8 ms·

Woolly Mammoth Revival

49 points by undefined1 6y ago

wiz21c 6y ago
So, every year we loose a big number of species. And now one wants to reintroduce a single new one ? Shouldn't it be better to deflect all the energy, money put into that project to actually protecting earth as it is ?
- MarkLowenstein 6y ago
  Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore people that they're going to change tack and use all of their brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead. They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as protected as it is now.
- dkarl 6y ago
  I would agree with you if we were playing with a fixed pot of money, but I think this project could bring support from an entirely new audience. I think a lot of people have a hard time conceiving of environmental protection as something positive and exciting. They see it as an essentially negative aspiration, like someone who sees healthy eating as an essentially negative application of discipline, pointlessly denying yourself doughnuts, because the positive benefits are too doubtful or abstract for them. Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could excite people who groan at traditional environmental initiatives. I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.
  - wiz21c 6y ago
    Your answer is spot on. The way I see the project is that it could somehow bring people to think that we can somehow save species using technology. I don't like that much because it frames the conservation effort to a specific object whereas an animal doesn't disappear like that, it disappears because its environment can't support it anymore. Alors, regarding the negativity, and you can call me a totalitarian, I think much of the way we see things come from our education. So I think we can actually teach children to recognize the obviousness of healthy eating. That education of course is balanced by what you learn from society and also from the dreams projected by that society. For me reviving dead animals is a useless dream. As for environment protection, the question of being exciting is not there. It won't be exciting at all for the masses. But in the end, if nothing is done, it won't be exciting either. My idealist brain doesn't accept that but my pragmatic brain understands that we'd need some political/philsophical/sociological super powers to change that. One of those super power is propganda. We know it works (even if the examples from history are unfortunate). But then again, propaganda doesn't mean dictatorship, just look the level of communication we receive about covid. We'd need an Elon Musk that would build a project around crowd hacking instead of sending cars to space. That's what we usually get into the form of charismatic leaders. Maybe that's what we need (or maybe I'm biased by my own personality who ikes charismatic leaders :-))
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  Even putting aside the whataboutism here -- the limitation is not "enough money exists on earth" -- it's not actually true that keystone megafauna goes extinct every year.
- derryrover 6y ago
  I think you are right on a moral level. But on a pragmatic level these genetic projects are perhaps promising also for conserving existing species. Conserving a species in the traditional way, by conserving it's ecosystem, is costly and often failed. Especially if the ecosystem in question is competing with farmland, cities or heavily impacted by global warming and pollution. Storing some DNA is cheap and will get cheaper. Doing tricks with this DNA will also get cheaper if we do it more often. I know it is unrealistic to think we can restore an entire ecosystem from a jar of DNA, but we can maybe repair a damaged ecosystem this way. We may also be able to keep small populations, normally impacted by inbreeding, more genetically diverse. This may be our chance to domesticate and protect what is left of the biodiversity on earth.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  umbrella species are useful.
- colordrops 6y ago
  This argument is so frustrating. It's commonly seen with space projects, like a space hotel. It assumed several things that are usually not true: * The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all resources available to the problem space * Everyone agrees on what the problems are * Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that need to be tackled * There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or plastic surgery research) * it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on working on the highest priority problem on some global list of problems. It's very flawed logic IMO.
  - smegger001 6y ago
    also the flawed assumption that we can't work on more than one problem at a time. that throwing all of our resources at a problem will speed up the solution to that problem without reaching a point of diminishing returns of investment. that all scientist, engineers, researchers, doctors, etc are interchangeable and are equally motivated and capable to productively research problems in unrelated fields and that if their chosen research were de-funded and were to be moved to another field they wouldn't just quit and do something they are more interested in. ignoring that knowledge gained in one field might also advance progress in another.
- Geee 6y ago
  The disappearing species are boring.
- cwp 6y ago
  Well, they are also working on helping the black-footed ferret recover and they started on that project before doing mammoths, so maybe cut them some slack?
joshuahedlund 6y ago
I feel like I've been reading about plans to reintroduce woolly mammoths for several years now. This link doesn't mention much in way of timetables or specifics. Is this turning into nuclear fusion or are we really making progress on this? What are the odds I'll get to see a live woolly mammoth in my lifetime?
- jyounker 6y ago
