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Help Save Endangered Rhinos by Making Artificial Horns (Video)
Black Rhinoceros horn material sells for $65,000 per kilo. The rhinos are rare, which helps up the price, but the horn is also prized "as a fever-reducer, a cosmetic, an aphrodisiac, a hangover care. And so people highly value it in the Vietnamese and Chinese cultures. So we are trying to reduce that value by increasing the supply," says Jennifer Kaehms of Pembient, a company that's working to make artificial rhino horns that are not only chemically indistinguishable from the natural variety, but are 3-D printed to look the same. The idea is that if they can flood the market with human-made rhino horns, it will cut poaching -- which is a big deal because there are only about 5,000 black rhinos left in the whole world.
They have a crowdfunding appeal on experiment.com looking for help in sequencing the black rhino genome. At this writing, it has two days to run and has only raised $12,831 of its $16,500 goal. The results will be open sourced, and once the black rhino is on its way to salvation, they plan to work on the white rhino, then move on to killing the black market for ivory and tiger pelts, which don't sell for as much as rhino horns but are valuable enough to keep an international horde of poachers in business.
They have a crowdfunding appeal on experiment.com looking for help in sequencing the black rhino genome. At this writing, it has two days to run and has only raised $12,831 of its $16,500 goal. The results will be open sourced, and once the black rhino is on its way to salvation, they plan to work on the white rhino, then move on to killing the black market for ivory and tiger pelts, which don't sell for as much as rhino horns but are valuable enough to keep an international horde of poachers in business.
It's not the chemical makeup of rhino horn that makes it valuable to people, it's the 'mystical' properties of it. It's pure superstition.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The point is that no one will be able to tell which is which. It's the same idea as destabilizing an economy by flooding the market with high-quality counterfeit bills.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
It should self fund.
No no no. Poachers do it for the money, not for the difficulty and risk. Make fakes good enough and no need to go shooting. (If you could print perfect money - why work.)
It is about time. The chinese fakes all sorts of things and try to sell to us. (Famous brands and fake drugs) Why not fake the stuff superstitious chinese wants? Powdered rhino horn is also popular - the powder would be even easier to fake. No structure there.
How about teaching backwoods-asshole Chinese and Vietnamese that not every rare animal part will make their dick harder or bigger?
That would be easier than teaching whitetrash-asshole in America that climate change is real?
There have been efforts to cut off the horns in the past (no need to replace them with a fake, 3D printed or otherwise because it's mostly for display). The problem is that poachers don't shoot rhinos that are running around loose; they use snares or traps that kill indiscriminately, whether the horn has already been removed or not.
The best solution is to cut the market price. By flooding the market with knock-offs the price will drop enough that it won't be worth the effort and risk to kill a rhino for its horn. And maybe (maybe) idiots will stop buying it because they know that what they're buying is almost certainly fake. A poacher in Africa would know he has the real thing, but by the time it gets to Asia everyone will claim to be selling the real thing, even though most will be fake.