They say over 99% of species which have ever existed have gone extinct, what if we could bring them all back? We spend a lot of time on the channel talking
about the future of humanity and colonizing and terraforming new worlds or even constructing
them from scratch. We generally do not spend too much time on
ecology though. We spent some time talking about energy requirements
for growing food for people but not so much the ecological angles, as I am a physicist
not an ecologist. Our main topic for today is how to resurrect
extinct species, and an important aspect of that is where you are going to put them all. Most species did not go extinct in a vacuum,
typically something else came in that either took over their ecological niche or radically
altered it so they could no longer survive. By and large you can’t just re-introduce
some extinct species into our own modern environment, as they will either die off again or possibly
make something else go extinct, and since virtually every species that ever existed
has died off, there’s really not room to resurrect them all here on Earth. Hence, we need to be thinking about where
else to put them. We’ve got two basic approaches, single species
recreation in a zoo environment or reproducing the entire ecosystem. Recreating some critter means it needs something
to eat, ideally whatever it used to eat, but a T-Rex probably can eat cow just fine. Some species are more adaptable than others. Humans are one of the most adaptable species,
so you don’t need to recreate sub-saharan Africa from a few million years back in order
to recreate humans from that period. On the other hand, some species are much more
specialized and highly dependent on their original ecosystem. Generally speaking, the ones that went extinct
did so because of dramatic changes to that ecosystem. Some might even need other species that went
extinct too, even in a zoo environment. A modern example would be the Giant Panda,
which cannot survive without a specific type of bamboo. Outside of the zoo environment, away from
where humans protect them and supply food of the right type and quantity, recreating
the original ecosystem might be a necessity for survival. In which case you need to recreate not just
that species but its whole ecosystem, and remove existing species of flora and fauna
and even bacteria from wherever you create this resurrected ecosystem. Our Audible Book of the Month, Michael Crichton’s
1990 novel, Jurassic Park, examines this concept, and the 1993 film adaptation brought dinosaurs
to the screen in a way that made it one of those most memorable films of its period and
spawned a franchise. It wasn’t the first fictional work to play
with the idea of dinosaurs by any means, but usually we’d found some surviving population
of them like in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Jurassic Park though introduces the idea that
we could bring them back instead, and over a quarter of a century later we are getting
close to being able to do this for some extinct species, which raises many related problems
and challenges, not to mention ethical dilemmas. Crichton examines many of these in his novel,
and you can pick up a free copy of Jurassic Park today and also get a 30-day trial of
Audible, just use my link, Audible.com/Isaac or text isaac to 500-500. Now in that story the resurrection is all
being done on an island, to help keep it contained, but that raises two key points to begin with. First, any given island already has an ecosystem,
and usually a fairly unique one, so you can’t plow one over to introduce a new ecosystem
without almost certainly eliminating many species that can be found nowhere else on
the planet. So if you don’t want to just wipe out some
species to replace them with extinct ones, you need to be thinking of putting it someplace
new. An island you made for instance, or one made
in a desert or tundra or even off planet. Second is the containment approach. Needless to say this is much easier with the
single-species zoo method than a replicated ecosystem. A single large creature like a T-rex, even
whole packs of them, pose no real risk to civilization even if they escaped into the
wild. This is not Hollywood and a T-Rex is not Godzilla. They would be easily located and re-captured,
particularly since this is 2018, not 1990 - you’re not going spend millions of dollars
making a dinosaur and forget to implant GPS tracking devices and health monitors on one. I’d be very surprised if those weren’t
routine on virtually all zoo animals and pets within a generation and the concepts we’re
discussing today aren’t happening tomorrow. So resurrected dinosaurs would pose no more
threat to civilization as a whole than sharks or crocodiles, and indeed the large animal
that causes the most reported human deaths every year, after other humans, is actually
the Hippopotamus, averaging about 3000 of us a year, which is ironic since it is a herbivore,
albeit a bad tempered one! Indeed deer, horses, and cows each kill more
people every year than sharks. It’s not the big predators that get us,
but the diseases carried by tiny insects. Bites from mosquitoes and Tsetse flies kill
hundreds of thousands of people each year by passing on diseases like Malaria, Dengue