  One good reason is that existing species are in some danger of collapsing from the extinction of keystone species. A good example are joshua trees. As I understand it, giant sloths distributed joshua tree seeds. (i.e. they ate the huge seeds, wandered over the next hill, and crapped them out in a big pile of fertilizer). Without giant sloths, joshua trees can't migrated outside of their existing habitats. That's all well and good while the climate isn't changing dramatically, but we're not in that world any more. The current estimate is that unless some substitute animal can be found, joshua trees with be extinct within the next few hundred years. So restoring ground sloths would save an existing species from extinction.
  - cwp 6y ago
    Sloths are a tough one. No preserved DNA, and no closely related surviving species.
elwell 6y ago
> a project in northern Siberia called “Pleistocene Park,” ... Zimov wants to add mammoths to the mix. Having just finished reading Jurassic Park: "Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way."
- Symmetry 6y ago
  Hard to be scared of an animal we've already hunted to extinction once back when we were working with spears.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Humans as a whole obviously has nothing to fear from small groups of mammoths roaming the Siberian tundra. Small groups of people encountering said groups of mammoths in the wild, on the other hand, could quickly end up dead if a bull has a bad day and goes on a rampage. I like the idea of fixing some of the damage our ancestors did. Especially given that it seems to have beneficial effects for the climate, and that giving the mammoths a new chance feels like the right thing to do. Intentions alone don't make things end up like you originally intended, though. There's a LOT of things that need to be taken into account before such a beast can be released into the wild.
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      The Siberian tundra already has bears, wolves, and the coldest cold known to man. It also has very nearly zero population.
      - fogihujy 6y ago
        Definitely. The mammoths will probably fit right in. That does not mean it will be without noticeable and possibly negative consequences for the few people that do live there though. A rampaging elephant is no joke, regardless of the amount of hair it has, and elephants do seem intelligent enough to be moody on occasion. Who knows how they'll respond to being cloned back into existence and then put in a foreign environment without their ancestors' culture?
dr_dshiv 6y ago
First the tundra. Then the suburbs.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Honey the mammoths are in the trash again. Did you lock the lid like I asked you?
fishmaster 6y ago
Woolly Mammoth Revival would be a great band name.
- justinator 6y ago
  There’s already Elephant Revival
slibhb 6y ago
The page lists supposedly rational reasons for wanting to do this but I think it's really just a romantic idea with no rational justification. Introducing new species into ecosystems is always risky, whether or not they're extinct. No one knows what would happen if we start "resurrecting megafauna". No one can say if reintroducing Mammoths will have a positive, negative, or no affect at all on climate change. The idea that scientists can answer questions like that is wrong. I'm all for conservation but this isn't that. This is "because it's there".
- osacial 6y ago
  The page also lists that they are coordinating projects and bring together specialists, so umm... it sounds a lot like Mars One.
- aerovistae 6y ago
  Well, I mean, going to the moon was another "because it's there." I don't see anything wrong with trying to do incredible things just because they're incredible. We learn a lot along the way.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Not to mention, reintroducing a subarctic species while we're busy melting the permafrost is just mean.
  - canadianfella 6y ago
    How so?
- wavefunction 6y ago
  "Rational" has a very loose definition so "because it's cool" is also a rational reason.
- standardUser 6y ago
  Megafauna are going to have low birth rates and be easy to track and cull. So the risk seems fairly low compared to say insects or seeds or bacteria that can never be reigned in once they are out in the world.
prewett 6y ago
I think this would be cool, but I can't see how reviving an cold-weather species in a warming climate is going to be an evolutionary success. Not to mention whatever other reasons they went extinct. I expect that this mammothy-elephant is going to essentially be a zoo piece, even if the "zoo" is a large part of the outdoors. Kind of like those game parks in the US that have African animals.
- smegger001 6y ago
  >Not to mention whatever other reasons they went extinct. correct me if i am wrong but isn't the current consensus that the reason they went extinct was because we found them tasty and had recently invented pointy sticks?
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
But the all-important question remains: how soon until I can eat a woolly mammoth?
cletus 6y ago
The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever but it won’t be a woolly mammoth, not a wild one anyway. Why? Because it won’t know what to do. They’ve shown this when species are repopulated in an area. All the herd knowledge about where to migrate, where to find food, where to find water and so on is lost. It’s akin to a total loss of culture. Just look at farmed salmon that escape into the wild. They don’t know to swim upstream to spawn. Life just isn’t a stateless function of DNA.
- hirundo 6y ago
  Feral children are sometimes raised by a species like wolves, more different from us than mammoths are from elephants. Some of them can never acculturate with other humans, but they are generally viable creatures. They are still human. That's better than extinction.
- kypro 6y ago
