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Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change t

Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de-extinction-is-bad-conservation/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de...

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford cars. This does not seem like a very good argument against anything new.
- buttercraft 2y ago
  Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and mammoths to work in a few years...
  - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
    We'll perhaps visit them at the zoo.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park that wealthy and middle class people can visit.
      - lukan 2y ago
        True philantropists it seems. (Never mind, that they never conserved anything)
      - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
        "HN is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it"
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        I think people are conflating (fiction writer) Michael Crichton's claims of Jurassic Park being for the wealthy and well-connected with the real-world economics of a zoo.
        lolinder 2y ago
        Can you elaborate?
        shadowgovt 2y ago
        As people have noted in other threads: Zoos, generally, maximize revenue (and community value, which is its own ineffable thing that matters a lot... The economics of zoos aren't just in dollars and cents, they're also in the local community thinking of them as a shelter, care space, and opportunity to see exotic animals without going to another continent and not, say, an animal-prison and a blight on the community, the kind of opinions that matter when zoos need more land to operate or want to form research or educational partnerships with neighboring institutions) by being a place the public can afford to go. As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.
leesec 2y ago
Why would a zoo or something just be for wealthy people
- johnecheck 2y ago
  Investors expect returns on the hundreds of millions of dollars they've invested. At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    They could just get the government to pay the company gobs of money for conservation efforts...
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    In fact, Apple has invested so much money in the iPhone. The only way they can make it work is if they sell the iPhone only to billionaires. Yes, just like Disney. The cost of Disneyland and Disneyworld mean that the only way it could provide a return is if the only people who can attend are the very wealthy. I think my model of the world is very good. It accurately describes things.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - johnecheck 2y ago
      iPhones are very expensive. If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        Oh I see. When you meant "very expensive" you meant "easily accessible for the median American" and when that guy said "wealthy people" you interpreted that to be "the median American". It's true that Europeans and so on are quite poor but the company is in the US. Yep, factually most Africans can't go to Disneyland either.
vrosas 2y ago
The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number of species if and when they're in danger.
- Hemospectrum 2y ago
  I'm continually disappointed they didn't decide to call it "reinstinction."
- johnecheck 2y ago
  Any number of species? Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This money and research would be better spent preventing the ecosystems from collapsing in the first place. If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed. But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root causes of that extinction is idiocy. Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.
  - vrosas 2y ago
    Climate change is only one reason for extinctions. Humans also tend to hunt a lot of things out of existence, like the dodo, that Colossal is also trying to bring back.
    - oyashirochama 2y ago
      Non climate hunting and direct habitat destruction is likely the largest cause of the current mass extinction event going on, life will eventually find a way to take advantage of humans like rats and pigeons already do or avoid it entirely like bats do.
  - prescriptivist 2y ago
    > Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us. Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.
lolinder 2y ago
Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked. That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.
- bbor 2y ago
  Plus, at a certain point we should probably ask what we're even doing here. At the same time and using the same ostensible "pro-environment" framework, we: 1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl, 2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and 3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity. If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead. Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones! TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...
  - octopoc 2y ago
    A big reason why we should support biodiversity is that once an animal is extinct, it's practically impossible to bring it back. With small effort now we can avoid great effort later. And any ecosystem is so unbelievably complex that we just aren't yet at the point where we can predict exactly how things will adapt. I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily predict what will happen if we go back to one.
jdminhbg 2y ago
Wealthy people, huh? Well now I’m against it!
- johnecheck 2y ago
  Lmao 'wealthy people bad' was definitely the substance of the critique, thank you for your valuable insight.
qoez 2y ago
The main lesson from 90s movies is that we must build the torment nexus
generalizations 2y ago
That entire article just sounds like a collection of every naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days? Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a preexisting opposition to the idea.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Collosal would face less pushback if they were upfront about the fact that they aren't a serious attempt at solving any ecological issues but that maybe they could push the tech forward enough that someone else could use it to solve real problems. There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that they are.
  - generalizations 2y ago
    I suspect the environmental pushback is from a vocal minority which dislikes the cynical lip-service companies have found it necessary/expedient to give. "nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now. In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving an endangered species or restoring one with all of its actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.
ta1243 2y ago
> in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay Perhaps they could have a coupon day?
- nopelynopington 2y ago
  Someone's rewatched recently :)
  - gautamcgoel 2y ago
    The only one on my side is the bloodsucking lawyer!
  - ta1243 2y ago
    There's some lines from various films from my teenage years that just live in my brain rent-free
silisili 2y ago
> a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.
dekhn 2y ago
this is basically George Church's MO. I respect him for his early work in sequencing, and he has some crazy/great ideas, but he also oversells everything to the press, which eats it up and spits out articles with the narrative "we're saving the world with this crazy idea"

