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What do you think is the downside? Affecting evolution is kind of the point (we don't want them to go extinct).

• joshuapants 12y ago
  What would be the downside of having dinosaurs around? What would be the downside of me being a Homo habilis and carving this message into the side of a large rock? Whenever humans meddle with the environment there are drastic unintended consequences. I get it, they're charismatic animals and that's probably why I'm being downvoted, but I don't think this is a particularly unreasonable dissenting opinion.
  • Mz 12y ago
    What would be the downside of having dinosaurs around? Dinosaurs couldn't possibly still be around. They existed in an era with a much more dense atmosphere and a much higher concentration of oxygen (30% vs 16%, iirc). The type of lung they had and the size of body they had -- they would suffocate here in our current atmosphere. It would be like a really bad case of altitude sickness. I think that's a very different scenario from what this article talks about, where humans have basically created this virus by domesticating dogs and having a fairly homogenous population of domesticated animals globally and now there are several billion humans...etc....and it is killing wild animals that shouldn't be all getting exposed to the same illness. I really think this is a very different thing from natural extinction of dinosaurs.