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Australian Billionaire Wants To Build Jurassic Park-Style Resort
lukehopewell1 writes "Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has already floated a plan to rebuild the Titanic to scale and sail it around the world, but now the mining magnate has found a new use for his money: cloning dinosaurs. Palmer reportedly wants to clone a dinosaur and let it loose in one of his resorts in Queensland, Australia. The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA."
I don't care how stupid, impossible, and just damn right eccentric this sounds.
Just for the record, he did actually watch the movie, so he knows how this turns out right?
And I want a pony.
Someone send this guy a DVD of "Weird Science". I'd go to that theme park.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I'm pretty sure I saw this movie already, and it didn't end well.
I thought there were lots of talks about this after the movie came out, and the definite answer was that it was impossible because DNA does not preserve that long, no matter how nicely that mosquito was encapsulated in amber.
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
I know UNIX, so I should be plenty safe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Colourful mining billionaire Clive Palmer may have a costly penchant for resurrecting remnants of the past, but he has no intentions of extending that to long-extinct reptiles, sources say.
The Sunshine Coast Daily reported on rumours that the mining magnate plans to clone a dinosaur from DNA, so it could roam free through a Jurassic Park-style area at his Coolum golf resort.
It was reported Mr Palmer had been in deep discussion with the people who successfully cloned Dolly the sheep.
But a source close to Mr Palmer rubbished the suggestion today.
"It's absolutely ridiculous," the source said.
However, Mr Palmer is expected to reveal highly-anticipated redevelopment plans for his luxury Coolum resort on Friday.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/palmers-jurassic-park-plan-extinct-20120731-23bvr.html
I distinctly remember that happening in a movie from my youth. It was even based on a book! As I recall it didn't end well for those involved.
Wasn't the composition of the atmosphere different back then? Even if you could clone a dinosaur you'd probably have to keep it in a tank.
Palmer just likes the lime light and will say anything to get it. Nothing to see here...
Has this guy ever seen a movie, ever?
Maybe you should add the "what could possibly go wrong" tag? :)
Have your people call my people, we can get this greenlighted next week! What could possibly go wrong?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But nigh impossible. Even if you were to find dinoblood in a piece of amber the DNA would still have decayed to near absolute uselessness.
Perhaps, just MAYBE, if the amber/mosquito/container for dinoblood was permafrozen since 65+ million years you'd have a shot at it, but even then entropy would probably muck it up.
A better bet would be to inflict gigantism on ostriches or some other present-day bird, or try to clone some other extinct animal that is not nearly as old as dinosaurs.
I, for one, would like to see how big an overgrown albatross would be.
Every time something weird like this comes (or gets reported to come) from Clive Palmer there is a political problem which he needs to divert the attention away from...
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/clive-palmer-says-greens-in-cia-plot-20120320-1vhmm.html
bash$
Now remember that this is all coming from “a source close to Palmer”
So possibly Palmer's only been dreaming next to a pint of Foster's "Aaaahhh...wouldn't it be awesome if we could build something like Jurassic Park. Next round is on me."
Q. What do you get when a fool becomes a billionaire ?
This is just Clive Palmer's way of deflecting press coverage. Palmer is one of several Australian mining billionaires, and the Treasurer is expected to talk soon about their opposition to mining tax. Clive would rather have http://google.com/search?q=clive+palmer+news link to anything else, e.g. dinosaurs and his new resort.
The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA.
He does know Dolly died at the age of six, while the average life span of sheep is at least twice that long and lots of sheep (when properly cared for) live up to 20 years?
Unless he's ok with his T-Rex barely reaching adulthood, he might want to look elsewhere for better cloning scientists.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It's sad when a mind degrades to this point. Dolly, IIRC, was one success in hundreds of failures, and had a pretty short and painful life. What's next? have Queensland leave the commonwealth?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
is a fucking ratbag who is wealthy enough for the fucking idiots of the media to hang off his every word. He was even given the title of "a queensland gem" or some such utter crap, probably because he is a fat ugly cunt with money and an ego to match.
...because people of your intellect should not be let loose on the world's stage to tarnish the rest of the country.
The sad part is this peanut comes out with a new "thing" every other week to get his name and/or face in the media. I like how the media plays down his eccentricity by labelling him 'colourful' as opposed to eccentric (or mad) though. That might attract the lawyers...
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
That Hollywood runs with this idea and makes a Movie out of it!
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
If he needs to blow it money on things we all think is stupid how about paying me to spend his money for him, That way he'll be killing two birds with 1 stone.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
The lesson I got from Jurassic Park was - Don't clone the meat eaters. Brontosuars and Siplodocis may not be as excitinfg as T-Rex, bit they won't eat you.
More important: How will the name of the dinosaur be? Larry?
Woolly Mammoth?
Almost as cool, easier to find viable DNA, and good practice (just in case).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
They could buy a nice place - Greece, say, or maybe Italy - and set up their Jurassic Park recreation there.
