Saturday, March 12, 2011
Would we kill off dinosaurs?
Would we kill off dinosaurs?
Bird DNA probably contains sufficient dinosaur DNA for use to recreate dinosaurs. While interesting to do, would we bother? Would it increase diversity? Doubtful, it being better to stop existing losses of diversity.
Could it be economic? Again doubtful, since we can just keep messing around with birds themselves for food animals.
But if we did create large herbivores or carnivores, would we keep them other than for curiosity? Unlikely. Large animals are capital intensive to keep ( relative to small animals) and maybe the only advantages are in controlling other large environmental species, such as trees, which currently do not have a decent predator.
I think we would kill them off. Anything much bigger than man is just too expensive.
Lets hope extraterrestrials are larger than us !
martin
Bird DNA probably contains sufficient dinosaur DNA for use to recreate dinosaurs. While interesting to do, would we bother? Would it increase diversity? Doubtful, it being better to stop existing losses of diversity.
Could it be economic? Again doubtful, since we can just keep messing around with birds themselves for food animals.
But if we did create large herbivores or carnivores, would we keep them other than for curiosity? Unlikely. Large animals are capital intensive to keep ( relative to small animals) and maybe the only advantages are in controlling other large environmental species, such as trees, which currently do not have a decent predator.
I think we would kill them off. Anything much bigger than man is just too expensive.
Lets hope extraterrestrials are larger than us !
martin
