thing scientists have been trying to do in a while.
The present and the time Wooly Mammoths were at their peak were different. Sea levels were much lower back than and thus more land was exposed, even creating a landbridge between Eurasia and North America. And from Spain to the Yukon territory was a landscape called the Mammoth Steppe, a giant stretch of freezing cold grassland with fewer trees than the African savanna (as far as I'm aware anyway). Now, much of this place has changed. Much of it is now covered in boreal woodlands, likely as a result of rising temperatures, and the Bering Strait is now gone. And I don't how the mammoth clones would supposedly make the earth colder, I still fail to see how they and other grazing mammals alone would lower sea levels that drastically. Or affect sea levels period.
And I know I'll probably sound like someone from Jurassic Park, but the truth is, you don't know what will truly happen. With the Asian elephant genes inserted into the mammoth genome, for all we know, these "mammoth clones" probably won't even fully resemble wooly mammoths, such as lacking he massive tusks used as built-in snow shovels, or their ears might be slightly bigger or heck, their fur coats won't be as ideal for dealing with cold climates as hoped.
My point is, no matter what you try doing, and no matter how much you'd like to, you can't control mother nature. Which brings me to my next point.
What this project assumes is that humans were the main cause of the mammoth's extinction. Truth is the exact main role causing their demise is still something paleontologists argue over. For all we know, it was probably mother nature who decided it was done with wooly mammoths, not humans.
And $60 million? Don't you think that would be better spent on modern elephant conservation? Conservation ain't exactly cheap ya know. And this brings me to another point brought up in another thread by others. Cloning extinct animals sounds good on paper, but how would it really affect conservation? Sure, it can bring back extinct animals, and that itself could make people care less about conservation. With that ability, people wouldn't take conservation as seriously and less money would be put into preserving extant wildlife. This is even worse considering that even then, humans cloning endangered wildlife could only do so much due to the vast amount of species in danger of extinction. They simply wouldn't get enough manpower for it. And the more charismatic wildlife would definitely get the most attention as they do now.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, I think Micheal Crichton would see this and say something like this: "I literally wrote a book warning you people against this."
And now to end this with a couple quotes.
"...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."-Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park, 1993
"Maybe progress should lose for once."- Owen Grady, Jurassic World, 2015
"The long-dead woolly mammoth will make its return from extinction by 2027, says Colossal, the biotech company actively working to reincarnate the ancient beast.
Last year, the Dallas-based firm scored an additional $60 million in funding to continue the, well, mammoth gene-editing work it started in 2021. If successful, not only will Colossal bring back an extinct species—one the company dubs a cold-resistant elephant—but it will also reintroduce the woolly mammoth to the same ecosystem in which it once lived in an effort to fight climate change, according to a recent Medium post."
This might not be a popular opinion, but personally, I think this is the stupidest thing scientists have been trying to do in a while.
The present and the time Wooly Mammoths were at their peak were different. Sea levels were much lower back than and thus more land was exposed, even creating a landbridge between Eurasia and North America. And from Spain to the Yukon territory was a landscape called the Mammoth Steppe, a giant stretch of freezing cold grassland with fewer trees than the African savanna (as far as I'm aware anyway). Now, much of this place has changed. Much of it is now covered in boreal woodlands, likely as a result of rising temperatures, and the Bering Strait is now gone. And I don't how the mammoth clones would supposedly make the earth colder, I still fail to see how they and other grazing mammals alone would lower sea levels that drastically. Or affect sea levels period.
And I know I'll probably sound like someone from Jurassic Park, but the truth is, you don't know what will truly happen. With the Asian elephant genes inserted into the mammoth genome, for all we know, these "mammoth clones" probably won't even fully resemble wooly mammoths, such as lacking he massive tusks used as built-in snow shovels, or their ears might be slightly bigger or heck, their fur coats won't be as ideal for dealing with cold climates as hoped.
My point is, no matter what you try doing, and no matter how much you'd like to, you can't control mother nature. Which brings me to my next point.
What this project assumes is that humans were the main cause of the mammoth's extinction. Truth is the exact main role causing their demise is still something paleontologists argue over. For all we know, it was probably mother nature who decided it was done with wooly mammoths, not humans.
And $60 million? Don't you think that would be better spent on modern elephant conservation? Conservation ain't exactly cheap ya know. And this brings me to another point brought up in another thread by others. Cloning extinct animals sounds good on paper, but how would it really affect conservation? Sure, it can bring back extinct animals, and that itself could make people care less about conservation. With that ability, people wouldn't take conservation as seriously and less money would be put into preserving extant wildlife. This is even worse considering that even then, humans cloning endangered wildlife could only do so much due to the vast amount of species in danger of extinction. They simply wouldn't get enough manpower for it. And the more charismatic wildlife would definitely get the most attention as they do now.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, I think Micheal Crichton would see this and say something like this: "I literally wrote a book warning you people against this."
And now to end this with a couple quotes.
"...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."-Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park, 1993
"Maybe progress should lose for once."- Owen Grady, Jurassic World, 2015
bearing in mind he was a climate change denier who literally included a thinly-veiled version of someone who criticized his stance on this matter within the final novel published during his lifetime, portraying them as a child molester with a micropenis!
