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Australian Billionaire Wants To Build Jurassic Park-Style Resort

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

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."

20 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome! by Elgonn · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't care how stupid, impossible, and just damn right eccentric this sounds.

    1. Re:Awesome! by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Informative

      Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".

    2. Re:Awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Doesn't it come across as "never do anything because there might be unintended consequences", though? I mean, the point of unintended consequences is you can't predict whether anything you do will have bad ones or not.

    3. Re:Awesome! by SomePgmr · · Score: 5, Funny

      I thought the take-away was, "Pay your programmers well, or things will go horribly wrong."

      Also, don't breed that really large, featherless, murderous variety of chess playing velociraptor with opposable digits. They're not worth the aggravation.

    4. Re:Awesome! by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Crichton was trying to make a point with his Jurassic Park novels. It was a cautionary tale about "the law of unintended consequences".

      And so? Why should we take Jurassic Park, or any work of fiction, as a guide to the way this would work in the real world?

      Cautionary tales of Science Run Amok are at least as old as modern science itself (Frankenstein was published in 1818, arguably about the point where science as we understand it today was emerging from the morass of religious teleology, superstition, and philosophical maundering) and for just as long, they've been held up as examples of why we shouldn't do this or that: "That which we know now is Good and Right and The Way Things Are, but this new knowledge you're seeking is in the realm of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know!" And for the entire time, science has gone ahead anyway, and within a generation or two everyone pretty much agrees that it was a good thing ... just in time to complain about whatever new field of knowledge is opening up and is therefore Scary and Dangerous.

      I'd say spending any amount of money to clone dinosaurs is a bad idea, but that's not because the end result will be people getting eaten by raptors. It's because we don't have any dinosaur DNA* and aren't likely to have enough to get anything like a complete sequence, nor do we have nearly enough basic biological knowledge to create a viable embryo even if we did have the genetic information. Now, speaking as a bioinformaticist, if Clive Palmer wants to devote a portion of his considerable wealth to creating the knowledge that would allow us to clone dinosaurs if we were lucky enough to retrieve some reasonably intact tissue, I'll applaud -- but I hope he's not expecting to have a pet stegosaurus any time in the next few years, or even decades.

      *Not counting bird DNA, which of course is plentiful, but reconstructing the ancestral sequences back to the point necessary to create "dinosaurs" as most people think of them would be just about as huge a challenge as building the whole thing from scratch.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    5. Re:Awesome! by Lotana · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!!!"

    6. Re:Awesome! by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    7. Re:Awesome! by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Informative

      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 *
    8. Re:Awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Awesome! by hvm2hvm · · Score: 5, Funny

      science that is applied for dubious rather than nobel goals

      Yeah, all scientists should have a nobel as a goal, not money

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      ics
    10. Re:Awesome! by aliquis · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Pay your programmers well, or things will go horribly wrong."

      No problem. I/we/she/whatever knows UNIX! ;D

    11. Re:Awesome! by tehcyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not the scientists who cause the problem in Jurassic Park, it's the selfish, money-obsessed fat-arsed geek who fucks everything up.

      But I can see why most slashdotters would not like this interpretation.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    12. Re:Awesome! by DrXym · · Score: 5, Funny

      Dinosaurs and unicorns simply didn't make it onto the ark. That's all you need to know.

    13. Re:Awesome! by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not at all. Even if all money is made in a profit-based market - and thus the funding for science comes from there- that doesn't mean that science has to be done with a profit motive.

      Crichton is strongly opposed to privatization of science and believes it must be tax-funded as a public-good without a profit motive, he also strongly opposes laws that allow publicly funded research to be patented.
      Now that tax-money may have been made by profit-seeking companies originally, but the intermediary step prevents THEIR motivations from becoming the motivations of the SCIENTISTS.

      His point is science should be done for knowledge, if somebody can use that knowledge to make a profit that's fine- but that somebody must not be the scientist. I tend to agree.

      If you take that approach, then you can prevent the kind of stupid laws that want to turn universities into more "business-like" entities, if anything they are TOO MUCH like private enterprize already, they OUGHT to operate as a public service. Nobody ever asks if a neighbourhood playground makes MONEY - we just build them because it's better to live in a world with them than a world without them. That is what science should be. A neighbourhood playground.

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      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    14. Re:Awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If it's any consolation, velociraptors were not that big and looked rather ridiculous

    15. Re:Awesome! by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Interesting

      >That would be ideal. Unfortunately that only works if people at large are happy to pay taxes to fund the science. In the real world we live in, majority of people bitch and whine about taxes that don't bring them direct, immediate benefits.

