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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."
Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".
Don't hold your breath. Clive Palmer has a long history of shooting his mouth off about grandiose schemes, then not following through with any action.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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 have read several of his books and came to the conclusion that either he is really afraid of all science and technology or just writing his books targeting the audience that are. Every single book came down to: "See? SEE?! This is why you fucking scientists shouldn't do anything remotely exprimental!!!"
I think it's pretty well accepted at this point. Early birds and feathered ground-dwelling dromeosaurs are anatomically almost identical. Obviously there's no way to be sure without DNA, but we're probably about as sure that aves is a subset of dinosauria as we are of anything in paleontology. (IANAP, terms and conditions may apply, see your local paleontologist for details.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not in the least. Read the forewords and author's notes as well and you'll see a very different point of view: science for PROFIT is extremely risky.
His concern isn't science for the sake of knowledge, but the inherent dangers of doing science for the sake of money. That become science done in secret rather than open, science that cuts corners to save costs, science that is applied for dubious rather than nobel goals.
He loves genetic engineering and it's possibility to improve lives for example, but as he shows in "Next" - he despises the idea of "gene patents".
The problem with Jurassic Park wasn't that it was science, but that it was consumerist-driven.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Using nothing more than signal chemicals (something like growth hormones) applied at the right spot during the right moment of embryo growth, it's possible to make chickens grow teeth. A different substance applied at the base of the spine during early embryo formation gets you a chicken with a long, dinosaur-like tail. You can do something similar to the wings too, unbending them in a way that makes them more like handclaws.
This is without any genetic modification at all. The data to revert a chicken to something with dinosaurlike claws, teeth and tail all still exists in the standard modern chicken genome. There's nowhere near enough data preserved in chickens to reverse what evolution has done to them over tens of millions of years, but there is a lot more preserved than you might expect.
Look up Jack Horner's "chickenosaurus" concept for the details. His book has info on the experimental background to the idea.
Nice comeback - though I obviously meant to type "noble".
That said - most people miss the point of the Nobel prize, I just hope most scientists don't. Alfred Nobel made his money from an invention called dynamite. While it later found use as a weapon of war, that wasn't the purpose of his creation. Dynamite is derived from the Latin for "alive" - and it was created to SAVE rather than TAKE lives. Specifically dynamite was invented for mining purposes - the most common mining explosive prior to that was nitro-glycerine, dynamite is MUCH safer to work with and it saved millions of lives by reducing explosion-accidents in mining.
Nobel firmly believed that science and knowledge are the greatest tools to advance a peaceful world with happier and longer-living people. His prize was intended to encourage scientists to do just that- produce knowledge for the good of mankind. This is also why the only NON-science prize is the peace prize. There is no Nobel-prize for business or economics (no really there isn't - the so-called Nobel-prize for economics was created much later by a bunch of Swiss bankers and has no affiliation with the fund Nobel left or the committee who awards the prizes from that fund).
Nobel was a humanitarian. The irony is that the very life-saving invention that convinced him of science's great potential for humanity was also just a few decades later such a major part in racking up the body counts in the world wars. Nobel would not have been pleased...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If it's any consolation, velociraptors were not that big and looked rather ridiculous
Utahraptors, on the other hand...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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?