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

In the beginning, only "a few wealthy people" could afford cars. This does not seem like a very good argument against anything new.

buttercraft 2y ago
Yeah, as if we're all going to be riding dire wolves and mammoths to work in a few years...
- MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  We'll perhaps visit them at the zoo.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Oh, good, so when that happens they'll be making some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park that wealthy and middle class people can visit.
    - lukan 2y ago
      True philantropists it seems. (Never mind, that they never conserved anything)
    - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
      "HN is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it"
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      I think people are conflating (fiction writer) Michael Crichton's claims of Jurassic Park being for the wealthy and well-connected with the real-world economics of a zoo.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Can you elaborate?
        shadowgovt 2y ago
        As people have noted in other threads: Zoos, generally, maximize revenue (and community value, which is its own ineffable thing that matters a lot... The economics of zoos aren't just in dollars and cents, they're also in the local community thinking of them as a shelter, care space, and opportunity to see exotic animals without going to another continent and not, say, an animal-prison and a blight on the community, the kind of opinions that matter when zoos need more land to operate or want to form research or educational partnerships with neighboring institutions) by being a place the public can afford to go. As far as I can tell, the idea of a dinosaur zoo as an exotic locale on its own island is... Pretty much a whole-cloth invention by Michael Chrichton. Based loosely on Disney, and even Disney's first two theme parks are places a public can drive to (and Disney works hard to keep prices down against the onslaught of the supply-demand curve of "very few parks that everyone wants to go to at least once in their lives"). It's an idea very detached from reality and I'm pretty sure it was a plot device to make sure our characters were trapped on the island instead of being able to just walk to the gate and drive away.

leesec 2y ago

Why would a zoo or something just be for wealthy people

johnecheck 2y ago
Investors expect returns on the hundreds of millions of dollars they've invested. At best, it'll be a very expensive zoo.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  They could just get the government to pay the company gobs of money for conservation efforts...
- renewiltord 2y ago
  In fact, Apple has invested so much money in the iPhone. The only way they can make it work is if they sell the iPhone only to billionaires. Yes, just like Disney. The cost of Disneyland and Disneyworld mean that the only way it could provide a return is if the only people who can attend are the very wealthy. I think my model of the world is very good. It accurately describes things.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnecheck 2y ago
    iPhones are very expensive. If you own an iPhone, you're already wealthier than a large chunk of the planet.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Oh I see. When you meant "very expensive" you meant "easily accessible for the median American" and when that guy said "wealthy people" you interpreted that to be "the median American". It's true that Europeans and so on are quite poor but the company is in the US. Yep, factually most Africans can't go to Disneyland either.

vrosas 2y ago

The mammoth is the big PR project but Colossal is working on a number of species, and the idea is the research will enable us to easily "de-extinct" or prop up the population of any number of species if and when they're in danger.

Hemospectrum 2y ago
I'm continually disappointed they didn't decide to call it "reinstinction."
johnecheck 2y ago
Any number of species? Maybe in theory, but propping up an entire ecosystem in collapse is well beyond Colossal's reach and incentives. This money and research would be better spent preventing the ecosystems from collapsing in the first place. If we fix climate change, I could see an argument for investing in restoring the ecosystems that were destroyed. But 'de-extincting' a species without addressing the root causes of that extinction is idiocy. Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.
- vrosas 2y ago
  Climate change is only one reason for extinctions. Humans also tend to hunt a lot of things out of existence, like the dodo, that Colossal is also trying to bring back.
  - oyashirochama 2y ago
    Non climate hunting and direct habitat destruction is likely the largest cause of the current mass extinction event going on, life will eventually find a way to take advantage of humans like rats and pigeons already do or avoid it entirely like bats do.
- prescriptivist 2y ago
  > Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us. Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.

lolinder 2y ago

Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked. That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.