      Sad, but true, not an insurmountable problem however. The difference is in education: teach people the value of knowledge, that all scientific research DO bring tangible benefits and that making it publicly available gives you as an individual a greater SHARE of that benefit. For example if all drug-research was done publicly, and made by whoever had a factory, without patents, then medicines would be MUCH, MUCH cheaper for all of us.

      >Science investment brings with it incredible returns, but in incomprehensible forms that can only be put into practical inventions many years later.

      Some generations have figured that out in the past, often the next one undid the progress, but like I said, it can be done.

      >Idealism just doesn't survive in the real world.
      This I radically don't agree with. Idealism is the only thing that changes the real world.
      To quote Richard Stallman: "If I had set out to say 'a mostly free operating system is okay' back when even that seemed impossible to most people, then we would not have had completely free operating systems available today. We have completely free operating systems because we set out to create nothing less than the ideal. Idealism is stating the ideal, and pushing for the ideal, even if you never quite get there, because every step you get closer is an improvement".

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      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    16. Re:Awesome! by GameboyRMH · · Score: 5, Informative

      Utahraptors, on the other hand...

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    17. Re:Awesome! by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >Value can be measured in the real world, it's not that hard, either people want it and are willing to SPEND on it, and thus you can have profit and you can measure efficiency or people don't want it and then there is NO VALUE except for what is in your head.

      That's an economist's definition of value - it's not an accurate or complete picture. Knowing the movements of the planets is information we cannot use to make a product, we cannot sell it, we cannot make anything out of it, if we ever can it won't be for probably hundreds of years - yet it DOES have value.
      Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up. It's a true post-scarcity supply.
      Economists measure that value as "zero" - but that's because economists are using a too limited view.

      >If you are not seeing this, then all you are talking about is mental masturbation, sure sure, you can have your mental masturbation, you can have your mental orgasm even because you believe that you have some knowledge that wasn't there previously, but if this knowledge never translates into anything that the economy actually is willing to pay for with profits, then its purely irrelevant, it was no more relevant than any other form of entertainment.

      That kind of view is the antithesis of human progress. All knowledge has infinite value just by existing.

      >My argument is that the basic science is done in the private sector as long as there is no government stealing money from the private sector, and it's done as a side effect of people searching for profit.

      If we limit science to that which has the potential for profit (or at least the currently VISIBLE potential for profit) we destroy it, not least because it isn't science AT ALL unless the results are freely available. It's only science WHEN it is public domain, until then - it's not science.
      Fundamental principle of the scientific method is peer-review, public scrutiny and openness - directly contradictory with a profit motive.

      >Before 1913 there were no income taxes, there were no corporate taxes, there were no payroll taxes, there were no capital gains taxes, no taxes on dividends, no taxes on rent, no taxes on PRODUCTIVITY

      Not only an idiot, an idiot who thinks America is the world. Read the bible, the first version of income taxes will be found the very first chapter of Kings I. 4000 years ago the governments charged taxes. Most of the Industrial-age scientific revolution came from Britain, not America and that WAS a welfare state. Most scientists were not employed by industry but by the church or by TAX-FUNDED academia (which Britain had, had for hundreds of years by then). The idea of tax-funded academic research was already WELL ESTABLISHED when it gave us Isaac Newton in the 1600's !

      >But how necessary is it to have government stealing money from the private sector to fund research into such things, what is the efficiency of this model?
      It takes something of fixed/limited value to buy something of infinite value that only gets MORE valuable the bigger the supply becomes and MORE valuable the more people have access to it. It's the greatest deal in the world, the ultimate investment.

      >It is the institutions that are concerned with education that allow the environment to develop that is necessary to do scientific research, including basic sciences.

      Cause and effect reversed - AGAIN. It's institutions that are concerned with research that double as the best training grounds for other researchers. That should be the total extent of university education: training the next generation of scientists. Everybody who does not WANT to be a scientist should NOT get a degree, but go to some or other form of trade school.

      >You are completely wrong, putting the cart ahead of a horse, thinking that the education and science came before the free market capitalist looking for profit.
      The first example of a University was Plato's academy, established in 387BC, it charged no admissi

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      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  2. Re:Did I miss something? by pegasustonans · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    True, though nobody ever said it would be impossible if the specimen were encapsulated in ice.

    It may be possible if dinosaurs are ever found preserved in ice. Though, I wouldn't hold your breath.

    The reason DNA degrades in amber is, among other things, due to background radiation, a factor which is less worrisome when dealing with ice.

    The likelihood of finding a dinosaur or specimen with intact dinosaur DNA in ice, however, is ridiculously low. Nevertheless, if I were a billionaire intent on blowing money, I could think of worse ways to spend it than a dinosaur hunting expedition to Antarctica.

    --
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
  3. Spin doctoring by gargleblast · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.