Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sebastianconcpt 1208 days ago
Don't we had a lot of movies explaining how bad this could go? Don't we had enough self inflicted catastrophes to keep us entertained that we need another disruptive one?
3 comments

Not a single one of those movies are an actual argument against a real de-extinction project.
Yes, because the parent comment's point was they are an argument _against_ not _for_ de-extinction
Obviously. Edited the missing words in my comment.
Well, I find the arrogance in trying to undo Natural Selection quite cute. She'll win. Big time.
Pretty sure humans caused the extinction of many of the target de-extinction animals. We became insanely good hunters, and killed off just a massive amount of megafauna like mammoths, and then we proceeded to do it to a ton of other species.

I am not so fatalistic about humanity’s environmental impact to just chalk it up to “well, see, mammoths shouldn’t have been so easy for humans to kill and so tasty…” or the same thing applied to any of the more recent species due to habitat loss, etc. (“sorry you can’t thrive in suburbs or clear cut fields, evolution is a b*tch, ain’t she?”)

Humanity’s capacity for higher level reflection is ALSO “natural” in the same sense, so all of these de-extinction projects are equally “natural.”

Where's the line when it constitutes 'undoing natural selection'? Resurrecting extinct animals? Conservation efforts? Taking antibiotics?
In the reversal of extintion part. There is the line. Your other examples are mere interference to produce artificial selection, which it doesn't have to be always undesirable, of course.
You mean Jurassic Park, that famous parable of the need for better fences?
People seem to be forgetting the meaning of "fiction" recently. Citing Jurassic Park makes about as much sense as citing cyberpunk's loss of humanity trope from cybernetics as the reason why amputees should be denied functional prosthetics.