The Weird Plan To Fight Climate Change With Mammoths | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org all my life I wanted to be a filmmaker from the time I was a little kid I wrote my first screenplay at 15 years old had to teach myself how to do it I knew I was destined to be the next Spielberg and sure enough today I'm a youtuber a youtuber in 2004 I went to Los Angeles for the first time the epicenter of the movie industry where all the magic happens in the first place that I went was the La Brea Tar Pits cuz I've always been fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits I mean the whole idea that you know hundreds of thousands of years ago there was this deathtrap where thousands of animals got stuck and then flash forward to the 1900s and they find all these now long extinct animals that look like you know versions of our animals that like grew up on another planet I mean the whole thing is just it's it's nuts plus that time period of Earth's history where those animals came from has always been fascinating to me because it was like after the dinosaurs and the mammals kind of came into their own and then they sort of became dinosaurs with this whole megafauna thing of giant sloths and saber-toothed Tigers and mastodons it's just it's just a really interesting period of Earth's history to me perhaps the fact that the first place I went when I went to LA was a paleontological you know excavation site probably you know predicted that I would be a science communicator someday the point is a lot of really cool animals have gone extinct over the years in fact 99% of all species have gone extinct at some point but what if we could bring them back human beings on this planet we own it in a way that no other life-form has ever owned it in the history of life on this planet in fact we're owning it so hard we're almost making it impossible to live on so we're almost owning ourselves take that humans dinosaurs were impressive don't get me wrong I mean not only in their size but they lasted for millions of years longer than we'd been around same thing for the you know giant mammals that came later that I was just talking about just absolute units they don't call him megafauna to be cute but as much of an impact that they've had we've had much more of an impact on our planet in far less time humans were the first terrestrial species to flip the equation instead of being shaped by the environment we're shaping the environment to fit us ecologically speaking we're a pretty big deal but that big deal has come at a big price according to a United Nations estimate we're on track to actually extinct over a million different species that is an estimate but it's probably not an exaggeration according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature more than a quarter of the 98 thousand 500 species that we've methodically assessed are under serious threat obviously some of that is due to natural processes but the current rate is considered to be from a hundred to ten thousand times more than normal five mass extinction events have known to have occurred since prehistoric times we are now living through a sixth extinction event only this time it's our fault over hunting loss of habitat and climate change have claimed many victims and they're gonna claim anymore and once the species is gone it's gone extinction is forever at least it always has been and before I get into why just really quickly I'm gonna plug my t-shirts really quick I always plug it at the end of the videos and still I always get comments in my videos saying where do I get this shirt well I always talk about at the end I'm gonna plug it right now if you like this shirt or any of the cool shirts that we have available that are kind of fun and nerdy you can go to answers of Joe DICOM slash shirts there I said it go get it hope you enjoy it sorry since we cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996 dinosaur fans have been clamoring for a time when a t-rex might break out of a paddock but short of a miracle that's probably not gonna happen DNA just degrades too much over time even if it is trapped in a mosquito trapped in amber but there are plenty of post dino species that we do have recent DNA for including some species that we've made extinct and there are active efforts to clone these creatures in the same way that we did dolly in fact some people have already done it an endangered band Tang which is a type of wild cattle was actually cloned in 2003 and a pair in e'en ibex which is now extinct was created using a goat as a surrogate mother yeah right actually the cloned Banting only lived half the lifespan of a normal animal oh and the ibex had breathing problems in only lasted a few minutes Oh No so there's still some work to be done in the meantime there are banks of genetic material just waiting for the problems to be ironed out the technical problems will surely overcome but there still are a lot of ethical issues around this you know the line your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think of they shot a lot of the issues basically boiled down to what's next there is a danger that restoring extinct species will put pressure on species that have filled the ecological niche that the previous species had filled once before there are already too many domestic animals in the world do we need more wild ones it's also been argued that it's far better to put resources into conservation than fringe science it's far cheaper in theory to protect one black rhino in the wild than to clone one and create a new and of course one bullet from a poacher might change that equation like everything else there's debate on both sides but de-extinction technologies are currently progressing really quickly in fact 2019 has already been a banner year for mammoth de-extinction so let's take a look at that breakthrough and look at some of the technologies that might bring some other species back from the void what you're watching is what happened when Japanese scientists merged cellular material from a 28 thousand-year-old woolly mammoth into an egg cell from a mouse they did the same with elephant cellular material which you can see for comparison in a paper published in March 2019 these scientists said that they observed partial nuclear formation in the cells they also said that damage to the mammoth DNA was about the same as they would expect to see in a frozen Mouse sperm these guys clearly need a hobby but the takeaway here is that we're getting closer than ever to seeing a woolly mammoth live again living on this planet but why would we do that I mean the man has died out long before our present age although our human ancestors may have played a part in reducing their numbers I guess you know humans gonna human what turns out mammoths may have a role to play in climate change environmental scientist and ponytail enthusiast Sergey Zima actually thinks that something like woolly mammoths could actually help prevent the Arctic from warming up faster for over 20 years Zima and his family have been building a nature preserve in the far north of Russia that they called Pleistocene Park like pretty much everything in that part of the world the park is built over a deep layer of frozen soil known as permafrost in permafrost sequester's large numbers of microbes that if they were to thaw would release a lot of methane into the air which would contribute to global warming it's kind of a major concern we are enormously big carbon boom in fact Sergey and a lot of other scientists think that the thawing of permafrost is something of a ticking time bomb for the planet so anything that can keep that from happening is worth a shot now as we all know darker materials absorb more sunlight than lighter materials anything that's white is going to reflect more sunlight than it absorbs anything that's darker is going to become warmer this is known as the albedo effect now snow reflects a lot of light but any kind of brush or foliage that sticks out through that snow will absorb a lot of heat that heat will transfer down into the ground which will melt snow which will reveal soil which is darker which will absorb more sunlight which will heat up more melt more snow it goes on and on and back in the Ice Age large herbivores like mammoths used to eat this foliage which kept it from absorbing heat kept the snow on the ground which reflected more light kept everything cold and without massive eaters like the mammoths around more brush has been able to come through and that's helped to warm up the Arctic a little bit z mob wants to change that so far he's employed reindeer and elk and bison to graze and clear the brush but what he really wants is about 50,000 roving elephants walking around clearing all that out roving elephants that are of course you know adapted