Technology

It's all fun and games until you're being chased down in your Jeep by a dodo.

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.

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.

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.

They were here pretty recently, their food is still here. It was cruel that we extincted them.

Nah. It’s still the same place. They died out within the time frame of completely modern humans.

Well pumpkins and avocados still exists at least and apparently they were grazers.

Yeah you say that until you get a tusk in the crotch

If they're like their cousins you don't want a pet that smart. Especially with a trunk. Good luck mammoth proofing your house.

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!

Obviously for the local petting zoo

Plus, mammoth burgers

There are about 2000 wild tiger left, I found this article from 2011 saying that they might be extinct in the wild by 2030.

So there might be 2000 ecological niches for smilodon to fill in 5 years. We better hurry then.

just like nuclear fusion, it was 10 years away 10 years ago, it's 10 years away now and it will be 10 years away 10 years from now

Enjoy eating rocks, I guess?

Maybe in 100 years, with how underfunded research in vertical farming is.

Or make is exactly the size on the picture, where the mammoth fits in a petri dish.

Worked in the docudrama "the Flintstones"