  To be honest I didn't even realise this was the goal. Surely the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance? Although, I guess you could take a herd of elephants and splice some woolly mammoth DNA into their genome and get the genetic variance that way. To your question though, presumably they could slowly reintroduce them to the wild in a controlled way? If humans gave them everything they needed to begin with then gradually restricted their food supply, etc? Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - SaintGhurka 6y ago
    >Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient? Maybe, but do we even know for sure why they died out and wouldn't their problems be the same or worse now?
    - jessaustin 6y ago
devoutsalsa 6y ago
Practically speaking, is this the best time in history to revive a species that died out because of a warming client? This is like reinventing ice & inviting it to your pool party in the desert.
- seabj0rn 6y ago
  The argument is that the wooly mammoth actually helps counteract the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere: "When the herds of northern megaherbivores were killed off by humans ten millennia ago, Zimov says, the largest biome on earth, called the “mammoth steppe,” converted from grassland to boreal forest and tundra. In these days of global warming, thawing tundra is releasing greenhouse gases, whereas grassland fixes carbon." [0] There is a really great documentary about Stewart Brand, We Are as Gods, that also covers this project. [1] [0]https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_why_we_should_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh... [1]https://www.weareasgods.film https://www.weareasgods.film
  - quelltext 6y ago
    How can one watch that documentary? Or rather, where did you?
    - epitactic 6y ago
      I had the same question - it appears the We Are as Gods documentary is not out yet. According to IMDB, it will be released in March 2021 at the SXSW film festival (March 16-20).
- bananabreakfast 6y ago
  Climate was a factor but not the primary factor in their extinction. Like the vast majority of all ice-age megafauna, they could not co-exist with the rapidly expanding human population and were driven from the land that sustained them and/or hunted to extinction.
- avdempsey 6y ago
AzzieElbab 6y ago
why not start with something known to be fit to current environment? like tasmanian tiger for example?
- saberdancer 6y ago
  Mammoths can be found frozen. I expect it's easier to find valid DNA in frozen mammoths then in tasmanian tiger skeletons.
- stubish 6y ago
  Because other people are working on the Tasmanian Tiger. Probably best that people in Australia do it too, as it might not be a great fit for the northern arctic ;) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/thylacine-genome-extinct-tasmanian-tiger-cloning-science https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/thylacine... So many extinct species, difficult to know where to start.
peteradio 6y ago
Bring back the buffalo!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
worik 6y ago
What a bad idea. Our understanding of how genotypes and phenotypes are connected to each other is so sparse, we are like children who found dad's old revolver in one cupboard and a box of bullets in another.... We have no idea what will happen if we put them together. Probably be OK. Probably
- neolog 6y ago
  What is the risk you are worried about?
swader999 6y ago
Does nobody care what these taste like? That's the data I'm interested in.
- ijidak 6y ago
  Actually, besides Jurassic Park style exhibits, hunting and eating is probably the killer app. There could be millions in game hunting and serving this at high-end restaurants. Note: I'm NOT advocating this. It's just that hunting and culinary would be a killer app.
  - swader999 6y ago
    As long as they use spears like our ancestors did I'm ok with this.
dang 6y ago
A small previous thread: Woolly Mammoth Revival - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322617 - April 2015 (10 comments)
hownottowrite 6y ago
Well, you could always give it a go on your own: https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/mammoth-meat https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/mammoth-meat
- satya71 6y ago
  I think this should literally be brought to market. If you did lab grown extinct animal meat (as opposed to beef), the interest would be a lot higher. No one would mind that the woolly mammoth meat on offer is not quite a good steak.
- King-Aaron 6y ago
  > We do not recommend or endorse the consumption of this item. It is not food. It is a display piece. Someone has probably done this to warrant such a message
Koshkin 6y ago
We owe it to them.
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
The bioethics question of "should we" is an interesting intellectual exercise but in real life, of course we should bring back as many mega fauna as possible. Biodiversity is the first reason that comes to mind; given the drastic rate of extinction of species, it should be an urgent priority to at least try to restore as many as possible. The more diversity in the animal and plant kingdoms, the more resilient the biosphere becomes. What's more, it's likely that humans played a role in these animals' extinction, so it's only fitting that their descendants try to redress the situation. Although the world has changed considerably since the Pleistocene and early Holocene (our current epoch), notably the recession of the last Ice Age, there are still parts of the planet that are suitable for cold-adapted mammals like woolly mammoths, woolly camels, and woolly rhinos. I'm hoping someone can figure out how to revive Neanderthals, probably wiped out and/or absorbed by modern humans (possibly we ate a lot of them, actually). They had larger brains than modern humans and were much stronger. Possibly they would have a lot to contribute.
senderista 6y ago
If we're gonna resurrect woolly mammoths, why not create a humanzee while we're at it?

