[HN Gopher] What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
___________________________________________________________________
What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
Author : mooreds
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-12-12 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thewalrus.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (thewalrus.ca)
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| Stupidity.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| 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?
| sseagull wrote:
| Don't know about the second question, but I think you are
| thinking of Dolly the sheep:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)
| sizimon wrote:
| The sheep was named Dolly, after Dolly Parton, because the cell
| used for cloning was taken from a mammary gland.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)
| farisjarrah wrote:
| 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.
| nobleach wrote:
| Wait... this was RePet from Total Recall.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Oh wow that really is a thing!
|
| Why be sad for your dog's death when you can just clone him.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I loved my chosen. How then could I accept the day she
| died? So I took from her body a single cell - perhaps to
| love her again.
|
| --Commisionner Pravin Lal
|
| (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, when finishing The Cloning
| Vats secret project)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| Wouldn't that also require the atmosphere of the Earth to contain
| 33% oxygen again?
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| jaynetics wrote:
| 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...
| warent wrote:
| It seems like they would be invulnerable to modern germs,
| because how could any germs exist which would thrive off
| hundred-million-year-old genomes
| cogman10 wrote:
| "germ" is a bad term.
|
| 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.
| VLM wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is considering this as really bringing
| them back and releasing them into an ecosystem, just Jurassic
| Park type novelty.
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| > the small dynos won't necessarily ruin the ecosystem as
| they won't be the apex predator
|
| Ask an aussie how much damage something as innocuous as a
| rabbit or a frog can do when in an ecosystem they weren't
| meant for.
|
| > unless the host country collapses and no one cares.
|
| Matter of time. Human life timescale too, not
| evolutionary timescales
|
| > it will just go extinct again, after causing some
| damage.
|
| Sounds real fun, I totally want that to happen /s
| axytol wrote:
| 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]?
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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?
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| Only one way to find out!
| russdill wrote:
| 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.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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) :)
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Co2 levels were 5x or 10x higher back then as well, so large
| forest fires weren't likely.
| sohamssd wrote:
| 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)?
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| so now we need dinosaur to fill labour gap?
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| la64710 wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| You probably want to read the article, then.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Before we bring back dinos, I'd love to see us bring back species
| we drove extinct such as the dodo.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| The dodo is a dinosaur.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| mkl95 wrote:
| What would prevent them from going extinct again?
| jfk13 wrote:
| Absence of a suitable meteor?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/mutant-chickens-grow...
|
| 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.
| Archelaos wrote:
| 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?
| elwell wrote:
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Dr. Ian
| Malcolm
| clever-hans wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Let's build huge new habitats for them in orbit.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's been done!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship
|
| >"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.
| goatlover wrote:
| Lets engineer them for Mars.
| ak_111 wrote:
| This sounds like gpt.
| autotune wrote:
| And it is a new account. What is the point?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| To say one thing, then do the opposite.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953823
|
| 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.
| ak_111 wrote:
| For what's it worth I don't mind it. I was just pointing
| out how easy it is to identify gpt content and wanted to
| verify.
| nathias wrote:
| a good AI paired with a gene engineering
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| indeed
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Bringing back dinosaurs is a lot like using regular expressions:
|
| Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll
| bring back dinosaurs." Now they have two problems.
| TheMaskedCoder wrote:
| Suddenly, I am very curious about what problem could possibly
| inspire bringing back dinosaurs as a potential solution...
| PeterisP wrote:
| The problem of not having dinosaurs for your theme park.
| skirmish wrote:
| Infestation by resurrected mammoths, of course.
| buggythebug wrote:
| Jeff Goldblum
| Doorstep2077 wrote:
| 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. Additionally, the environment that they lived in no
| longer exists, so even if we could bring them back, they would
| not have a suitable habitat to live in. In short, the concept of
| bringing dinosaurs back to life is purely fictional and not based
| in science.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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"
| user3939382 wrote:
| Life.. uh.. finds a way
| VLM wrote:
| 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 ...
| iamgopal wrote:
| True, if we bring back dinosaurs, that will be the biggest
| example of it
| jstanley wrote:
| Life "finds a way" by evolving adaptations. Not by running
| obsolete technology in an inappropriate environment.
|
| Life has _found_ a way - we are it!
| hnbad wrote:
| It has. They're called birds.
| lubujackson wrote:
| 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.
| erikstarck wrote:
| Yeah, they need to place theses jurassic creatures in a park on
| an island somewhere.
|
| I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
| chasil wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://profjoecain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/robert-e-...
| ben_w wrote:
| Hmm... I have a question inspired by your choice of phrases:
|
| Is there a graph somewhere of Earth's mean sea level
| atmospheric pressure over time? Was it significantly
| different e.g. a billion years ago?
| Tyrannosaur wrote:
| Wait, why would carbon dioxide levels have any effect on
| wildfires more than, say nitrogen?
|
| For wildfires, I would expect the proportion of oxygen to
| matter much more than other gasses not involved in
| combustion.
|
| Perhaps there's a difference in humidity levels, and
| therefore specific heat of the air?
| downrightmike wrote:
| Nitrogen is inert. Combustion doesn't need nitrogen. It
| just basically fills space.
| Tyrannosaur wrote:
| As far as wildfires go, so is carbon dioxide. CO2 is not
| a typical reactant of combustion.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| We just need to create a cheetah racing league. Problem
| solved.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Venus has a CO2 atmosphere, so the upper bar is very high.
| jcfrei wrote:
| 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.
| hvs wrote:
| 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.
| rrgok wrote:
| "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
| downrightmike wrote:
| If the Antarctic thaws, it would be probably the best place
| for them.
| Name_Chawps wrote:
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| rirze wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| jameshart wrote:
| I find a mixture of nuts and seeds in a wire mesh container in my
| yard brings them back on a daily basis.
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| We want Ornitishian dinosaurs, too.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| 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.)
| VaxWithSex wrote:
| 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.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Right, not ornithischian.
|
| 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.
|
| The small fry are no bigger than elephants.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well that was the most interesting sci-fi-that-might-be-
| real I've read all week.
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