The dinosaurs lived in an incomprehensibly different world. From the food and nutrition to the very air they were breathing which we only have vague ideas about. That means the first several generations at the very least would suffer and die from various nutrition, toxicity and environment issues. Even after all that got figured out the dinosaurs would likely have be confined to some small controlled environment right down to the air they breath because this is not the world they are evolved to exist in. Humans can't even figure out how to keep many currently living species alive in captivity and we can study them in the wild.
Basically if we bring back dinosaurs it will be to torture them for our amusement and curiosity. Even if unintentional. The movies make us think Jurassic Park but the reality would be more like a slaughter house or medical experiment lab. The movie wouldn't be exciting if every scene was the same as that sick triceratops. Its actually hilarious if you think up a version of the movie in your head where they just walk around watching animals dying and laboring to breath.
"they're hunting us!"
"lol JK you should have seen your face. No they would pass out after two steps if they tried to chase us. We have to feed them through tubes because they don't even have the energy to chew"
As far as I understand, keeping such creatures alive would require facilities with enriched oxygen. If the large ones escaped, they would suffocate.
"...large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28."
Volcanic activity in the Cretaceous enabled these high oxygen levels.
"The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... One of the problems that people have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is
comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more
than enough to essentially combat wildfires."
Oxygen only one part and for all we know there were other trace gasses in the air they required that we don't even know about.
There are all kinds of animals today we cannot keep alive in captivity because they require some sort of unknown sequence of environmental triggers to activate or deactivate various processes in their body.
For instance cheetahs are nearly impossible to breed in captivity because their mating process requires running for many miles to exhaustion. Without this the pregnancy rate is in the abyss even with artificial methods. There are endless examples thats just one off the top of my head.
Makes me wonder what the evolutionary benefit of keeping such triggers are and makes me wonder if part of the reason for the drop in human fertility in parts of the world is due to us removing some of those triggers for ourselves.
Sure it does, it's a "product", so in principle it participates in the reverse reaction. This probably doesn't actually make a difference for combustion, although CO2 does apparently work a bit better than N2 for firefighting in spite of the added weight, but that seems usually attributed being heavier-than-air (heavier than O2!) and somewhat polar. Not sure how applicable that is to wildfires when it's the atmosphere, though.
Why would a 2% CO2 atmosphere combat wildfires? It's a non-reacting gas, but so is nitrogen... And yet, wildfires still happen, despite our 79% nitrogen atmosphere.
While it is true that there are no wildfires on Venus, there is also no wood, or oxygen. Any oxygen released immediately reacts with the dirt to make, largely, more CO2.
If you wanted to terraform Venus, you would need to make diamonds out of the air so the carbon wouldn't just burn again. The oxygen you release would then react with the dirt and rocks to make more familiar minerals, and more CO2, of course. For a long time.
The whole surface would be a mile deep in diamonds before you finished. Hardly any water: the solar wind, not deflected by a magnetic field, carried most of that off. She probably had a field when she still rotated fast enough.
Earth gets to keep her water because the moon keeps us rotating enough to keep a magnetic field. Mars lost his because he is too small to keep a liquid core to generate the field with.
Yeah, I was pointing out that atmos can store a ton of CO2, past a certain point life be damned. Our lungs only work on the differential in the air lower to our body's.
They had feathers when they were dinosaurs, and they’re smaller now.
I can’t usefully comment on most of the actual science in that paper, but I already had reasons to expect significant changes to the total mass of the atmosphere before reading it — the difference between today and the pre-oxygen apocalypse era (~2.4 Gy) implies at least a change of either 0.21 bar (if the oxygen came from the water) or 0.07 bar (if it all came from CO2).
I have no idea what to also anticipate from geology, impacts, or other things life might do besides the GOE.
On mobile so I'll let other ppl sezrch. My $0.02: atmos pressure is a resultant of gravity, which is a result of mass.