49 points by undefined1 6y ago

So, every year we loose a big number of species. And now one wants to reintroduce a single new one ? Shouldn't it be better to deflect all the energy, money put into that project to actually protecting earth as it is ?

MarkLowenstein 6y ago
Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore people that they're going to change tack and use all of their brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead. They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as protected as it is now.
dkarl 6y ago
I would agree with you if we were playing with a fixed pot of money, but I think this project could bring support from an entirely new audience. I think a lot of people have a hard time conceiving of environmental protection as something positive and exciting. They see it as an essentially negative aspiration, like someone who sees healthy eating as an essentially negative application of discipline, pointlessly denying yourself doughnuts, because the positive benefits are too doubtful or abstract for them. Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could excite people who groan at traditional environmental initiatives. I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  Your answer is spot on. The way I see the project is that it could somehow bring people to think that we can somehow save species using technology. I don't like that much because it frames the conservation effort to a specific object whereas an animal doesn't disappear like that, it disappears because its environment can't support it anymore. Alors, regarding the negativity, and you can call me a totalitarian, I think much of the way we see things come from our education. So I think we can actually teach children to recognize the obviousness of healthy eating. That education of course is balanced by what you learn from society and also from the dreams projected by that society. For me reviving dead animals is a useless dream. As for environment protection, the question of being exciting is not there. It won't be exciting at all for the masses. But in the end, if nothing is done, it won't be exciting either. My idealist brain doesn't accept that but my pragmatic brain understands that we'd need some political/philsophical/sociological super powers to change that. One of those super power is propganda. We know it works (even if the examples from history are unfortunate). But then again, propaganda doesn't mean dictatorship, just look the level of communication we receive about covid. We'd need an Elon Musk that would build a project around crowd hacking instead of sending cars to space. That's what we usually get into the form of charismatic leaders. Maybe that's what we need (or maybe I'm biased by my own personality who ikes charismatic leaders :-))
bpodgursky 6y ago
Even putting aside the whataboutism here -- the limitation is not "enough money exists on earth" -- it's not actually true that keystone megafauna goes extinct every year.
derryrover 6y ago
I think you are right on a moral level. But on a pragmatic level these genetic projects are perhaps promising also for conserving existing species. Conserving a species in the traditional way, by conserving it's ecosystem, is costly and often failed. Especially if the ecosystem in question is competing with farmland, cities or heavily impacted by global warming and pollution. Storing some DNA is cheap and will get cheaper. Doing tricks with this DNA will also get cheaper if we do it more often. I know it is unrealistic to think we can restore an entire ecosystem from a jar of DNA, but we can maybe repair a damaged ecosystem this way. We may also be able to keep small populations, normally impacted by inbreeding, more genetically diverse. This may be our chance to domesticate and protect what is left of the biodiversity on earth.
pvaldes 6y ago
umbrella species are useful.
colordrops 6y ago