bbor 2y ago
Plus, at a certain point we should probably ask what we're even doing here. At the same time and using the same ostensible "pro-environment" framework, we: 1. refuse to engage in biome modification to save soon-to-be-homeless species like the Axolotl, 2. are willing to go to great lengths to preserve existing biomes exactly as they are, such as opening up owl hunting permits to protect the western US's shittier owls from encroachment by the dominant eastern species, and 3. are trying to revive mammoths and dire wolves to increase biodiversity. If we truly care about biodiversity, we should probably decide upfront why we aren't protecting some of the 400K species of beetles or 150K species of flies (together making up ~1/3rd of all animal species) instead. Personally, my preferred answer is simpler: embrace human aesthetic preferences, rather than pretend we're doing all this for some altruistic, scientifically-supported cause. Not only should we respect nature, we should respect its inherent capacity for change and disregard for human morality. Nature is ambivalent towards mass extinctions, much less specific ones! TBH, the Red Mars books' discussion around when and why to preserve abiotic martian landscapes may have radicalized me on this issue...
- octopoc 2y ago
  A big reason why we should support biodiversity is that once an animal is extinct, it's practically impossible to bring it back. With small effort now we can avoid great effort later. And any ecosystem is so unbelievably complex that we just aren't yet at the point where we can predict exactly how things will adapt. I haven't read Red Mars but these are both very different from an abiotic landscape. You can easily go back to an abiotic landscape on Mars because that's the default. It doesn't take delicacy. And, an abiotic landscape is extremely simple compared to an ecosystem. We can easily predict what will happen if we go back to one.

jdminhbg 2y ago

Wealthy people, huh? Well now I’m against it!

johnecheck 2y ago
Lmao 'wealthy people bad' was definitely the substance of the critique, thank you for your valuable insight.

qoez 2y ago

The main lesson from 90s movies is that we must build the torment nexus

generalizations 2y ago

That entire article just sounds like a collection of every naysayer argument they could find, compiled into an authoritative-sounding essay on why doing nothing is better than doing some very cool proof-of-concept genetic editing tech. Are they just reflexively against tech these days? Because when the arguments they bring are so scattered and miscellaneous, it sure sounds like they're justifying a preexisting opposition to the idea.

lolinder 2y ago
Collosal would face less pushback if they were upfront about the fact that they aren't a serious attempt at solving any ecological issues but that maybe they could push the tech forward enough that someone else could use it to solve real problems. There's nothing wrong with building cool proof-of-concept tech as a prestige project that might actually lead to real solutions some day, but Collosal's dire wolf lookalike and mammoth lookalike and whatever else lookalike aren't a serious solution to a problem nor a direct path towards a solution, so they get valid criticism for pretending that they are.
- generalizations 2y ago
  I suspect the environmental pushback is from a vocal minority which dislikes the cynical lip-service companies have found it necessary/expedient to give. "nor a direct path" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there - I see no reason to push back against a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process. If you're claiming that their attempts yet a solution, then your point is as useless as expecting them to solve the entire problem on the first go. If you're claiming that their attempts aren't even going in the right direction, and aren't how you find a solution, then that would require much more evidence towards a negative proof than has yet been raised here - enough to say that they should definitely give up now. In fact, insofar as we care about extinction, their success is likely our best shot at long-term preservation. I'd like to see them keep trying.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > a company that is figuring out how to run back the extinction process Are they, though? This isn't a dire wolf, it's a wolf with a few genes tweaked to make it look more like a dire wolf. I see no evidence that they have any intention of pursuing the far more arduous task of actually preserving an endangered species or restoring one with all of its actual DNA, and I don't see a compelling reason to believe that introducing a lookalike in the wild will do anything to fill the gap left by the real thing.

ta1243 2y ago

> in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay Perhaps they could have a coupon day?

nopelynopington 2y ago
Someone's rewatched recently :)
- gautamcgoel 2y ago
  The only one on my side is the bloodsucking lawyer!
- ta1243 2y ago
  There's some lines from various films from my teenage years that just live in my brain rent-free

silisili 2y ago

> a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" Oh come on, we already know the end goal is for the uber rich to be able to "hunt" a Mammoth in a small enclosure, then post tacky pics in safari clothes next to a dead one on Facebook.

dekhn 2y ago

this is basically George Church's MO. I respect him for his early work in sequencing, and he has some crazy/great ideas, but he also oversells everything to the press, which eats it up and spits out articles with the narrative "we're saving the world with this crazy idea"