The mass has reduced over time, due to solar wind blowing away our atmosphere. But compared with the mass of the friggin' earth, my intuition says atmos pressure has reduced only slightly
I see where you're going with that, but gravitational force is GMm/r^2, so the mass of the air column halving would halve the pressure, and the shell theorem implies that is exactly half and not even a rounding error on M because none of the air above (the only bit contributing to the pressure) can contribute to the gravity field.
First part is also why Venus, with a lower mass, is able to have about x89 Earth's atmospheric pressure.
Humans tolerate those altitudes very poorly. They suffer from health problems and miscarriages.
High-altitude genetic adaptations have been the subject of a fair amount of study; there are three major groups bearing such adapations: Tibetans, Ethiopians, and Andeans.
The Andean adaptation suite is noticeably more primitive and lower-quality; this is generally thought to be the result of having evolved only very recently, after humans made it to the Americas.
The Tibetan suite is so effective that part of it has been proposed to be the result of interbreeding between arriving homo sapiens and a different hominid species native to the Tibetan plateau.
Thanks. I didn't know Ethiopians were also in the altitude mutant club!
My anecdote is I travelled in Bolivia for 3 weeks. Never under 3700 meters. One day we climbed Uturunku (6008 meters) as part of a jeep tour, You start at 5100 meters, so it's less crazy than it sounds.
Of the 6 tourists starting, only 3 made it up, with some real struggles.
Meanwhile, our native guide seemed to just have a relaxing walk...
Humans are really exceptional in their ability to survive in a large range of environments. If you do some reading about just how fragile many if not most animals are in regards to their environment you will surprised that they exist at all.
"Basically if we bring back dinosaurs it will be to torture them for our amusement and curiosity". Just a thought experiment, I hope I won't be downvoted to hell. Isn't this the predicament of all beings? You might say, that some people enjoy life, but at that point you should
1) Confirm that all beings are not answering with a Stockholm Syndrome
2) Confirm what is the subjective experience of the dinosaur
I have neutral or positive emotions most of the time, and negative emotions only rarely. I almost never have negative thoughts (anymore).
You hit me with Stockholm Syndrome; I respond with Typical Mind Fallacy. Just because your life is largely suffering, you assume that all humans lives must largely consist of suffering. This is not true.
I meant that dinosaur are not biologically capable of living in this time period or this environment of earth. They would have to be on life support from birth. Even than it would take many years of trying before we figured out how to keep them alive. Which means they would start dying a slow agonizing death from the moment we create them.
It would be like dropping people off on Venus and saying make the best of the sulfuric acid atmosphere.
Have you ever seen a killer whale in captivity with its top fin floppy/not standing up straight. They have no idea why that happens in captivity they cannot figure out even after many decades of them being captive. Now imagine that with millions of years of difference.
Pretty unlikely that we would be able to find a complete DNA of a single species of dinosaur. More likely we would have to patch it together and while we're at it might as well modify it allow them to survive under current conditions. Just speaking hypothetically here but that seems like the more probable scenario.
That seems more plausible to me too, that we'd actually end up with something "based on actual dinosaurs!", maybe even with "Motel of the Mysteries"-type historical misconceptions baked in, just to make them meet expectations.
It seems like more than an issue of DNA to create a 50 ton dinosaur that could survive in a modern climate. Dinosaurs were able to reach their sizes precisely because of the oxygen-rich environment, not just their DNA.
What about not bringing back dinosaurs but changing the dna of say a chicken to resemble that what we'd consider to be a dinosaur without it actually being any historically known dinosaur?
Google searches for "high altitude dinosaur" mostly find complaints that scientists assume they exist but mountains are peak erosion sites so there are no fossils or other evidence.
Theoretically geologists could predict high altitude plains or areas of generally high ground, probably, and it would be interesting to see reported fossils in those known lower PP-O2 areas. Fossilized vegetation evidence in the area of dino fossils could indicate higher altitude for both.
