It depends. Would I still get enough wifi to upload Inat observations?
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but. A substantial part of the world’s population - between wars and climate change, is already mired in this.
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Thank you for having a sense of humor. 
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I know, I spent most of my life helping them. How else would I have learned how to speak many languages fluently without ever having taken a single language course.
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Zero actual Dire Wolf DNA.
A few edited genes, most of which were just to make them white for show.
99.9% Gray Wolf genes.
= Not a Dire Wolf, not even close. They don’t even look like Dire Wolves. It would have been more informative to sew a Dire Wolf costume and put it on a German Shepherd.
This reminds of NASA pushing the “Life on Mars” pseudoscience 30 years ago. You would think Time Magazine would have learned from that hoax?
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@sethshively and @song_dog, no offense, but as interesting as your conversation has gotten, it seems to have drifted quite a bit off topic.
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It has drifted, but then we are talking about a dire situation.
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Agreed. I moved the posts in question to their own thread here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/environmental-impacts-of-western-countries-and-lifestyle/63940
Doing my best to choose a point at which the topic seemed to totally diverge.
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We might be screwed
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If ever there will be a Dire Wolf, it’s just going to be a Grey Wolf.
Years ago I heard about scientists trying to “bring back” the Thylacine, but it’s been maybe 7 or 8 years since I heard that, and a little while ago, I read a book about the Thylacine, and it said scientist were trying to get the Thylacine back by 2010. Well that happened. It just won’t work. The same with the Dire Wolf. What can it do to benefit humans? Nothing.
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That’s 10000000000000000 times more useful than bringing back Dire wolves, because Dire wolves went extinct in prehistoric times and Tasmanian tigers went extinct in 1936 which is not even a full century ago yet. They went extinct pretty recently.
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I found the creation of these animals extremely exciting to be honest. I’ve always believed that genetic engineering should be undertaken more as it can pretty much be used to solve all of the worlds problems.
I find the idea of trying to recreate an extinct animal very fascinating. It of course won’t be the same Dire Wolf that was lost, but it’s close to it. I’m a massive fan of the mammoth project that is currently in progress and can’t wait to see those mammoths created and released into the wild. The science behind it all fills me with awe and wonder. I think there is a lot of superstition and fear mongering around genetically engineered organisms and we should be far more frightened by the advancements of artificial intelligence.
If humanity wasn’t so terrified by genetic engineering and actually started focusing it’s advancements into that we could cure disease, reverse aging, repair broken ecosystems, produce artificially created genetic diversity in severely endangered inbred organisms, the possibilities are literally endless. I hope to see a change in attitude towards genetic engineering in my lifetime so I get to see the amazing advancements that are currently thought to be impossible. Think of just how much progress has been made by AI in such a short amount of time? The idea of people having access to technology that converts text on a screen into high quality images would have sounded so outlandish 20 years ago, but now it’s widely known as possible and it’s downright incredible. I can only hope to see a similar level of advancement within the genetic engineering field in the upcoming years.
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except it’s not close to a dire wolf. it’s just a designer gray wolf. you can be skeptical of sensationalism without losing your fascination of science.
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Not even close. They modified 20 genes to make a gray wolf look somewhat closer to how they imagine a dire wolf looked. The genetic differences between the two species amounted to tens of thousands of base pairs, and they did not even say they made the changes to follow the dire wolf genome, only to make them look more like them. We don’t actually know that they recreated anything of the original dire wolf.
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Where? The world will soon be (and already is) much hotter because of climate change.
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There is a theory is that the ecological changes made by mammoths in Siberia (e.g. more grassland, fewer shrubs and trees) would help the permafrost there stay frozen longer, reducing the amount of methane that escapes. Pleistocene Park is experimenting with this using extant megafauna.
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I agree. Besides, how would they fit in a modern ecosystem
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