Nothing bad will happen, as long as they spare no expense.
It’s all fun and games until you’re being chased down in your Jeep by a dodo.
The world they lived in is long gone along with the food they ate and the rest of their species. It seems almost cruel to bring them back.
Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That’s (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).
I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They’ll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.
Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We’d be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn’t have that specific issue.
Different group, I think, and not as close to success. The thylacine has a better chance at long-term survival if we do bring it back, though—it isn’t an ice age creature, and it was surviving despite competition from other creatures in a similar niche until humans started aggressively hunting it down.
It’s not that long gone. There were still mammoths around when the pyramids were built. Plus there’s still huge swaths of tundra and taiga that they could live on, with a lot of the same plants, even if it’s quite a bit warmer.
In the grand scheme of things the pyramids were built relatively recently, but I’d still consider it quite long ago
Measured in human life it’s long ago. measured at universal scales, it was nothing.
Not advocating for restoring the mammoth, but this is a dangerous line of argument.
With climate change and ongoing mass extinctions, many current species are or will soon be in the same situation that re-introduced mammoths would be—and you could use the same argument to say that trying to preserve them is cruel so we should kill off any current species facing environmental stress.
I’ve said this a million times before, but if we’re playing gods anyway, can’t we make them dog sized also?
I would totally get one or maybe two.
They’ll be wearing stylish pool noodles on the tusks to minimize furniture and gonad damage.
Or we create them with softer tusks. Maybe that’s better, the. They’ll also be worthless to poachers.
I don’t want to live in a world that has wooly mammoths with floppy tusks. It just seems wrong.
I hope they have put a substantial amount of thought into potential problems that could arise. (Not that it will actually be like JP)
I hope whatever species that comes after us doesn’t bring us back
No! They did it! They blew it up!
And then the apes blew up their society too. How could this happen?
And then the birds took over and ruined their society.
And then the cows. And then…I don’t know, is that a slug, maybe?
Noooo!