Then Gina could let her pesky children loose in it and see how long they last. Sort out the family inheritance issues once and for all.
I feel sad for this guy, that his creativity is so limited that he can only imagine wanting things that had already existed: Titanic, dinosaurs, giant ferris wheel... Maybe he'll want a copy of Neuswannstein like Disneyland's, or a copy of the Pyramid of Giza and the Statue of Liberty, like Las Vegas. If rich people were ... more interesting, maybe we'd like them better!
The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA
Any scientist with a reputation to protect will keep a million miles from anybody with such a request. Can you imagine the ridicule they'd get at their next conference if their colleagues knew they'd been talking about resurrecting dinosaurs? Maybe one day it will be possible to restore a whole organism from remains millions of years old, but right now the technology is very far from achieving that.
I would have thought that, being a member of the Liberal Party of Australia, Clive Palmer would have been well aware that there were already plenty of dinosaurs to go around.
Athy, athier, athiest.
None of this will happen.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
After the dinosaur gets a good taste of what is 2012 A.D. compared to 10^8 B.C. he wishes only one thing: to be extinct again.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I support his goals as long as he lets me shoot me some dinosaur so I can hang its head next to the lion and the bear on my wall :)
Sadly, cloned dinosaurs will probably be pretty fragile creatures. Not only are there bound to be tons of errors in the DNA, the maternal contributions from the surrogate mothers are going to be all wrong. And to top it all off, their symbiotic bacteria and environment are going to be entirely different, and they are going to be exposed to pathogens they have no resistance to. We're lucky if anybody can make those animals survive; they won't be taking over the world any time soon.
He should clone Denver the last dinosaur because he's my friend and a whole lot more. Besides Denver would never kill anyone. He just wants to play on a playground with your children.
Rhinoceros's, sea turtles, komodo dragons, horned toads. These are only some examples of living dinosaurs. The difference between dinosaur and animal is only the date it went extinct.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Despite early promise, virtually all ancient DNA occurrences older than a few hundreds of thousands of years are regarded as bogus, including all supposed dinosaur DNA. People initially thought that some DNA was preserved from dinosaur bones from the Cretaceous Period (more than 65 million years ago), but these were eventually discovered to be due to contamination and amplification errors. The same is true for many other multi-million-year-old supposed fossil DNA occurrences. DNA only seems to survive for a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of years before it is too degraded to yield a meaningful signal. Therefore, the only dinosaur DNA available is from modern or slightly older birds.
The problem with all dinosaur DNA claims has been known since the 1990s. It's not news to people in the field. So, when he talks to those scientists it's going to be a short conversation. It isn't going to matter how much money he offers. It's not possible. We don't have the ingredients necessary. If he wants dinosaurs, about the best he could do is let a bunch of emus run wild on the resort, and they already have those in Australia.
If he wanted to try something cool that is in the realm of possibility (although still extraordinarily difficult), he could try to revive an extinct moa. Some of the remains include soft tissues, so their DNA has already been sequenced. Moas would probably be quite impressive if alive again. Their hips are roughly the height of a person, and their head would be about twice as high.
Dynamite is derived from the Latin for "alive"
Eh?
Dynamite: Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary dynam-(from Greek dynamis power)
When will they learn not to introduce foreign species?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The guy is a massive attention whore. He's mentioned that he wants to have a tilt at the next federal election. Enough people are likely to vote for him based on the fact that they keep hearing his name, even if it is in regards to batshit insane ideas.
Australia's wildlife's not nearly dangerous enough, they really could use some dinosaurs running wild.
You just know that there will be an escape sooner or later.. and many death will ensue.
Why would anyone ever want to go out of their way, to bring back predators that were long dead... isn't there enough stuff out there that want to kill us already!?
That's right kids. Don't use magic science to make dinosaurs, or even more ridiculous magic will happen to propel the plot!
Anyone who takes Crichton seriously is a moron.
The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA
The correct response is obvious: "How much money do you have?
That's a resort I'd rather visit. Or just clone any living supermodel, or clone sets of supermodels. I mean, is prostitution illegal if the woman is a clone?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Video
Clone dinosaurs, rebuild the titanic, put the dinosaurs on the titanic and then sail it around the world?
You won't find any frozen dino remains in Antarctica, at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction it still had a tropical climate, and only iced over after the opening of the drake passage 23 million years ago.
