12th July 2006, 11:45 AM
lazyfatbum Wrote:haha the message wasn't dont clone dinosaurs, it was dont clone things period, let nature do its thing. We wipe out a species of bird because of new parking lot, a tiger wipes out a species of rodent in the unmapped regions of africa. Because of the destruction of the natural ecology and food chain nature will take over and correct it in whatever logical way is available. If those birds we wiped out took care of the overpopulation of insects, other insect eating animals will grow in numbers because of the larger food source, if another predator that ate those rodents cant find its food source, it either leaves in search of something similar or goes after something else. A few decades later you'll never know there was a problem.
The difference is that there's the factor of guilt for us, that it's our fault for killing off an entire species of something. Even when they mention the wolly mammoth they have to throw in that we're probably the reason it no longer exists.
Anyway, at the end of the film of the first Jurassic Park Dr. Grant watches a flock of pelicans fly over the sea. While it's not explained, the feeling I get that from that shot is that dinosaurs changed and evolved and moved on and we're holding on to the past imagining these animals that no longer exist because they changed with the world. With dinosaurs though, well take a grizzly for example. You can shoot it in the head with a high calibur rifle repeatedly and you wont kill it just because of its massive size and mass, density of muscle and bone, etc. Now imagine a 40 foot grizzly; you would need a mechanized assault team just to take it down in case it realized that it can do whatever it wants, a 40 foot grizzly would probably need to eat alot of meat every day, wiping out entire towns of people in a few hours just to keep its belly full. Now imagine a world with hundreds of millions of 40 foot grizzlies in every part of the world. It would take years of intense military action, an almost constant war effort against the animals to thin the numbers down and if they can breed quickly and/or it's just too costly to kill them all financially we could end up with protected safe-spots for man kind where only certain cities have protection against the 40 foot grizzlies meaning that they essentially have 'won' and claimed the earth.
Unless every human being is armed with tactical nukes and high calibur 40MM cannons a world with dinosaurs would be a dinosaur's world very quickly.
All just blind speculation.
I see nothing inherantly wrong with cloning.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)