Lifted from the Dragon's Tales

[james_davis_nicoll]

Does Brand ego-google? Anyway, if I was going to make up a list of pundits who could be creatively mined by SF writers as Tommy Gold used to be, Brand would be near the top of the list.

As I recall, Pamela Sargent's Cloned Lives has a concern about recreating lost species via advanced biotech I have not seen elsewhere that I remember: knowing it's possible to bring back a dead species might make it more acceptable to drive species extinct in the first place. Not that people seem all that averse to extinctifying species...

My suspicion is that cute or impressive species would benefit from recreating but the uggos would not. Even if a quarter billion years had not reduced their genetic information to noise, nobody wants to see gorgonopsids or therocephalians come back.

Comments

[mishalak]

As any program to bring back a species would have all the costs associated with saving a species through captive breeding plus the technological challenge trying to figure out what it will take to coax a DNA sequence to reset and take in a cell it will be a great deal more expensive than just saving a species in the first place. Or, as usual, prevention is less costly than a cure.

Stewart Brand

[bibliofile]

Um, you know that he was involved with the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, right? Though that influence was more often indirect, you could argue that he's had a ton of influence on all sorts of writers and not just SF ones.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that gorgonopsids and therocephalians are the perfect pets for classic evil multibillionaire.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Speak for yourself. *I* want to see a gorgonopsid and/or therocephalian.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

That's going to take time travel, alas.

Note that the techniques described depend fairly heavily on having a related species around, even in birds. Much worse in mammals; we don't be getting any thylacines back because of a lack of near-relatives suitable to be incubators, and we might not be able to manage a mammoth if extant elephants have diverged too much.

Still, chickens with alien gonads is a very cool technology and I can see it being immensely useful with the various horribly threatened galliform birds, like sage grouse and sharp-tailed grouse.

[(Anonymous)]

There are still dasyuromorphs around, and given how small marsupials are at birth, it would not be impossible to envision a Tasmanian devil as a host mother for a thylacine. At least until birth - I don't think that lactation is so simple a process with marsupials as it is with placentals and replicating the series of "milks" a mother thylacine would have secreted for her developing offspring might be a challenge.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Would you mind unpacking the Tommy Gold thing?

I once had lunch with him when he gave a colloquium at Fermilab.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ideas that didn't pan out in real life (moon dust, the whole habitable planets need big moons to scoop off unneeded air and he was a steady stater, wasn't he?) worked pretty good to inspire SF writers.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Didn't he believe petroleum was generated by geologic processes, too?

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

No, what you really gotta do is take the T. rex, dull its teeth, and make it about two feet high. Pet mini-rexes for everyone!

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

It never occurred to me, but yeah... I can buy Stewart Brand as Tommy Gold. Very bright, some very good ideas, but with a healthy smattering of not-so-good ones and outright nuttery.

Damm but I miss WER though.

[(Anonymous)]

...knowing it's possible to bring back a dead species might make it more acceptable to drive species extinct in the first place...

A criticism of species salvage that I recall hearing in the very early 70s, as I recall, with that addendum that it's a potential sop to conservationists - you can always say that you've saved the species while proceeding to develop its habitat in such a way that the species in question can never be successfully re-introduced into it, even if successful recovery of viable individuals of the species in question is ever technologically feasible. In time, ideally, the greenies will get distracted by something else anyway and you can get on with your shrimp-farming, strip mining or whatever.