Sure, intuitively most dinos would thrive in hot swampy jungles. But there's so much delicious higher altitude land covered in pine trees waiting to be eaten... The cold argument is serious, but plenty of animals migrate, so given great forest of edible food, something should have evolved to eat its way uphill in the summer ...
Yes, my thought exactly. The oxygen level in the air was significantly higher and there is no way some of those larger dinosaurs could exist without much higher oxygen content.
birds are dinosaurs. I’m not sure how much they evolved from their ancestors but I don’t think it’s much. If I were to guess Dinosaurs will live fine on the current earth.
So did many other organisms who are still with us today. I'm guessing most organisms will be fine if the basics are covered (tolerable level of oxygen and air pressure, tolerable levels of radiations).
Evolution doesn’t work by having individual creatures keep calm and carry on just ‘putting up’ with whatever geological, climatic or atmospheric changes take place.
Evolution works by having creatures that can’t handle the new situation die. Preferably before they are able to reproduce.
And it may have escaped your attention, but the large non-avian dinosaurs? They all died out.
Dinosaurs are gone, all that remains is their bone structures. No complete genomes are recoverable, just maybe a few fragments.
However if you want dinosaur-like creatures, you're basically talking giant flightless birds. So, start with something like an ostritch or a rhea, and use CRISPR to make selective edits aimed at increasing leg size and bone density. This would require a comprehensive understanding of development in these species, of course, and that's probably not there yet. You'd also want to create a fairly diverse source population so the new species wouldn't suffer from inbreeding issues.
Once you got the leg strength and body mass up, it's time to go for big sharp teeth. Increase spine strength and musculature, and then reactive that talpid2 gene with modifications that allow the embryos to survive to adulthood:
Now, would this giant mutant toothed ostrich be a dinosaur? For all intents and purposes, yes. Would doing this be a good idea, would you want these things running around suburban neighborhoods devouring stray cats and terrorizing the local human population? Maybe not.
Complete layman here. -- What about trying to reconstruct a likely common ancestor of reptiles and birds on the DNA level and combining this with the Parent's approach?
The ‘common ancestor of reptiles and birds’ is way older than dinosaurs. And it’s also the common ancestor of all mammals.
You could get the common ancestor of birds, dinosaurs, and a living reptile if you just go to the common ancestor of, say, a chicken and a crocodile. That’s also the ancestor of pterosaurs as well as dinosaurs though.
Pedantically, we don’t need to bring back the dinosaurs since they are already here. All birds are dinosaurs. If we want to bring back the non-avian dinosaurs, cause a mass extinction of mammals (we are doing a great job at that) and then wait millions of years.
Sauropods, particularly. And while we are at it, pterosaurs, which are not dinosaurs, and mosasaurs, likewise. All are equally plausible, meaning not.
The original article is actually promoting inventing new animals that look like dinosaurs. Or rather what we guess they looked like. We might be able to do that, someday.
Anything that looks like a sauropod would need solutions for all the problems anything sauropod-shaped would necessarily have had, and solved. There is no reason to think our solutions would match what they had, but we could anyway determine whether they were plausible solutions. My bet is on two-chambered auxiliary hearts all the way up the neck. (The null hypothesis is a volkswagen-sized heart and very, very thick artery walls, assuming new circulatory structures were out of reach.)
Sauropods are Saurischian not Ornitishian. But you are right, we want them too.
The vw sized heart was in a dinosaur show when I was a kid. Either David Norman or Bob Baker stood below a brachiosaur and told the audience about the heart. wow 30 years. Time flies.
For those in the back, sauropods, despite appearances, run with the tyrannosaurs and birds, not the triceratopses and hadrosaurs. Or anyway walk. Or did.
My solution to their energy problem is eusociality: big Mama stays put and is fed by the small fry who range far and wide. They also tend her eggs. She eats their first-level output, then they eat her better-digested leavings. The digestion scheme is like rabbits, and addresses the problem that absorbing nutrients through a 2D intestinal wall scales badly to a 3D animal. If she doesn't need to heave her bulk around the forest, her energy needs are lessened. Meanwhile, the small fry don't need to digest everything all the way.
