Science Officially Stomps All Hope of Dinosaur Cloning
- Thread starter Mike Kayatta
- Start date
Oh, well that ruins my fantasy island business plan idea. Thanks a lot science, first you turn Dinosaurs from awesome large scale reptiles to giant chickens, and now you say we can't even try to do the cloning thing to find out 
So as of now they can't. Who's to say in 100, 500, 1000 years from now science hasn't advanced so far they can easily do it?
When no blueprint is avalible to build stuff from, call a creative person.
While i highly doubt the technology is ginna be present in the near future, maybe one day we the human race, or more precicely, our scientists, would be able to not just clone stuff from existing DNA, but create our own blueprints, using DNA we made from scratch, or at least modifieed existing DNA enough to cut and paste parts of DNA code together, and creatve our own kind of dinos (1 meter tall T-rex without sharp teeth who eats modern day grass, instead of having a lawn mover, oh yeah)
This post is not based on any factual knowledge about genetic engineering, but the resistant hopes and dreams of a nerd.
Maybe android technology (the aratificial perosn thingy, not mobile phones) will allow us to make bio-mechs some day, and then it's just a matter of giving it shape.
While i highly doubt the technology is ginna be present in the near future, maybe one day we the human race, or more precicely, our scientists, would be able to not just clone stuff from existing DNA, but create our own blueprints, using DNA we made from scratch, or at least modifieed existing DNA enough to cut and paste parts of DNA code together, and creatve our own kind of dinos (1 meter tall T-rex without sharp teeth who eats modern day grass, instead of having a lawn mover, oh yeah)
This post is not based on any factual knowledge about genetic engineering, but the resistant hopes and dreams of a nerd.
Maybe android technology (the aratificial perosn thingy, not mobile phones) will allow us to make bio-mechs some day, and then it's just a matter of giving it shape.
When it comes to science, never say never. You can say it's impossible now, but you shouldn't say that it's 100% impossible and that it will never happen.
Okay, well, maybe aliens exist? And they kidnapped a handful of dinosaur specimens? And have successfully continued on the dinosaurs as a species? And so when aliens come to Earth and are all "hey guys, we're aliens, 'sup," what we need to do - as a collective species, represented by The President of the USA, probably - is take said alien by the space collars and scream in his space face: "TAKE US TO THE DINOSAURS"
and then they will, probably. here i drew a picture of it
and then they will, probably. here i drew a picture of it
I was talking about how our understanding is still underdevelopment. If we want to find a certain sequence of code in the D.N.A strand we would have to decode the whole thing and then analyse it. It's as if were reading binary and we need to develop Hexadecimal, octdemical and programming languages such as C#/C++. In terms of technological advances, Unix still hasn't been development.albino boo said:
DNA itself is nothing more than a computer program designed to do a task so hopefully in the next hundred years, heavy computing tasks and our DNA understanding today would be a trivial task then allowing friendlily computer software to program and predict the outcome of structures of DNA just like MS Studios can program and predict the outcome of code.
AKA; The digitalisation of DNA.
What the article says is that after 6.5 million years is is no longer mathematically possible to know what base pair exited and what order they came in. Its does not matter how sophisticated you get you model because there is no longer enough structure left to work a model from. There is only so far extrapolate, its fine when the fragments are lager you can do pattern matching and frequency analysis to model the original structure with high degrees of certainty. When the fragments get to be so small that instead of there being only 1 structure but multiple structures have equal mathematical validity. After a certain point there is no way of telling which base formed a pair and which base pair was next to each other because there is not enough information left to determine that. Its the same as if you take an ice sculpture, left it melt and then try and determine what shape the sculpture was from the water. The melt water contains the vast majority of the water molecules the formed the sculpture but none of the information as to how it was organised. Its the same process with DNA but because at STP DNAs covalent bonds are 1000s of times stronger than Hydrogen bonds in water ice this process takes millions of years.mad825 said:
I once talked about bringing back non avian dinosaurs with one of my biochemistry proffesors. Though you're right that we probebly won't find any intact DNA there is still the possibility, well, plausibility that we'll be able to reverse engineer this DNA from their closest living relatives, namely avian dinosaurs AKA birds.