for northern climates also known as a mammoth that's exactly what the team in Japan wants to deliver but what they create isn't going to be exactly a duplicate of a mammoth not at first anyway because the first few man was born would actually have to gestate in elephant wombs or artificial wombs and as we've learned over the years DNA actually isn't the end-all be-all of what the environment actually plays a much larger role than we thought this is actually something doctors are still struggling to understand about human pregnancy surrogate pregnancies are of course when a couple can't naturally conceive they do in vitro fertilization and then implant that into a third person a surrogate mother and we used to think that the surrogate mother just was basically a vessel that carried the baby that she didn't share any genetic material with the baby in any way shape or form now we know it's more complicated than that it turns out the mother's RNA actually does interact with the DNA of the fetus the RNA actually decodes the DNA of the embryo and that actually can turn some genes on and turn some genes off and this isn't just something that affects the fetus in the womb this is actually the RNA that passes on to a person continues to affect their development all the way up through adulthood this is just one more way that your mom has of controlling you all your life what this means is that when scientists perform a surrogacy across different species what they get is effectively a hybrid harvard professor george church who is the leading geneticist has been working for years to try to create a hybrid elephant mammoth that he calls a mammoth --nt and this would actually achieve some of the things that Sergei zmapp wants to achieve and there are other techniques that can be used to bring back extinct species but they all have their own hurdles multiple initiatives are attempting to revive the Oryx which is the large cattle species through selective breeding of its mixed-species descendants in other programs aim to engineer a currently living species into an extinct species piece by piece none of these methods are ever gonna fully restore what was lost that time has passed the world has moved on the arrow of extinction only goes in one direction but we might get some version of what we've lost something else to consider is that if that extinction happened a long time ago whatever niche in the environment that that species filled has long been filled by now and in fact that entire environment might not exist anymore so what then you have to also consider the role of community in the animal kingdom you know not every single behavior in an animal is instinctual some of them have to be passed on from one generation to another so a sole member of a revived species would have to learn that from someone who what is it how and this is a concern in another high-profile de-extinction program which is the great passenger come back passenger pigeons used to literally darken the skies they traveled in the literal billions literally not something you'd want to stand under so we used to hunt them because I mean how could you not just fire a gun and discriminately in the air and five pigeons would fall not gonna stop firing my gun in the air indiscriminately or anything back then the thought that we could over hunt passenger pigeons was just a laughable concept until we did it we actually hunted them to extinction but so what you may be asking and I see pigeons in the park all the time yes you see those all the time but what you don't see is pigeons that migrate and flocks so big it took days to pass overhead that much travel of that many animals had a big effect on the heartland in the eastern United States the bugs they ate the droppings they left behind the gaps they created in the canopies when they sat on the branches and even the entire trees that they would knock over with their weight all of this helped to boost the natural regrowth cycle of the forest and help keep them healthy many ecologists say that the lack of pigeons have made the forest more fragile and less biodiverse not to mention thicker healthier forests would sequester more co2 out of the atmosphere for all those reasons our buddy George church thinks it's actually a good idea to bring back the passenger pigeons and he's not alone several top geneticists are working on programs to engineer passenger pigeon traits into currently living pigeons a 20-17 project led by Ben Novack actually produced germline chimeras from rock pigeons what's a germline chimera in this case it's a bird that naturally expresses a caste nine gene and its reproductive system this enables efficient CRISPR cast nine editing setting the stage for Novak and his team to introduce the reconstituted passenger pigeon traits only two entire passenger pigeons genomes have been sequenced and 37 have been partially sequenced for a species once had billions of these things flying around the question of genetic diversity becomes an issue some have argued that they might not be able to breed fast enough to survive the onslaught of modern germs that their bodies are not prepared for so the idea of gradual hybridizing might be a better way of going about it you know this way it would allow for some necessary adaptations from the living species to take place but back to the question of community and learning in a species we don't know how much of their migration patterns was inherited just instinctual and how much of it was passed on from generation to generation even if we create perfect passenger pigeons will they behave like passenger pigeons back in the day or will they behave like the rock pigeons that they were created from not to mention there was a reason that we hunted the hell out of them back in the day passenger pigeons kind of sucked they were considered a nuisance to people back in the day and they were a menace to farm crops I mean bringing them back might just be inflicting a biblical plague unto ourselves now before you flame me in the comments for being anti passenger pigeon I think it'd be really cool to bring them back I would just make sure and you know cover my car and if we do perfect de-extinction there's a long list of cool animals that we could bring back and scientists already working on some of these most of which became extinct due to habitat loss some because of us some not the bottom line is the more our way of life crowds out species around the world the more effort will have to spend on maintaining biodiversity humans do definitely own planet Earth but we haven't been the best owners it's be honest about it but maybe now that we've reached a technological point where we're not always fighting for our survival that's something that we can not think about alright why stop with animals why not why not people you know why could we clone Einstein can we bring him back I mean not him literally obviously environmental factors play a large part of it it would be more of a version of him than what actually existed before but he did have a very remarkable brain there were unique characteristics about Einstein that gave him an advantage intellectually over other people you know what could Einsteins a day with modern technology maybe he could work out time travel then we could just go grab whatever species we want and bring him back no cloning needed still you don't want to be stupid about it and if you don't want to be stupid maybe check out brilliant org brilliant org is an online learning platform they'll teach you to think like a scientist by using your natural problem-solving skills to discover fundamental science and math concepts you can start yourself off easy with the science essentials and mathematical fundamentals courses and give yourself a nice little baseline or if you're a big smart emic smart face you can jump straight to vector calculus that's up to you we also have a daily challenges feature so if you only have a few minutes a day you can go in pop in do a little problem solving thing give your brain a little workout and then get on with your day viewers this 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mat miser Pedro meadows and Larry Hewitt thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos behind the scenes stuff live streams that are exclusive to patreon supporters you can go to patreon.com/scishow Joe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this one Google thinks you'll like that or any of the others with my face on them I talked about cool fun and science stuff every Monday and Thursday and if you subscribe you'll be one of the first people to see them and hit the little bell because apparently got at the Bell these days alright I'll leave it at that thanks again for watching you guys go out have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 447,958