I love thought experiments like these, One would have to think where could ancient dinosaur DNA survive? Antarctica has been covered by ice for 5 million years, that is still 60 million years too young. Maybe there are a few bugs that have dino dna that is better preserved than the stuff that has been exposed to sunlight and elements the past 5 million years. And even if there is viable dna you would have to drill down 13-15k feet of solid ice to the antarctic landmass, which might as well be impossible(if you knew exactly where to look).
And lets say you bring the dinosaurs back, what was the air and temperature like for them? back >65mya earth had 30% oxygen(its 21% today) that much oxygen would be hard to deal with for humans today(cuts would heal in a day though!), also forest fires would be uncontrollably bad. And what about the temperature? It would be 10 degrees warmer than it is today. So you would have to alter the climate and atmosphere significantly for your newly cloned dinosaurs to survive, or perhaps they could adapt to our current conditions, who can say?
If you want to make a really dramatic movie, have it survive in giant rock fragments knocked into orbit around the sun when the Chicxulub meteor struck the Earth. The inside would hopefully remain very cold and shielded from external radation.
I suspect though that not only would breakdown of DNA still happen on it's own, but atomic decay within the rock would be enough to destroy the DNA.
Lets not also forget cosmic rays and their effect on interstellar debris(astronauts helmets showed micro holes caused by these rays under an electron microscope) :)
My interest was piqued when you mentioned cuts would heal faster. Is there a video that explains what life would be like if the earth had higher concentrations of oxygen? (30,50,70)?
On mobile, will let someone else search. But what springs to mind : more O2 means faster reactions, so faster metabolisms, so bigger animals and more cancer. Though the latter only compared to equally sized animals today (bigger animals tend to have lower cancer rates I think?)
Interesting. I always assumed divers had 100% oxygen tanks, but I guess percentage and pressure are different things. But with that in mind, wouldn't a great percent of oxygen just mean there is less of the other gases, but the relative pressure would still be the same as gravity didn't change?
When you're dealing with one constituent of a gas mixture, it's partial pressure that counts, not the pressure of the whole mixture. If the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere were to increase without a change in overall atmospheric pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen would increase. Another way of saying this is, you would have more oxygen molecules in the same volume of space. The total number of all molecules per unit of volume would be the same, but more of those molecules would be oxygen. More oxygen molecules per unit of volume = higher pressure.
I don't think it's this simple. The structure of the egg and uterine environment play important roles in development. It's like a programming language with a compiler written in it's own language. Losing the living animals is like losing the compiler. Using a related animal is like using a fork of the lost compiler to recompile the lost compiler. If that fork has changed something you'll end up with something slightly different than the lost one.
I partly think the first animal born from such a process will not be a true representation of the genes it's born from-- that would require a second-generation organism borne from a pregnancy of its own kind.
You would possibly need many more generations, if it can even be achieved, as the Tyrannosaurus born from a chicken egg is not itself a true Tyrannosaurus and may not be able to create the right kinds of eggs because of that.
I'm generally with the detractors on a lot of this. I don't think that bringing back dinosaurs is the best idea. I do think getting more diversity with grazing animal populations and increasing the numbers for ruminants would be beneficial. A lot of the grasslands have deteriorated as the numbers of grazing populations have declined. Nature is an ecosystem, not a mono crop.
On the flip side, just with breeding, we've seen what variance can do to bee populations (africanized bees), and how a lack of diverse pollinators are less effective than honey bees alone.
I think containment for such organisms could be more challenging beyond the Jurrasic Park movie plot. For example would we also have to account for side effects such as horizontal gene transfer[0]?
If you bring them back, it's only a matter of time before they are in the ecosystem. Maybe we contain it for a decade, a century at most but it's going to happen. It's basically the plot of the entire movie series.