This argument is so frustrating. It's commonly seen with space projects, like a space hotel. It assumed several things that are usually not true: * The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all resources available to the problem space * Everyone agrees on what the problems are * Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that need to be tackled * There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or plastic surgery research) * it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on working on the highest priority problem on some global list of problems. It's very flawed logic IMO.
- smegger001 6y ago
  also the flawed assumption that we can't work on more than one problem at a time. that throwing all of our resources at a problem will speed up the solution to that problem without reaching a point of diminishing returns of investment. that all scientist, engineers, researchers, doctors, etc are interchangeable and are equally motivated and capable to productively research problems in unrelated fields and that if their chosen research were de-funded and were to be moved to another field they wouldn't just quit and do something they are more interested in. ignoring that knowledge gained in one field might also advance progress in another.
Geee 6y ago
The disappearing species are boring.
cwp 6y ago
Well, they are also working on helping the black-footed ferret recover and they started on that project before doing mammoths, so maybe cut them some slack?

joshuahedlund 6y ago

I feel like I've been reading about plans to reintroduce woolly mammoths for several years now. This link doesn't mention much in way of timetables or specifics. Is this turning into nuclear fusion or are we really making progress on this? What are the odds I'll get to see a live woolly mammoth in my lifetime?

jyounker 6y ago
One good reason is that existing species are in some danger of collapsing from the extinction of keystone species. A good example are joshua trees. As I understand it, giant sloths distributed joshua tree seeds. (i.e. they ate the huge seeds, wandered over the next hill, and crapped them out in a big pile of fertilizer). Without giant sloths, joshua trees can't migrated outside of their existing habitats. That's all well and good while the climate isn't changing dramatically, but we're not in that world any more. The current estimate is that unless some substitute animal can be found, joshua trees with be extinct within the next few hundred years. So restoring ground sloths would save an existing species from extinction.
- cwp 6y ago
  Sloths are a tough one. No preserved DNA, and no closely related surviving species.

elwell 6y ago

> a project in northern Siberia called “Pleistocene Park,” ... Zimov wants to add mammoths to the mix. Having just finished reading Jurassic Park: "Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way."

Symmetry 6y ago
Hard to be scared of an animal we've already hunted to extinction once back when we were working with spears.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Humans as a whole obviously has nothing to fear from small groups of mammoths roaming the Siberian tundra. Small groups of people encountering said groups of mammoths in the wild, on the other hand, could quickly end up dead if a bull has a bad day and goes on a rampage. I like the idea of fixing some of the damage our ancestors did. Especially given that it seems to have beneficial effects for the climate, and that giving the mammoths a new chance feels like the right thing to do. Intentions alone don't make things end up like you originally intended, though. There's a LOT of things that need to be taken into account before such a beast can be released into the wild.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    The Siberian tundra already has bears, wolves, and the coldest cold known to man. It also has very nearly zero population.
    - fogihujy 6y ago
      Definitely. The mammoths will probably fit right in. That does not mean it will be without noticeable and possibly negative consequences for the few people that do live there though. A rampaging elephant is no joke, regardless of the amount of hair it has, and elephants do seem intelligent enough to be moody on occasion. Who knows how they'll respond to being cloned back into existence and then put in a foreign environment without their ancestors' culture?

