Australian Billionaire Wants To Build Jurassic Park-Style Resort 409
lukehopewell1 writes "Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has already floated a plan to rebuild the Titanic to scale and sail it around the world, but now the mining magnate has found a new use for his money: cloning dinosaurs. Palmer reportedly wants to clone a dinosaur and let it loose in one of his resorts in Queensland, Australia. The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA."
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought there were lots of talks about this after the movie came out, and the definite answer was that it was impossible because DNA does not preserve that long, no matter how nicely that mosquito was encapsulated in amber.
True, though nobody ever said it would be impossible if the specimen were encapsulated in ice.
It may be possible if dinosaurs are ever found preserved in ice. Though, I wouldn't hold your breath.
The reason DNA degrades in amber is, among other things, due to background radiation, a factor which is less worrisome when dealing with ice.
The likelihood of finding a dinosaur or specimen with intact dinosaur DNA in ice, however, is ridiculously low. Nevertheless, if I were a billionaire intent on blowing money, I could think of worse ways to spend it than a dinosaur hunting expedition to Antarctica.
Spin doctoring (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)
No matter how primitive the technology, it's possible to construct a cautionary tale of how it will fail: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
>That would be ideal. Unfortunately that only works if people at large are happy to pay taxes to fund the science. In the real world we live in, majority of people bitch and whine about taxes that don't bring them direct, immediate benefits.
Sad, but true, not an insurmountable problem however. The difference is in education: teach people the value of knowledge, that all scientific research DO bring tangible benefits and that making it publicly available gives you as an individual a greater SHARE of that benefit. For example if all drug-research was done publicly, and made by whoever had a factory, without patents, then medicines would be MUCH, MUCH cheaper for all of us.
>Science investment brings with it incredible returns, but in incomprehensible forms that can only be put into practical inventions many years later.
Some generations have figured that out in the past, often the next one undid the progress, but like I said, it can be done.
>Idealism just doesn't survive in the real world.
This I radically don't agree with. Idealism is the only thing that changes the real world.
To quote Richard Stallman: "If I had set out to say 'a mostly free operating system is okay' back when even that seemed impossible to most people, then we would not have had completely free operating systems available today. We have completely free operating systems because we set out to create nothing less than the ideal. Idealism is stating the ideal, and pushing for the ideal, even if you never quite get there, because every step you get closer is an improvement".
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)
Gatling created his machine gun trying to save human lives. In the days of the Civil War, most of the deaths were from infections of otherwise non-fatal wounds or disease. Most of the soldiers were dying before they had the chance to shoot the other guys. Gatling thought that if he could create a gun that enabled one man to do the work of a hundred men, then 99 men could stay home from the battlefield.
Let's just say that this didn't turn out the way he expected it to.