Fever, African Sleeping Sickness, Zika, Ross River Fever and many others. What additional horrors lurk in extinct ecosystems
are unclear and I, for one, am not keen to find out first hand. Containment won’t work well on critters
like that because they are very small and reproduce quickly in massive numbers and you
can’t realistically grow each one, so the trick of growing them in some other animal
and having them be born sterile probably isn’t too realistic. This is another advantage of the zoo approach
over the re-created ecosystem. Realistically we don’t have as much interest
in recreating extinct insects or bacteria and both would be nightmares to contain, though
we would likely want to bring back a lot of extinct plants and they can be serious containment
problem too. You could build some nature preserve, artificially
heated and lit, down in Antarctica for keeping your dinosaurs. Any that escape would just freeze to death,
and they aren’t going to sneak out in a crate or letter sent home, but an insect probably
could, and bacteria certainly could, and each of those make up way more total species than
all the typical birds and beasts. There are roughly 5000 mammalian species;
there are over a thousand times as many other species around on the planet. We typically are only interested in the big
critters, but that’s not a whole ecosystem just the top few tiers of the food chain. Odds are good you don’t need most of the
species around when the T-rex was alive, but you might need some. Generally an exact duplication won’t be
viable. We have the expression ‘Dead as the Dodo’,
for the dodo bird of Mauritius which was hunted to extinction by humans and the invasive species
we introduced a few hundred years back. Now that’s not a long time ago so finding
DNA samples is entirely on the table and indeed we have, damaged though they are. This is where we get to our first real trick
for doing this. If you happen to find a totally intact strand
of DNA you can take it and find an animal that’s sufficiently like it, say a pigeon
for a dodo or an elephant for a wooly mammoth. You take an egg, clear the DNA out, and insert
the new DNA, and do this many times to ensure success. However this requires you find a completely
intact DNA genome and also means you just have one, which is quite the genetic bottleneck. It’s rather expensive to clone a pet but
there are companies now that do that, not just research it. You send them money and a DNA sample, and
they send you the clone of your cat, dog or horse. Doing it inside a different critter as the
parent is trickier, but certainly doable and down the road we probably could use an entirely
artificial womb. That might be preferable anyway since for
many of these it is going to be humans raising generation number one, which is easier said
than done for some species. Once you get them re-established they can
continue their normal parenting cycle but the whooping crane for instance can be imprinted
onto another whooping crane, learn how to forage for itself, can be taught migration
patterns, and how to successfully mate, but 100% of the time the captive raised birds
will abandon the nest, and their nestlings, as soon as they hatch. We actually have to have humans dress up like
whooping cranes to raise them, and this had mixed results. More modern, animatronic tools have a greater
success rate in passing on parenting skills. We can print DNA these days so you can get
a sample that is damaged and instead of splicing it onto a related species, you can grab multiple
copies and fill in the blanks. And odds are if you can find one partial strand
of DNA in a sample you can find a bunch more. After all there are trillions of cells in
your body and each has DNA. This doesn’t really help us much with things
that have been dead for millions of years. It’s pretty hard to recover DNA even from
a frozen corpse sitting in ice for several thousand years, let alone a fossil, which
even nowadays people tend to forget is rock, not bone, and contains no more DNA than a
plaster cast made of a footprint you left walking across some mud. The half-life of DNA is about 500 years, in
this case meaning the time it takes for half the bonds in a given DNA strand to break,
under ideal conditions. The oldest we’ve found is a bit less than
a million years old, buried under ice in Greenland, and we think that’s about as old as you
can get. Again, though, if you find a sample, odds
are it’s not a DNA sample but several million of them, so if you are carefully extracting
each one and reading it in, you are getting millions of mostly trashed but otherwise identical
DNA strands to look at. Reading DNA has gotten way cheaper in recent
years and needless to say so has computing power. Take a long sentence as a single line and
randomly redact or scramble bits of it, put another below it and do the same, and you
can compare the two and make more sense of it, do this millions of times and even if
most of those lines only have maybe one word left correct you are going to be able to get
that sentence locked down with utter certainty, but at some point it’s too degraded even
for that and the hard cap is probably not much over a million years, and certainly far