dr_dshiv 6y ago

First the tundra. Then the suburbs.

hinkley 6y ago
Honey the mammoths are in the trash again. Did you lock the lid like I asked you?

fishmaster 6y ago

Woolly Mammoth Revival would be a great band name.

justinator 6y ago
There’s already Elephant Revival

slibhb 6y ago

The page lists supposedly rational reasons for wanting to do this but I think it's really just a romantic idea with no rational justification. Introducing new species into ecosystems is always risky, whether or not they're extinct. No one knows what would happen if we start "resurrecting megafauna". No one can say if reintroducing Mammoths will have a positive, negative, or no affect at all on climate change. The idea that scientists can answer questions like that is wrong. I'm all for conservation but this isn't that. This is "because it's there".

osacial 6y ago
The page also lists that they are coordinating projects and bring together specialists, so umm... it sounds a lot like Mars One.
aerovistae 6y ago
Well, I mean, going to the moon was another "because it's there." I don't see anything wrong with trying to do incredible things just because they're incredible. We learn a lot along the way.
hinkley 6y ago
Not to mention, reintroducing a subarctic species while we're busy melting the permafrost is just mean.
- canadianfella 6y ago
  How so?
wavefunction 6y ago
"Rational" has a very loose definition so "because it's cool" is also a rational reason.
standardUser 6y ago
Megafauna are going to have low birth rates and be easy to track and cull. So the risk seems fairly low compared to say insects or seeds or bacteria that can never be reigned in once they are out in the world.

prewett 6y ago

I think this would be cool, but I can't see how reviving an cold-weather species in a warming climate is going to be an evolutionary success. Not to mention whatever other reasons they went extinct. I expect that this mammothy-elephant is going to essentially be a zoo piece, even if the "zoo" is a large part of the outdoors. Kind of like those game parks in the US that have African animals.

smegger001 6y ago
>Not to mention whatever other reasons they went extinct. correct me if i am wrong but isn't the current consensus that the reason they went extinct was because we found them tasty and had recently invented pointy sticks?

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

But the all-important question remains: how soon until I can eat a woolly mammoth?

cletus 6y ago

The sad fact is that woolly mammoths are gone. I mean you might be able to extract DNA and gestate it in an elephant or whatever but it won’t be a woolly mammoth, not a wild one anyway. Why? Because it won’t know what to do. They’ve shown this when species are repopulated in an area. All the herd knowledge about where to migrate, where to find food, where to find water and so on is lost. It’s akin to a total loss of culture. Just look at farmed salmon that escape into the wild. They don’t know to swim upstream to spawn. Life just isn’t a stateless function of DNA.

hirundo 6y ago
Feral children are sometimes raised by a species like wolves, more different from us than mammoths are from elephants. Some of them can never acculturate with other humans, but they are generally viable creatures. They are still human. That's better than extinction.
kypro 6y ago
To be honest I didn't even realise this was the goal. Surely the larger issue here is the lack of genetic variance? Although, I guess you could take a herd of elephants and splice some woolly mammoth DNA into their genome and get the genetic variance that way. To your question though, presumably they could slowly reintroduce them to the wild in a controlled way? If humans gave them everything they needed to begin with then gradually restricted their food supply, etc? Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SaintGhurka 6y ago
  >Wouldn't they eventually learn how to be self-sufficient? Maybe, but do we even know for sure why they died out and wouldn't their problems be the same or worse now?
  - jessaustin 6y ago

devoutsalsa 6y ago

Practically speaking, is this the best time in history to revive a species that died out because of a warming client? This is like reinventing ice & inviting it to your pool party in the desert.