I think that's unrealistic - they either eat all their food (if there is even a climate they can survive in) or they get caught. Though this won't apply to small species as much. But the small dynos won't necessarily ruin the ecosystem as they won't be the apex predator. Not like a T-Rex is going to run around without being found, unless the host country collapses and no one cares. But it will just go extinct again, after causing some damage.
I remember in the 90s, when they cloned Polly (or Molly? I don’t remember), people predicted crazy future where we keep cloning animals and one day maybe humans.
I don’t hear much about cloning recently. What happened?
Apparently it's become so commonplace among pets that my dog's veterinary insurance policy specifically has an exclusion saying that our pet insurance does not cover cloning. I just googled "Dog Cloning" and there were a bunch of results offering the service.
Seems to me that until we can do it with a mammoth—which is way easier for a ton of reasons—bringing back any kind of dinosaur is about as sci-fi as faster-than-light travel.
Maybe as biology hacking becomes the new frontier in the coming decades we'll be able to work back from a bird to something impressively dinosaur-like, but I'm not optimistic about growing one from DNA fragments or whatever. Even with a complete genome I think it'd be damn difficult.
As others on this thread pointed out, faithfully replicating a dinosaur is both difficult, due to lack of data and a bit pointless if it could be accomplished.
Synthetic biology has bigger fish to fry. For example we are very likely to find that humans are really bad at living in space or on other planets. Fixing that problem has more practical implications.
In the future we can simulate growth and metabolism of a specimen, when we have its DNA. So we'll at least have a biologically accurate simulated Jurassic Park.
That's also when we can debug consciousness, given that our simulation is accurate enough. I have no idea how many years we'll have to wait. Maybe 50 years?
That was my thought as well. With sufficiently advanced computing and world modeling, we wouldn't use DNA to bring back real creatures, just high-fidelity digital ones, complete with a simulated environment that suits them.
I always have one simple adage that I recite: eternity is a long time.
We can't know what will be in the realm of possibilities in 100 years, let alone 1000 years or tens of thousands of years.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if we'd be able to recreate dinosaurs in a couple hundred years. And whether it's a good thing isn't really the issue. If Man can do something, he will.
The only thing I'm pretty sure about is that it won't be in our lifetimes. Unless we conquer aging and death that is.
I’m surprised to see the lack of comments suggesting to use AI to piece together their DNA. Since the DNA breaks down into thousands of pieces, is it not simply a giant puzzle? Surely there are similarities in many modern species DNA that a properly trained neural network can reassemble. For the 20 or 30% of the rest of the DNA, we’ll need a lot of experimentation.
What happened to the findings of the gelatinous blood vessels and blood cells that they found within a tyranosaurus rex bone? It was something that scientists said would have been impossible, but they found it about 10 years ago.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard ANYTHING about this. Did they bury this or something or has anything been released about this since then?
I did not read the article but the title of this post begs the question “Why?”. While I can understand the value of entertainment , I think it would be better to have robotic replicas of dinos rather than the real ones. Just my 2 cents.
If you can construct a dinosaur zygote (genome, a wealth of proteins and enzymes, epigenetic markers, cell environment, etc. etc.), you can easily oxygenate a containment room or adjust the metabolic parameters.
DNA's short half life (relative to geological time scales) means we likely won't be recovering enough information from fossils. DNA is a reactive species (it has to be to undergo the incredible mechanics it does). I'm not going to calculate the number of samples we'd need - it's a lot.
Any future "clones" will leverage the wealth of information we gain from our current biodiversity. Really advanced computer-generated approximations of what the biochemistry, developmental biology, etc. could have been.
It dropped by a third, which is less than the difference between New York and La Paz, so I guess they could deal with it? I wonder how well their immune systems would handle modern germs, though...
We've never done the experiment, but there are innumerable germs that infect across species, so they'd be catching all kinds of stuff.