short of 65 million. Humans and chimpanzees share about 95 to 98%
of their DNA and we share 40 to 50% with a fruit fly. You get a lot of DNA from your parents, and
most of it is nearly identical, as your parents are much more closely related to each other
than we are to chimps, but there are some differences. I can’t reconstruct your grandfather’s
DNA just from yours because you only have about 25% of his unique DNA in you. However if he had about fifty kids by fifty
different mothers it should be quite easy to determine his DNA enough to clone him. Let’s say we had two guys, not related,
Alex and Calvin. Their parents both got divorced and remarried
and so Alex and Calvin share a half-brother, Bill, who himself never had kids, but Alex
and Calvin both had a bunch. Bill’s subspecies or clade went extinct,
but we could mostly reassemble it by reconstructing both Alex’s and Calvin’s DNA and when
it comes to a species, we don’t need 100% accuracy. None of us have exactly identical DNA, except
for identical twins and even that’s a bit iffy. After all, not even all the DNA in your body
is the same, compare two strands taken from different parts of the body and there will
likely be a few differences. Indeed most of us have around 100 new mutations
to our DNA that aren’t from our parents, just bad copying, and that’s how mutation
and evolution can occur in organisms that just split by mitosis or clone themselves
asexually. With enough processing power and samples,
you can assemble a pretty decent match of DNA for any organism from its descendants,
and in the case of a whole species we can do this a lot better since we’ve got a big
margin for error, and can potentially reconstruct every extinct species from their cousins’
descendants, as we did with Bill. As we catalog more and more species and digitize
their DNA, as our computers improve and so does our knowledge of genetics, we could potentially
put together a lot of very long extinct species not from remnants of DNA from preserved corpses
but rather from those remnants of DNA left around in all of us and the millions of successor
species inhabiting the planet. It won’t be exact but that means nothing
in terms of species, since they don’t have identical DNA to each other anyway. So we’re taking the “if it looks like
a duck and quacks like a duck, you’ve succeeded” approach. Even so, we aren’t even sure if T-Rex had
feathers or not yet, which really screws with our typical image of them as scaly rather
than giant chickens. You could get some serious errors if you made
the wrong thing and you don’t even know it because you misinterpreted the available
data. Like if aliens visited a post-apocalyptic
Earth and restored us along with Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. And again we can’t overlook things beyond
DNA, like behavior or associated organisms, both those inside and out. We’ll probably get good enough with DNA
in the next century or so to be able to look at a complete DNA genome and model what it
should grow into, and that would help a lot since you can backtrack various modern descendants
and cousins to get prior DNA segments until you get something that has that DNA and will
look like the original. That might be the best you can do, and you
might also have a bunch of basically unrelated but near identical critters each with valid
claims to be closest to the original yet are so different they couldn’t interbreed. An important problem arises, though, in that
a critter is more than just its DNA. Indeed, humans are basically an ecosystem
within an ecosystem, you’ve got hundreds of species of bacteria just in your guts alone
and the number of bacterial cells in you outnumber your human cells. Many of these bacteria are also symbiotic
organisms, meaning we rely on them and vice-versa to live, but they’re not encoded in our
DNA as they are separate organisms that inhabit our bodies. There’s a chance extinct critters could
use modern microorganisms, but there may be problems with this that mean we require the
original microorganisms. Remember, though, that we said we did not
want to recreate the bacteria and other microfauna and microflora species that would have co-existed
with T-Rex because these are almost impossible to contain. If we simply recreate T-Rex without those
smaller critters then there is a good chance that our T-Rex will be short-lived or sick. This is another reason why we would choose
not to create an exact copy of T-Rex. Instead, we would tweak the DNA of T-Rex to
use and react to modern bacteria in the same way other modern species do. We might also build in safeguards that would
make it impossible for our T-Rex to survive outside of its assigned habitat. That was, of course, one of the plot points
in the Jurassic Park series and, in the stories, it failed spectacularly. I believe, though, that the reality is that
we would be able to do that job very effectively and would not make such elementary mistakes. It is something we are doing in labs very
effectively even now. The take home point is, though, that the T-Rex
that we create would probably look like T-Rex of old, but it would be a modernized version
and not entirely true to the original. This is less of a problem with more modern
