Crichton the caveman: “Destroy it immediately. Sure, it SEEMS beneficial, but it’s only a matter of time before super-intelligent wheels escape your control and destroy the world.”
Og: “Shut up!” (Beats Crichton to death with club)
A few centuries later:
Johannes Guttenberg: “Behold, I have invented a printer! With this invention, I can spread learning and culture all over the world! Why, this could be the start of a rebirth of civilization… a Renaissance.”
Ludwig von Crichton: “Destroy it, you fool! If you don’t, this printer will start making books on its own and overrun the Earth!”
Guttenberg: “Shut up, dummkopf!” (Beats him to death with printer’s mallet.)
Frank Buck: “I’ve mastered the art of capturing animals alive! Soon, we can build first-rate zoological gardens all over the world, where people can learn to appreciate animals of all kinds.”
Michael Crichton Sr.: “Stop, you cretin! If you do this, chaos theory dictates lions and tigers will take over North America, and
slaughter every man, woman and child on the continent!”
Chaos theory doesn’t predict that the park will fail. Chaos theory merely states that it is hubris to think you have everything safely under control. There is no way to assume you have all the variables and their interactions understood well enough to confidently state that nothing will go wrong. Sooner or later the numbers will catch up with you (basically a restated Murphy’s Law…Murphy being the original chaos theorist).
As for ‘proving’ the park will fail you can’t do that but you could probably apply a statistical analysis to it that would look something like the following.
Chances of Dinosaurs Running Amok and Eating Visitors and Staff:
1 day – 0.0002% chance
1 week – 0.005% chance
1 year – 1.27% chance
10 years – 18.68% chance
100 years – 99.999% chance
Why did the park fail? because they made assumptions:
We can keep the animals in…despite the fact that we know next to nothing about their abilities.
They can’t breed…whoopsie…that frog DNA is helping them breed.
They need an amino acid only we can give them…whoopsie, they can get that acid in NATURE.
They can’t get off the island…whoopsie, there are some that are smart enough to figure out how (and did).
The movie points this out poorly, the book is better. My favorite part of the book is the aviary/hotel. They build a hotel in an aviary…they never took into account that pteridactles (sp) crap ALOT more than little birds do…and they like to poop on strangers.
Sure, he may/did screw up alot of the science, but that doesn’t undermine the premise: Don’t implement some new fangles science just because you can. Perhaps you should test things first. make sure you understand the ramifications of what you are doing. Sure, you are going to miss things, but lets at least THINK about it.
The dangerous thing about Chrichton is that he does do some research. He does just enough, in fact, to make his stories convincing… But not enough to make them accurate. The net result is that we’ve now got a bunch of folks running around who think that they know chaos theory, or xenobiology, or photonic computing, or time travel, or etc., when in reality, all they know is the name of the field.
The one that always drove me a bit bonkers from this is the “If a butterfly flaps his wings it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world.” Any basis to this? It seems more logical that any effect of a small action in one place will in the long run by damped out. But my logic and a $1 won’t even buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Not to hijack this thread further into a Jurassic Park bashathon (but maybe a Cafe Society thread devoted to that wouldn’t be a bad idea), but as a software developer, I have to say that idea of one programmer (Nedry) writing “three million lines of code” all by himself is just far beyond im-freakin’-possible.
Unless 2,999,990 of those lines were NOOPs (“no operation”), of course.
And really, would you go to a theme park where the only recourse when a storm arrives is to pile into a helicopter and fly back to the mainland? Walt Disney would’ve herded everyone into the central hotel and sell the guests overpriced knickknacks while they waited for the thing to blow over…
Yes and no. The butterfly doesn’t actually cause the hurricane as such.
All this illustrates is the difficulty in prediciting complex systems (or at least systems in which you can’t know all the variables).
Assume you had a stupendous super computer and input every piece of data on weather conditions on earth. That includes everyone’s breathing (they’re pushing air around), every car moving, people walking, temperature at every point on earth and so on. Theoretically you can now predict future weather patterns with great precision. Now assume that in all the data you collected you neglected to account for one butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon Basin. At first your computer program will seem to be running well but at some point that teeny-tiny error in your initial inputs will grow to be a BIG error down the road. Your computer may then well tell you to expect a sunny day in Miami and surprise the hell out of you when a hurricane shows-up on your doorstep. Eventually that error alone will make your program completely worthless at prediciting anything even minutes away unless you re-input new, accurate data.
Another reason that it is not exactly Chaos Theory causing the park to fail (at least, I think so. Correct me if I am wrong): Chaos Theory assumes a set of starting conditions, and then lets the system evolve through time without interference. A slightly different set of initial conditions would result in (possibly) wildly different results down the line. However, a zoo (or JP) is not a hands-off no interference system. There is constant feedback and tweaking. If the power dips, they fix the generator. If the animals escape, they build bigger fences, etc. The only way JP would be a system subject to Chaos Theory would be if they just built it and set it in motion, never adjusting, fixing, or manipulating the variables as it runs its course.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by sghoul *
**Man, I think some of you missed the point of JP.
Why did the park fail? because they made assumptions:
We can keep the animals in…despite the fact that we know next to nothing about their abilities.
They can’t breed…whoopsie…that frog DNA is helping them breed.
They need an amino acid only we can give them…whoopsie, they can get that acid in NATURE.
They can’t get off the island…whoopsie, there are some that are smart enough to figure out how (and did).
The movie points this out poorly, the book is better.
I total agree with you. Michael's point is a simple one, science doesn't always look at the entire situation of a new discovery. They look at things with a very narrow mind. This is also different then a zoo, because we have known about animals that are in zoos for almost as long there have been humans. But dinosaurs, we only know about them from the point of millions of years after they are dead. An example in the book of this is the dinosaur *Dilophosaur* was poisonous, but they did close to nothing to affectivelly solve this. Animals in todays zoos aren't as strong or as big as the ones in Jurassic Park, mainly, dinosaurs. Our materials can't hold anything that is moving 30 mph that weighs 30-40 tons.
Also, that person that wrote in about Crichton getting bashed to death because he thinks "the wheel is evil," well I think his analogies are so poor that I didn't even bother to look for his name. Michael Crichton didn't say that we shouldn't make scientific discoveries, but to throghly research them. Oh, by the way, a caveman didn't invent the wheel, try the summerians.
I think most of the people who wrote in saying that this doesn't make sense only saw the movie, or didn't take the book in throghly. His message is out very open and is easy to understand.
This is a good book, and his science may be off, but it is fiction and he acknowledged this in the back of the book. I think most of you should reread Jurassic Park and then post a reply at my E-mail. huffed@hotmail.com
Well, yes, a chaotic sytem is one that shows sensitivity to initial conditions by definition. But you’re right, I should’ve made it more clear that that’s what I was talking about.
astorian *you cracked me right up with that post, my man.
My objection to Crichton is his use of chaos theory to make the unpredictable predictable.
Fairly simple linear systems that have God-awful-unsolvable solutions are relatively common. You can usually get short-term numerical solutions to any of these. The problem is a long-term solution to any problem that has a sensitivity to initial conditions.
My beef with Ian Malcolm is predicting that the park was going to fail. If he was really appreciative of chaos theory I think he would have said, “I have no idea what is going to happen here.”
Exactly! The behaviour of an out-of-control aircraft is chaotic. But if you try to evaluate the behavior of an aircraft on auto-pilot, you use control theory. This will tell you if the system is stable or not. A stable system will compensate for differences in initial condition or external interferences. If a system turns out to be unstable, you can’t blame chaos theory - you blame the engineer who failed to design a stable system, or blame external conditions that the system wasn’t designed to handle.