seabj0rn 6y ago
The argument is that the wooly mammoth actually helps counteract the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere: "When the herds of northern megaherbivores were killed off by humans ten millennia ago, Zimov says, the largest biome on earth, called the “mammoth steppe,” converted from grassland to boreal forest and tundra. In these days of global warming, thawing tundra is releasing greenhouse gases, whereas grassland fixes carbon." [0] There is a really great documentary about Stewart Brand, We Are as Gods, that also covers this project. [1] [0]https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_why_we_should_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_wh... [1]https://www.weareasgods.film https://www.weareasgods.film
- quelltext 6y ago
  How can one watch that documentary? Or rather, where did you?
  - epitactic 6y ago
    I had the same question - it appears the We Are as Gods documentary is not out yet. According to IMDB, it will be released in March 2021 at the SXSW film festival (March 16-20).
bananabreakfast 6y ago
Climate was a factor but not the primary factor in their extinction. Like the vast majority of all ice-age megafauna, they could not co-exist with the rapidly expanding human population and were driven from the land that sustained them and/or hunted to extinction.
avdempsey 6y ago

AzzieElbab 6y ago

why not start with something known to be fit to current environment? like tasmanian tiger for example?

saberdancer 6y ago
Mammoths can be found frozen. I expect it's easier to find valid DNA in frozen mammoths then in tasmanian tiger skeletons.
stubish 6y ago
Because other people are working on the Tasmanian Tiger. Probably best that people in Australia do it too, as it might not be a great fit for the northern arctic ;) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/thylacine-genome-extinct-tasmanian-tiger-cloning-science https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/thylacine... So many extinct species, difficult to know where to start.

peteradio 6y ago

Bring back the buffalo!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

worik 6y ago

What a bad idea. Our understanding of how genotypes and phenotypes are connected to each other is so sparse, we are like children who found dad's old revolver in one cupboard and a box of bullets in another.... We have no idea what will happen if we put them together. Probably be OK. Probably

neolog 6y ago
What is the risk you are worried about?

swader999 6y ago

Does nobody care what these taste like? That's the data I'm interested in.

ijidak 6y ago
Actually, besides Jurassic Park style exhibits, hunting and eating is probably the killer app. There could be millions in game hunting and serving this at high-end restaurants. Note: I'm NOT advocating this. It's just that hunting and culinary would be a killer app.
- swader999 6y ago
  As long as they use spears like our ancestors did I'm ok with this.

dang 6y ago

A small previous thread: Woolly Mammoth Revival - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322617 - April 2015 (10 comments)

hownottowrite 6y ago

Well, you could always give it a go on your own: https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/mammoth-meat https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/mammoth-meat

satya71 6y ago
I think this should literally be brought to market. If you did lab grown extinct animal meat (as opposed to beef), the interest would be a lot higher. No one would mind that the woolly mammoth meat on offer is not quite a good steak.
King-Aaron 6y ago
> We do not recommend or endorse the consumption of this item. It is not food. It is a display piece. Someone has probably done this to warrant such a message

Koshkin 6y ago

We owe it to them.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago

The bioethics question of "should we" is an interesting intellectual exercise but in real life, of course we should bring back as many mega fauna as possible. Biodiversity is the first reason that comes to mind; given the drastic rate of extinction of species, it should be an urgent priority to at least try to restore as many as possible. The more diversity in the animal and plant kingdoms, the more resilient the biosphere becomes. What's more, it's likely that humans played a role in these animals' extinction, so it's only fitting that their descendants try to redress the situation. Although the world has changed considerably since the Pleistocene and early Holocene (our current epoch), notably the recession of the last Ice Age, there are still parts of the planet that are suitable for cold-adapted mammals like woolly mammoths, woolly camels, and woolly rhinos. I'm hoping someone can figure out how to revive Neanderthals, probably wiped out and/or absorbed by modern humans (possibly we ate a lot of them, actually). They had larger brains than modern humans and were much stronger. Possibly they would have a lot to contribute.

senderista 6y ago

If we're gonna resurrect woolly mammoths, why not create a humanzee while we're at it?