well that's why I'm skeptical too, what are the odds that a big vanity project just happens to also be a great climate change fix? They also want to resurrect the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. It's hard enough to find climate solutions that work when you're motivated by that, when you're motivated by "doing cool stuff" you might stumble onto a solution, but the odds do seem rather low.
They would be trying to resurrect the mammoth either way, so it's not like there's any real incentive to actually research whether it will work.
> It's hard enough to find climate solutions that work when you're motivated by that, when you're motivated by "doing cool stuff" you might stumble onto a solution, but the odds do seem rather low.
Yes, it is critical to not let your focus split, and always stay true to the most important goal.
If you're a robot.
"Doing cool stuff" is one of the major, most basic drives behind progress of science and technology. Definitely more honest than "doing it for the money" or "doing it for social status", where you can always find ways to cheat if the going gets annoying. "Doing cool stuff" is up there with "doing it to save ourselves from an imminent, lethal threat" - the other highly reliable motivator that has little tolerance for bullshit, and was responsible for most of the rapid progress thorough history. Of the two, I'd prefer the one that doesn't involve violence and fear of death. It's probably more sustainable, too.
See also: something something Feynman on having fun in research.
Consider also: Most progress happens in small increments; the set of people motivated by wanting to solve climate is small, so it doesn't really hurt to also add the people motivated by doing cool shit in parallel. The chance of getting critical increment doubles; the chance of any one in any of the two groups having the full solution is ~zero.
I think it's great to have "help fix the climate" as a sort of stretch goal for someone's cool project, it's just not something I'm going to take particularly seriously. Maybe they'll produce a couple mammoths who get sold to zoos and then get bored and move on to their dodo resurrection instead.
I worry that they can use the climate change argument to deflect from the ethical arguments around whether it's even a good idea to resurrect a highly intelligent social animal like this. Imagine bioengineering a resurrected "Neanderthal" into a world without Neanderthals. There's something bleak about it. If the breeding/release idea doesn't work out you've just intentionally created some endlings[0] with no real future.
Asimov wrote an interesting story that has a similar premise.[0] Since I read it as a child I have wanted to see cloned hominids.
I think that in the near future we'll wealthy weirdos start to clone their ancestors, and things like native groups in colonized places like Canada or New Zealand start to clone their ancestors to buff up their population and strengthen their legal claims to territory. Think about what we'll be able to do with artificial wombs.[1]
As for your neanderthal endlings it probably will be pretty bleak for a lot of these hominids, but who knows, maybe some of them will end up being smarter than your average human and they'll have a role in society.
Also, recreation is technology. If it turns out that ten mammoths are more efficient and require less human maintenance to modulate tundra and encourage the ecocycle, we know how to do it. We don't need to start a 50 year investment in 2050 and hope it works. Mammoths are likely to be equally or more useful than AI image generation or gigantic warehouses that sequester carbon given various precision-machined parts and chemical engineering. Animals are more efficient and require fewer externalities than most human endeavors. Even if we just ignore the externalities and admire these new impressive technologies. Life is very efficient.
I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.
When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.
Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
It's been a while since I took any classes about it, but I don't think i implies "repeating time." I'm pretty sure it's just from the fact that waves themselves are repeating, i.e. periodic. But Schrodinger's equation doesn't say anything about the nature of time itself IIRC.
Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
you'd be absolutely right that the global warming justification is a retro-active "find a problem" situation. the true motivator lies in the technology that Colossal is attempting to accomplish the mammoth cloning with.
as it stands right now, cloning of any organism requires at the very least living fibroblast cells. Of course, you cannot get these from deceased mammals. Colossal's strategy is to essentially blast the host genome with fragments of the subjects DNA (which you can get from deceased/fossilized tissue) and hope that the end result is an elephant cell that's been reprogrammed into a mammoth-like cell from which to do cloning.
imo if they really wanted a mammoth, they could just make a hairy elephant. that would be 10x easier. but the whole idea is being able to resurrect...mammals.
From a certain point of view, the entire civilization beyond the absolute basics is a "big vanity project". Whenever you gaze at Notre Dame or Taj Mahal, or even an old Greek amphitheatre of which there are hundreds, you can say "this could have been used to feed the poor, no one needs a theatre to survive and a theatre won't help us solve climate change or whatever pressing problem is on the horizon".
But people in general don't want to live completely utilitarian life, and your "vanity" is someone else's "exploration of the possible" or "lifting up human mind". Both of you might even be right at the same time.
It's a bit like saying you're going to Mars to save the world. No, you're going to Mars because it would be cool.
Doing stuff because it would be cool is great, it's just kind of dumb to pretend you're doing it for a practical purpose. Just say you want to do the big thing because it would be fun, or inspiring, or you have a trillion dollars and can afford it.
