Why do the dinosaurs always escape in Jurassic Park? Is it because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that life always finds a way? Or is it because nobody pays to see a movie where a couple of brats go on an uneventful vacation to a dinosaur zoo?
It's definitely the latter, but through the power of repetition people started to believe it was the former.
Neither. It's because it's extremely difficult to keep large animals confined indefinitely through all circumstances. Ask any farmer with livestock. The bigger they are, the more capable they are of ignoring whatever fencing/obstacles you put in the way.
Zoos keep Rhinos. They manage without the kind of budget that a resurrected dinosaur would afford. They also keep elephants, 800lb gorillas, chimps, ostriches, all kinds of powerful and intelligent beasts capable of reproduction. They sometimes escape, but it's the exception, and killing the animal(s) is always a last-ditch option.
That last point is another place where I expect a huge fiction-reality gap. If I pay to watch a movie about a dinosaur getting loose, I want to see it shrug off bunker-busting missiles from fighter jets, with big fireball explosions and people jumping in the air and the hero magically surviving. I don't want to see a short, sad walk down to the city park where they try and fail for an hour to coax it back and ultimately decide that they have to shoot it with a slightly larger than average rifle. That's the boring and horrible but realistic scenario.
There's nothing wrong with the movie scene not being realistic, but there is something wrong with blindly assuming that the movie scene is realistic.
Zoos keep large animals in significantly smaller areas that are easier to control and maintain. I can see someone making "Jurassic Zoo" where you're keeping a few fairly docile dinosaurs in an area of a few acres. I don't have hard data but the territories in Jurassic Park look like they were measured in square miles.
If "escapes are rare and low-consequence" is your point, I'm happy to agree.
Re: enclosure size, that's because city land is expensive, not because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that it is impossible to hold an animal in a large enclosure. Come on.
Jurassic Park is a great example of hard scifi in that the problems which happen all happen in believable ways.
It's still fiction and not an attempt to realistically estimate the rate at which problems would happen or the magnitude of those problems if they did. Look to zoos if you want a realistic point of comparison for the risk analysis -- but not if you want to watch a T-Rex chase kids in Jeeps.
Yep. I was actually thinking of zoos as a counterpoint to my post upthread. But the difference is that of scale: how do you allow a T-Rex or a herd of brachiosaurs the square miles they need for their territory and still keep them within that territory? You may as well just say, "let's not bother fencing them in and just use the ocean itself as the barrier."
No, hold on. This isn't this isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation or or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs ah ah had their shot, and Nature selected them for extinction.
But we all want Jurassic Park though. And we likely will get it in the next few decades, just like we will likely also get Westworld park full of virtual beings that you can seduce (and we probably have something near equivalent in VR now.)
I really doubt people want to seduce sexbots in a public park. If we get realistic west world sexbots, expect them to follow the business model of hookers.
I watched the original, which was awesome. Newer one didn't appeal to me.
It's a cute idea but that would be stupidly expensive. It would be difficult to compete with the nearby hotel that includes 10 robo-whores complementary with each night at 1/100th of the price; or a giga-chad sex machine that you can just purchase for home use. For sex, or, actually, just as a worker to do real labor because that's a hugely valuable task to society rather than playing pretend saloon whore for a few billionaires.
I think you've summed up the biggest immersion breaker in that program for me. At some point a character mentions a cost of $40,000/day, which seems like a huge amount until you look at how much staff is needed to keep the park running (including apparently an entire private army), and the amount of damage done on a daily basis which then needs fixing.
That's pretty funny. Strictly speaking, there has to be more robots than people in the park at any time. Probably by a factor of 10-20 or so if you want people to feel like the real people tourists are a small minority. Implying each robot is earning about $2,000-4,000/day. Ignoring the fact that they get destroyed and other fixed costs, it would take years to pay these things off assuming they cost upwards of $10M each.
>which seems like a huge amount until you look at how much staff is needed to keep the park running (including apparently an entire private army), and the amount of damage done on a daily basis which then needs fixing.
[Spoiler]
They did mention that the real money maker for the park was information collection, not the admission fees.
It's definitely the latter, but through the power of repetition people started to believe it was the former.