When chicken embryos first start to develop they have teeth buds along their jaw lines and the beginnings of multi segmented tails. As they develop their DNA tells the developing embryo to absorb them. Much like human embryo's absorb our own embryonic gill slits. Now if you turn off the genes that control this absorption instruction you get chicken embryos that develop long multi segmented dinosaur tails and meat eating dinosaur teeth complete with the serrated inside edge.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1026340/Jurassic-Park-comes-true-How-scientists-bringing-dinosaurs-life-help-humble-chicken.html
Note:The 'Daily Mail' isn't the gold standard for scientific reporting but here it does a good job of describing the research so the public can understand it (creationists excepted). Names of people and institutions where the work was done are given allowing Internet searches to the relevant papers and science reporting.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
He's got to be where he is by breaking the rules. He started off as a department of mines clerk with inside information and the ability to get leases before anyone outside of the department, got a lot of special treatment later from a government that ended up with half the ministry in jail for taking bribes, then shot from mere millionaire to billionaire on the back of a very strange and dubious deal where he bought Queensland Nickel Refineries for far less than they were making a year in profit. I won't say he's crazy from his claims that a rival political party to the one he bankrolled was "funded by the CIA", I'll say it was a very deliberate lie just like all the rest that got him to where he is.
I haven't met him, because I'm in the minerals exploration business and Clive doesn't do that sort of thing - he just takes stuff from other people once they've found something. He's a bloated leech that adds nothing and just uses the courts as a blunt instrument.
I's say with his funding to set up the LNP that he's already brought the dinosaurs back to Queensland.
'The Gods must be crazy' has gone out of style?
Space science is another such endeavor. It's been used as rationalization for some of the most ridiculously overpriced infrastructure (the International Space Station) ever built. Even the unmanned space programs have devolved into building new overpriced widgets rather than actual space science.
New Horizons - first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
Kepler - (at least) tripled the number of known exoplanets.
Messenger - first artificial satellite of Mercury.
Cassini/Heugens - first spacecraft orbiting Saturn and its moons. Discovered methane lakes on Titan. Discovered cryovolcanoes on Enceladus. First landing on Titan. [...]
Dawn - first close-up images of major asteroids (Ceres, Vesta). First demonstration of ion thrusters in space.
Radiation Belt Storm Probes - understanding the (critical to life on earth) Van Allen radiation belt.
Solar Probe Plus - closest man-made object to the Sun.
[...]
It's a pernicious myth that the unmanned space program is not producing new and significant results. I really don't understand why it keeps recurring on this website, amazingly. Is it a myth born out of abject ignorance? (If so, go RTF NASA websites.) Or is it an article of faith of people of a specific political bent, absolutely unsubstantiated by facts or actual knowledge of space science?
As an australian he should know the consequences of introducing a new kind of species in an ecosystem without natural predators.
And yes, if those cause problems could introduce later their natural predators, that were bigger dinosaurs, and keep the progression hoping that a big meteorite eventually kills again all the big ones. But the real solution is not start it in the first place.
Why not start with something a little less ambitious than full blown dinosaurs? I'm sure there's quite a few relatively recently extinct animals that would generate quite a bit of "buzz" if the were suddenly brought back into existence. I for one would like to see the Dodo Bird brought back. How about the Passenger Pigeon? No human alive today has ever seen a live one... Why not start there?
the raptor ate your baby
Step 1: Sequence the genomes of every animal on the planet.
Step 2: Determine computationally how these animals diverged and back calculate a viable ancestor genomes.
Step 3: Build synthetic genomes of those animals that are viable.
Step 4: Transfer those genomes wrapped around histones with the correct modifications back into the an egg.
The technical problems are things like DNA methylation, back calculating genomes, and the fact that we don't know how most non-coding RNA works for organism development.
I'm sure I left out a bunch of stuff but we are currently developing the technology to do all these steps!
Let the scientists make a s**tload of genetic and paleontologycal researches, and let the crazy guy pay for it.
There is no need to characterize him as such. He was a thief, plain and simple. He failed to respect natural rights, and violence resulted.
And which "natural right" would that be? Philosophers typically agreed that life and liberty/freedom are natural rights, and possibly some variant on the pursuit of happiness (though that's largely covered by the first two) - i.e. they are things you would have in the wild until you die. Property was far more contentious and is generally considered a legal rather than natural right. Locke is the only one I can think of offhand that included it - in the wild property is limited to whatever you can defend, and by definition no thief violates that. The problem is that property is a self-catalyzing - the more you have the easier it is to get more, enshrining it on the same level as life and liberty will inevitably lead to a feudalistic society.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
As a Christian I do not accept the belief that dinosaurs are millions of years old. From a scientific perspective DNA simply cannot last millions of years so wouldn't finding dino DNA be a proof that they are not infact millions of years old? From a Biblical perspective it should be easy enough to find lots of dinosaur DNA. From an evoluationary perspective they should not be able to find any dinsoaur DNA at all.
Not to worry, he's planning on setting it loose in _Australia_. Poor thing won't last 5 minutes.
There is not enough food on earth to feed human, Do we want to share with Dinosaurs now? or be food for them to reduce population..THINK
I see you've been hit pretty hard for your trolling yesterday. Just to make it abundantly clear, I did not moderate your comments down. For that matter, it has been a very, very, long time since I last had any mod points to hand out.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
are u crazy are u trying to inger people i think and believe ur best thing to do is rebuild the titanic instead of recreating dinosaurs