You'd have much better chances starting with a chicken or an Ostrich. Also good luck!Li Mu said:
Well, this means we won't be able to replicate Dinosaurs, in the way Jurassic Park did.
HOWEVER, thanks to modern day genetics, we are able to backtrack an organism's DNA to more or less previous states in evolutionary development. Do that to a bird and what would you end up with in the end? Dinosaurs!
As a great synthetic mind once said, technology is not a straight line. There are many paths to the same end.
HOWEVER, thanks to modern day genetics, we are able to backtrack an organism's DNA to more or less previous states in evolutionary development. Do that to a bird and what would you end up with in the end? Dinosaurs!
As a great synthetic mind once said, technology is not a straight line. There are many paths to the same end.
Hang on all this says is that we can't CLONE dinosaurs from primordial DNA.
It says nothing about genetically engineering a dinosaur.
Scientifically speaking we have all the things we need to make a dinosaur. We know the building blocks for genetic code. Can implant that code into cells and know how to cultivate these cells to at least a small lump or functional organism.
If we could somehow find a template of dinosaur DNA, something like maybe a current species of animal that hasn't evolved for a long long while like maybe a crocodile we could replicate the entire thing.
Sure they won't be exactly like the T-rex but I think we can classify any 18 feet tall giant reptile as a dinosaur.
It says nothing about genetically engineering a dinosaur.
Scientifically speaking we have all the things we need to make a dinosaur. We know the building blocks for genetic code. Can implant that code into cells and know how to cultivate these cells to at least a small lump or functional organism.
If we could somehow find a template of dinosaur DNA, something like maybe a current species of animal that hasn't evolved for a long long while like maybe a crocodile we could replicate the entire thing.
Sure they won't be exactly like the T-rex but I think we can classify any 18 feet tall giant reptile as a dinosaur.
Science never rules anything out, only changes the probability of things on a scale from probably to improbable.
Time travel is already theoretically possible and occurs all the time(when two black-holes collide there is a space where time goes backwards before the eventual collapse. At least if Neil deGrasse Tyson is to be believed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmWO4Vtk-s8) So potentially it would be possible for us to travel back in time to get their DNA and clone them. YEAH, BET YOU DIDN'T THINK OF THAT MATT KAPLAN, DID YOU?
Time travel is already theoretically possible and occurs all the time(when two black-holes collide there is a space where time goes backwards before the eventual collapse. At least if Neil deGrasse Tyson is to be believed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmWO4Vtk-s8) So potentially it would be possible for us to travel back in time to get their DNA and clone them. YEAH, BET YOU DIDN'T THINK OF THAT MATT KAPLAN, DID YOU?
Why would it be?
People ignore the other major pillar of the book that was only given a few nods here and there in the movie because it got in the way of the "Wonder": The things in the Park weren't dinosaurs, they were GELFs made to look like them.
All the talk of the park all being an illusion boiled down to the animals themselves being one too. They were Frankenstein gestalts made up of bits and pieces of salvageable dinosaur DNA with the rest being stripped from modern animals loosely based on them being the closest living relatives to things that died 65 millions years ago.
In the book, near the end, Doctor Wu puts this to Hammond and doesn't even look on their creations as animals. They're nothing but machines made up of biological material that look and act like a close enough approximation to be the real thing.
Nothing about them is authentic besides those few stands of DNA. Even the dinosaurs whose DNA they're partially made up of are from vastly different eras of the Mesozoic all shoved together, their ecosystem is dead, most of the herbivores have dietary problems as a result of it and many of them labour to breath in our less oxygenated atmosphere.
When it comes down to it, they're only a slight step closer to actually being dinosaurs than synthetic machines dressed in dinosaur skin and fake programming.
The movie itself is ironic because they do this very thing. They make dinosaurs from robotics and CGI, then start flipping through the book of modern animal noises and behavior to fill in gaps fossils failed to preserve.
It's all bullshit, it's all fake, but it's still life, life made from human irresponsibly that then goes on to force equilibrium onto it's environment when it refuses to act the way we expect it to.