Rating: 4.9039416 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, la brea tar pits, de-extinction, wooly mammoths, climate change, jurassic park, pleistocene park, Sergey Zimov, permafrost, carbon bomb, passenger pigeons, DNA, Genetic editing, megafauna

Id: DMTwbV9UqHA

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/HeraldofMultiverses]

Hello u/theDeviousLemon! Thank you for creating this sub! I hope to see this community grow, and to try and help you get this out there!

I especially appreciate the existence of this community because I often feel alone in my acceptance of the hard truth that is the climate crisis. Absolutely none of my family will accept the truth, and I don't have many friends to talk about the issue.

But I believe. I believe that humanity has the ability to overcome the slimes that push to destroy our planet for the sake of profit! And not only should we strive to convince the hopeless and downtrodden that they have the power to change things, but we should also strive to change people's minds!

I used to be an adamant denier of the climate crisis, because I was raised by deniers in a tiny town that also didn't believe it. I was sheltered, is what I'm saying. But I grew up. I got to big for that tiny town and while I still might be here, the ideals we share are far too big for the tunnel-visioned folk of this town!

So don't give up! Continue to spread the message; THERE IS STILL HOPE! As long as we are here, as long as we fight, as long as we kick and scream, there is HOPE!

Never give up, never stop fighting, and never compromise. Together, we will save the one planet we have!

~ Sharp.