extinct species, like mammoths who didn’t live that long ago and died in cold climates
where frozen bodies have been found, or which died out during human history and we’ve
got plenty of samples leftover, like something we hunted to extinction for trophies. We also need to tinker less with the DNA to
make it work with our current microbial environment. I don’t think we can exactly erase that
crime, of obliterating another species for fun and profit, but odds are pretty good we
will be able to bring back everything we actually wiped out in the last couple centuries and
that’s something. Of course we also wiped a lot of them out
for living room, and that’s what wiped out a majority of those we didn’t, and humans
are responsible for only a fraction of extinct species. If we genuinely wanted to bring back entire
ecosystems, then we would have to destroy other ecosystems that have arisen in the same
place as the original ecosystem. We’ve explored creating a glorified zoo
with extinct species. But let’s explore the ethics of doing so. The main objections are that you either have
to grow them in another distantly related critter, like a mammoth in an elephant, which
many feel is unethical, and that you need some place to put them. I’ve also heard people question if resurrecting
dead species in and of itself is unethical but I’ve never heard this argument actually
detailed as to why it would be wrong to do so. There is a question around what caused the
extinction of the dinosaurs. The most popular view is that an asteroid
or comet collision 65 million years ago wiped them out. If that is true, then why not give them a
chance to live as well given that their development was cut short by an unfortunate accident as
opposed to classical Darwinian evolution? We speak a lot about the Fermi Paradox on
this channel and, given that we have not encountered any other life-forms beyond Earth yet, the
dinosaurs are potentially precious as an alternative path life could have taken. While early efforts at this will likely involve
gestating extinct species in living cousins, like the mammoth and the elephant, I can’t
say that is a moral issue that keeps me up at night. It’s a potential serious problem if the
mother tries to murder the infant or won’t care for it, but we have raised a lot of infant
mammals on our own and can probably socialize them well enough to let them return to normal
after we’ve got hundreds of them a few generations down the road. Though this could be a very challenging task
especially if you’re not sure what the original behaviors were. It’s also a reminder that it is more than
just DNA you need to preserve or figure out, you need to know what they ate, so you can
restore that too or cook up something else they can eat instead, as well as what organisms
they had inside themselves, like our own gut bacteria which isn’t in our DNA. You need to know their behaviors and social
structure, you need to know what they can live around without wiping them out or being
wiped out by them. We can potentially entirely skip part of that
as artificial womb technology improves in the decades to come and since DNA does freeze
pretty well and can be stored digitally we can afford to be patient about the actual
resurrection itself, even if we probably want to move with great haste in acquiring the
samples. That Passenger Pigeon DNA ain’t getting
any fresher after all. That raises an ethical concern that’s arguably
a bit fallacious but at the same time is not, that is if folks think we can resurrect anything
we wipe out then we might damage our current preservation efforts. You don’t need to protect the panda because
you can just clone them again down the road. Obviously that has nothing to do with the
ethics of the technology itself but it is a legitimate concern. Similarly, early attempts especially might
result in a ton of failures for every success, but that’s less an ethical concern with
the technology than early efforts to master it. We’ve also got the concern that if you’ve
got ressurected dinosaurs or wooly mammoths or dodos, people will want to eat them, indeed
that might be one source of funding, people who want to have a dino-burger or mammoth
steak. However, that’s the same ethical concern
as with any other livestock and this kind of technology is going to run hand-in-hand
with being able to grow meat in a lab that matches natural stuff and is maybe cheaper
too, so I don’t think it’s too valid. I could be biased on that though, I might
have been raised by a vegetarian but I’m not one myself and a dino-burger sounds tempting,
but I’d still rather eat a lab-grown burger than one off a living animal, all things being
equal, if it was an option. The zoo is almost attainable with our current
technology. It does have its ethical problems and technological
problems, though. We cannot easily separate the ethical issues
from the practical ones. The primary ones of major concern are loss
of natural habitat, loss of coexistent species, loss of biodiversity, loss of the original
DNA so that the critters can survive in our world, and behavioural issues. We have already spoken about the fact that
for an extinct critter to survive in our modern world, it will have to be modernized. That modernization, though, means that the