"FIV cross-species transmission: An evolutionary prospective" is an interesting paper as an example. It seems FIV infects all cats in the cat family. That paper has a long discussion of the old and new world cat problem as relates to FIV. I'm well aware that saber tooth tigers are not dinos but if we brought saber tooth tigers back they would probably be screwed over by FIV either instantly or at least very soon.
An interesting google search phrase is "diseases of farmed crocodiles and ostriches" and apparently there's a reason our supermarkets are full of the livestock we eat; raising meat crocs looks like a HUGE disease headache. Imagine a giant 400 foot long dinosaur suffering from Caiman Pox.
Raising disease free reptiles that we already have experience with seems to be a big headache; I predict it would be pretty tough to raise dinos.
Certainly it's somewhat unlikely (but not impossible!) for them to be susceptible to a virus.
Bacteria/fungal/etc though? They are perfectly susceptible to all those "germs". Strep doesn't really care if it's infecting a human or an animal. It just needs a hospitable environment.
Dinosaurs are distant ancestors of birds, and we keep billions of birds in captivity all over the world, which has allowed for a whole host of pretty nasty diseases that affect birds to evolve. It would be surprising if none of those were capable of infecting dinosaurs.
> Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago and became extinct long before humans existed. Even if we had the technology to bring them back, we would not have any of their DNA to use as a template.
Sounds like you didn't read the article. Hendrik Poinar, the director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, said "Will we ever find a dinosaur that has viable DNA? I’ve learned to never say never." And then a footnote associated with that statement said "Last March, researchers founHed evidence of preserved cartilage cells and DNA in a 75-million-year-old baby dinosaur fossil."
Your other points make sense, but only to a degree. Sure, dinosaurs-as-a-whole probably wouldn't do too well naturally in our environment, but how sure can we be that a few species wouldn't be able to survive? And isn't it plausible that an artificial habitat could be constructed that could allow even more to survive? After all, we have ways to keep pretty much any animals (including humans) alive in artificial habitats that are kept in environments the animals wouldn't normally survive in (see: zoos, aquariums, space stations).
I find it fascinating that we may be able to clone extinct species, but I agree with the warnings about the dangers of de-extinction. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. It's important to consider the potential consequences of bringing back ancient species, both for the animals themselves and for the ecosystem. It's also worth noting that even if we are able to successfully clone a dinosaur, it's unlikely that it would be a true copy of the original due to the degradation of DNA over time. Cloning a dinosaur would be more like creating a genetically modified hybrid than reviving a true extinct species.
clever-hans 4 hours ago | undown [flagged] | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
I agree that ChatGPT/generated responses should be banned on HN. It undermines the integrity of the platform and goes against the spirit of genuine discussion and collaboration. Let's not turn HN into a spammy bot-infested wasteland.
>"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" is the second episode of the seventh series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. It first aired on BBC One in the UK on 8 September 2012 and on BBC America on the same date in the United States. It was written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Saul Metzstein.
>The episode features alien time traveller the Doctor (Matt Smith) and his companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) accompanied by Rory's father, Brian (Mark Williams), Queen Nefertiti (Riann Steele), and John Riddell, a British big-game hunter (Rupert Graves). The group lands on a large spaceship that contains dinosaurs and discover that it is a Silurian ark, though the Silurians have been murdered by Solomon (David Bradley), a black market trader who is intent on finding something of value.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.
Basically if we bring back dinosaurs it will be to torture them for our amusement and curiosity. Even if unintentional. The movies make us think Jurassic Park but the reality would be more like a slaughter house or medical experiment lab. The movie wouldn't be exciting if every scene was the same as that sick triceratops. Its actually hilarious if you think up a version of the movie in your head where they just walk around watching animals dying and laboring to breath.
"they're hunting us!"
"lol JK you should have seen your face. No they would pass out after two steps if they tried to chase us. We have to feed them through tubes because they don't even have the energy to chew"