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Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is. The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. You canno

Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is. The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. You cannot overcome all obstacles, and the universe not only doesn't care about your hard work and positive attitude, but is utterly unaware of and unaffected by your very existence. Life, nature, the universe all do what they do and no matter how hard you try, you can only influence things. You have no real control at larger scales. To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is. There's a difference between author-intended message, and message or messages received by the audience. La mort de l'auteur, and all. > The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. Hopefully not, because that take is bullshit. Of course you can overcome life finding a way. Were you ever vaccinated or took antibiotics? That's humans one-upping nature. The point, if anything, is that you can't overcome nature once and for all[0]. You have to put in effort to stay ahead. It's kind of implied in what life is in the first place. Evolution through natural selection is an optimization system. A greedy, short-sighted, incredibly dumb optimization system, but it has scale on its side. Which is why we are, for example, dealing with "superbugs" now. Life found a way around some of our antibiotics[1]. But this doesn't mean antibiotics were a mistake. It means we need to do better, one-up life again. Say, with phages. It's not hubris to realize we are smarter than dumb natural selection. It's not hubris to recognize we can win, and keep on winning. > To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world. Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering. Meanwhile, I'll take my antibiotics and phages and RNA vaccines and cars and computers and airplanes[2], and if someone actually gets around to cloning dinosaurs, I trust they'll have people on the team who know what interlocks are, or redundant power supply. Unlike in movies like Jurassic Park, there exist non-idiots in the real world, and we also have case studies and regulations governing handling dangerous animals and technologies. -- [0] - Ignoring for a moment that humans are nature too, and everything we do is part of "life finds a way", too. [1] - In big part because human societies are dumb too. Clear parallels to Jurassic Park here. [2] - Oh my god what an exercise of hubris powered flight is! Didn't we learn anything from the story of Icarus?!
- vinceguidry 3y ago
  If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. That's not at all a given, not until such cloned dinosaurs become ubiquitous. What is the rate of lions and tigers escaping zoos and killing people? Zoos aren't a new thing. I wouldn't be too worried about experimental lions escaping a high-tech, super high-profile zoo. > Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell. We're a bit more advanced and organized worldwide than in times of Pablo Escobar. Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction. I mean, how much do you think a nu-dinosaur bone would fetch on the market? Also, imagine the damage control budget flowing in if one of the victims of escaping dinosaurs happens to be a US citizen. "We Have To Do Something" is a force to be reckoned with. Civil liberties get trampled, and whole countries get blown up, once the public fear ripens enough to go past Thoughts and Prayers stage.
    - vinceguidry 3y ago
      > Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction. Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares. When you're dealing with nature, you're dealing with something much bigger than you are. Sure you can throw more resources at the problem. Doesn't always work. Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere. You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly. How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed. You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them. Were you really one of the ones who thought he could actually do something positive with Twitter?

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is. There's a difference between author-intended message, and message or messages received by the audience. La mort de l'auteur, and all. > The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome. Hopefully not, because that take is bullshit. Of course you can overcome life finding a way. Were you ever vaccinated or took antibiotics? That's humans one-upping nature. The point, if anything, is that you can't overcome nature once and for all[0]. You have to put in effort to stay ahead. It's kind of implied in what life is in the first place. Evolution through natural selection is an optimization system. A greedy, short-sighted, incredibly dumb optimization system, but it has scale on its side. Which is why we are, for example, dealing with "superbugs" now. Life found a way around some of our antibiotics[1]. But this doesn't mean antibiotics were a mistake. It means we need to do better, one-up life again. Say, with phages. It's not hubris to realize we are smarter than dumb natural selection. It's not hubris to recognize we can win, and keep on winning. > To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world. Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering. Meanwhile, I'll take my antibiotics and phages and RNA vaccines and cars and computers and airplanes[2], and if someone actually gets around to cloning dinosaurs, I trust they'll have people on the team who know what interlocks are, or redundant power supply. Unlike in movies like Jurassic Park, there exist non-idiots in the real world, and we also have case studies and regulations governing handling dangerous animals and technologies. -- [0] - Ignoring for a moment that humans are nature too, and everything we do is part of "life finds a way", too. [1] - In big part because human societies are dumb too. Clear parallels to Jurassic Park here. [2] - Oh my god what an exercise of hubris powered flight is! Didn't we learn anything from the story of Icarus?!

vinceguidry 3y ago
If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > If you clone dinosaurs, they will find their way out and kill people. Maybe not your park, but your competitors are eventually gonna slip up. That's not at all a given, not until such cloned dinosaurs become ubiquitous. What is the rate of lions and tigers escaping zoos and killing people? Zoos aren't a new thing. I wouldn't be too worried about experimental lions escaping a high-tech, super high-profile zoo. > Hippos are now practically indigenous to Colombia thanks to Pablo Escobar. And yep, they hurt and kill people all the time. Good luck unringing that bell. We're a bit more advanced and organized worldwide than in times of Pablo Escobar. Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction. I mean, how much do you think a nu-dinosaur bone would fetch on the market? Also, imagine the damage control budget flowing in if one of the victims of escaping dinosaurs happens to be a US citizen. "We Have To Do Something" is a force to be reckoned with. Civil liberties get trampled, and whole countries get blown up, once the public fear ripens enough to go past Thoughts and Prayers stage.
  - vinceguidry 3y ago
    > Extincting large animals isn't a very difficult feat, especially if people were to react quickly. We usually have the opposite problem - keeping larger animals from being entrepreneured into extinction. Yet. Hippos still roam the jungles of Colombia freely. I'm sure they've even killed a few Americans. Nobody cares. When you're dealing with nature, you're dealing with something much bigger than you are. Sure you can throw more resources at the problem. Doesn't always work. Australians fought a war against emus and lost. The tumbleweed war in the American prairie is going nowhere. You seem to have this limitless faith in human ingenuity against nature that just doesn't make any sense. You open biological cans of worms, and it's going to take more resources than it's worth to fix properly. How many billions went into containing Chernobyl? And it's still not fixed. You just seem to want to give carte blanche to the Elon Musk's of the world because you want to believe they can dig us out of holes rather than dig us further into them. Were you really one of the ones who thought he could actually do something positive with Twitter?