original species is lost and what is created is a shadow of its former self. We want to avoid these shadows, if possible. To do so, we must also recreate all of the
critter’s original environment, including the microbiological one. Recreating critters costs a lot of time, effort
and money. The trouble is that such a species will not
be genetically diverse and to introduce biodiversity into a population will result in a lot of
dead-end individuals of that species, leading to suffering of the dead-end organisms. Despite this, for a species to survive, it
will be necessary to develop biodiversity. Again, how can we do this in an ethical way? Almost all pack or herd critters have a social
order taught to them by associating with other critters of their species. Many of the extinct species were herd or pack
animals and we can only guess as to what their social behaviours were. Even today, orphaned elephants that grow up
without a matriarchal elephant to guide and control them turn into the elephant equivalent
of dysfunctional gangsters and have trouble mating and raising new young. To solve these problems, we are now going
to have to move away from the zoo and adopt a more futuristic approach. We speak a lot about simulating our minds
on this channel, but what about simulating entire ecosystems? In our future, we might be able to create
a simulated ecosystem and this would allow us to create the necessary microbiological
and other co-existent species. Normally such details are below the threshold
likely needed for a convincing environment, if you’re shooting a TV show in a library
it doesn’t matter if the books on the shelves are blank. However in this case such details would allow
us to fine-tune the environment and see what will survive and what will not, how various
behavioural models actually work. Given the necessary computational capability
and storage, we can fine-tune the environment of the extinct worlds of our past without
any chance of damaging our own environment or the environments of other critters we share
our world with. We can even go further than that and allow
the virtual environments to develop and evolve, eventually hopefully producing a sentient
species that we can relate to as well. Given the sheer scale of computational power
available to certain supercomputers like the Matrioshka Brain we’ve discussed before,
simulating whole biospheres all the way down to the cellular level, even many multitudes
of them, would barely register as a minor process to such computational leviathans. And that, of course, is without even considering
quantum computing, and running through billions of theoretical mutations or ecosystems to
see which are likely to end in something we have nowadays and thus to let us backtrack
to the most likely origins, might be just the kind of process quantum computing is ideal
for. Of course simulating an environment is one
thing, but if we really want to allow extinct species to be part of our world, we will also
want them to move outside of the simulation and back into the real world. Once the digital ecosystem is stable and we
have the necessary biodiversity and a stable social order, we would render the digital
system and re-create every detail of the digital ecosystem in reality. Space, of course, is an issue and channel
regulars have probably already guessed where I’m going to suggest we put them, and that’s
space itself. We often talk about creating new environments
for humanity, be it arcologies down here on Earth or rotating habitats in space, so that
we can restore Earth to a more pristine state. This might be the backwards approach, especially
for extinct species, though. You don’t move humans off Earth to give
Earth back to our cousins and you don’t displace existing ecosystems to put back extinct
ones. You build new places for them instead. And while a closed ecosystem needs to be pretty
big, it is worth noting that the homeland of the now extinct Dodo, Mauritius, is only
2000 square kilometers, which is fairly parallel to the size of an O’Neill Cylinder Space
Habitat and a good deal smaller than the McKendree ones we could make if we ever master mass
production of graphene. Such places don’t have to be 100% closed
either, just so long as they are self-enclosed enough that you don’t need to bring much
in. Assume for the moment that we wanted to replicate
every major phase of Earth in the last half billion years since the Cambrian Explosion,
which is almost certainly impossible without a time machine but represents our most extreme
case. And assume that we needed an entire planet
worth of living area for each phase and said we needed those phases no more than 50,000
years apart. That is probably massive overkill by at least
a couple orders of magnitude but it would mean you would need a whopping 10,000 snapshots
of Earth, one every 50,000 years for 500 million years, and a planet for each. And again that’s extreme overkill. 10,000 planets sounds like a lot but there’
almost certainly a billion decently Earth-like planets in the galaxy that could be terraformed
to match Earth sufficient for them – after all Earth has changed a lot in temperature
and climate over that time too, and more over, the Dyson Swarms we so often discuss here
can give you over a billion Earth’s worth of living area just around our own sun. 10,000 planets worth of area is not quite
1% of 1% of either of those, terraformable planets or a Dyson Swarm, whereas the protected
areas of the United States come in around 14% at the moment, proportionally a thousand
times as much and more. So it’s a very tiny portion of the area
future civilizations would have, more like a single zoo in an entire country than tons
of space given over to nature preserves, and that was our extreme overkill case. Having entire habitats just given over to
extinct ecosystems is certainly on the table then, and presumably would help fund ones
that were totally locked off from visitors, just scientists and caretakers who ensured
the habitat was safe. More realistically and in the more near term
too, you could create thousands of such cylinder habitat nature preserves just in orbit around
Earth with many thousands more just given over to people and our preferred pets and
parasites without even making a dent in Earth’s orbital space. For my part, while I certainly don’t want
to see Earth turned into some paved over dystopian nightmare, this does seem like the better
path to preserving ecosystems, and even better for restoring extinct ones. Needless to say it’s an expensive pathway
that’s really only available to civilizations that can build such habitats cheaply, but
we’ve devoted whole episodes to establishing that we probably will be able to do just that
down the road. And fortunately this is something we can approach
with some patience, at least so long as we can acquire and preserve that genetic data. But I think it is doable and I think we will
do it too, amusingly exactly because it does require tons of manpower and resources. One of our upcoming topics is going to be
jobs of the future and a second look at post-scarcity civilizations and the problems these debatable
utopias have, and a big chunk of that is what people do when robots are doing most of the
work. Even if you don’t need a job to pay the
bills and put food on the table, you probably do need one to keep your sanity intact. For that matter, civilizations need folks
to have some interdependence on each other to stay together or they might die off, something
we’ll be examining this spring too, and projects like these offer a potential common
purpose and goal when survival is no longer an issue and luxurious comfort might be universal. If you’ve got billions of people twiddling
their thumbs in idle luxury, lacking something to do and many wanting something to do, something
that truly matters that they can feel good about, creating and maintaining millions of
habitats to pay penance for our civilization’s prior acts of genocide is probably a pretty
good pick. You can do a lot worse than being able to
look in the mirror every morning and see a creator, guardian, and protector of previously
extinct cute cuddly critters. So such places might get made even if they
aren’t a tourist-funded location because virtual reality turns out to be a cheaper
and better alternative in that regard. Easier and safer to go riding around on dinosaurs
in Virtual Reality after all. That’s pretty far ahead of course and I
suspect we’ll be doing de-extinction of some more recently deceased critters sooner
than that, and probably on artificial islands in the sea or in desert or tundras, like in
Jurassic Park, which again is our book of the month, sponsored by Audible. Michael Crichton has written a lot of books
and probably had more of them turned into films or TV shows than anyone else, the most
recent being the Westworld TV show based on the earlier film he wrote and directed, which
is also set in a park where people visit, though that place seems too big for an island
and I half-expect it to turn out to be set on a space station as a twist. Crichton is big on those, and I always enjoy
his novels for having characters who seem to think things through in a bit more detail,
they don’t skip over simple solutions or take forever to figure out things that are
obvious to the audience and should be to the experts portrayed. That is something many of the film or TV adaptations
do and that books don’t, and why they are worth reading or listening to. The novels are often much better than the
films adapted from them, and Jurassic Park was a great film. You can pickup a FREE copy today, just use
my link in this episode’s description, Audible.com/Isaac or text isaac to 500-500 to get a free book
and 30 day free trial, and that book is yours to keep whether you stay on with Audible or
not. Jurassic Park is a great book, but if you
don’t like it, you can swap it out for another at any time. Audiobooks are great for helping you be a
better you - whether you want to expand your mind, feel healthier or get motivated. So with this new year, I encourage you to
check out Audible and learn something new. Next week we will be joining Paul Shillito
of Curious Droid for a two part special on Missions to Mars, looking first at the history
of missions planned then moving on to those which have been proposed more recently and
their various strengths and weaknesses. For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
