Yeah, of course! Dinosaurs! Pterosaurs! Trilobites! Neandertals! Dodos! Everything that is possible! Someone is going to do it anyway, might as well be me.
And I want to know how they taste!
The answer would probably be, “not very much.” I’m having trouble following this line of thought.
Left Hand of Dorkness was doing a cost-benefit analysis, and I pointed out some of the benefits. Are you trying to argue that the costs of potentially introducing a new and invasive species outweighs any inspirational benefit of reintroducing an extinct species?
~Max
I agree with this. I don’t see reviving one species that we help make extinct is much different from intervening when another species is on the brink, and we do that all the time (California condor, northern elephant seal).
I want to eat one. If anything was eaten into extinction, this is it.
I am willing to sacrifice Manitoba to the mammoths.
Then Thylacine, Stellers sea cow, Carolina Parakeet- maybe (they dont do well in captivity and again the vast hardwood forests on the east coast are gone), Great Auk, Dodo, Haast’s eagle, a couple moa species. Maybe Aurochs, but we have bred cattle that look very much like them, and they may be the same species even…
Interesting, look at this list of recently extinct mammal species ( since the year 1500 C. E., ) and there hardly any land megafauna (Beasts over 100#)on it at all.
Aurochs (maybe, if they were a species),Bluebuck,Schomburgk’s deer, a pygmy hippo, that’s pretty much it. Less than one hands worth.
If de-extincting recent or ancient lost lifeforms CAN be done fairly cost-effectively then it WILL be done, fuck any ethics. That’s the tawdry reality. Timid researchers may revive dodos or passenger pigeons; bold scofflaws will go for past humanoid species; impressive saurians; dire wolves and sabre-tooth cats; tiny equines, proboscideans and other reduced monsters for pets; yes, whatever can be exploited. Selecting suitable host-mothers for such exotics may be difficult; expect development of appropriate artificial wombs which will of course see human applications. If an eohippus can be cloned, so can Jeff Bezos, FTW.
True. It was quite rare when white men found it, like maybe 1000, but pretty much we ate them all.
You might want to re-read the OP - we’re specifically discussing the ethics of it.
Unless your argument is “whatever is possible is ethical”, but that didn’t seem to be what you were saying.
I think mice are worth as much as megafauna. More, even.
I wonder if there’s a lot in the gap between my arbitrary 1000 CE cutoff and theirs? Probably not. Let’s use theirs.
There’s also lists of birds, fishes and insects.
Although if you ask me, Neduba extincta was kind of asking for it 
I’m saying that ethical arguments will be swept aside by curiosity and greed and will be ultimately resolved by power (im)balances. And what seems right or ethical or even a good idea now may not play out so nicely - c.f. rabbits in Australia.
SHOULD extinct diseases be revived? No. But I fully expect unethical players to do so. SHOULD extinct fauna be revived? I don’t know. I see suggested size and time limits but those look arbitrary, speculative. We won’t know the consequences till we start reviving ancient life. SHOULD revival work be limited to safely-sealed environments? Yes, but I expect [del]budget-minded[/del] cheap, rushed, sloppy labs to skip safeguards. And I’ll ask not SHOULD but COULD all such work be tightly controlled? I doubt it, even with draconian crackdowns and near-ubiquitous surveillance.
OP asks, “You’re on the panel discussing the implications. The lights go red on the cameras. The world is watching. What do you say?” I’d say, “The technologies of extinction revival will also let billionaires reach for immortality and for your dead or living kin or friends or pets to be cloned. If it’s possible, it’ll happen. Prepare for a bumpy ride, kids.”
True, some of those rodents filled a important niche.
Scientifically risk is calculated by multiplying the probability of an event and the impact of the event.
Where this approach fails is when the probability is extremely low but the impact is extremely high.
For example nuclear plant accidents fall into this category where there are multiple failures resulting a disaster. Airliner accidents, Deepwater Horizon, etc all fall into this category.
I am wary of anyone who says that we understand all the risks associated with the OPs proposition.
Oh, I agree. The ramifications are so complicated that no one alive could foresee all of them.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It just means for some people it shouldn’t be done. The ethics of it are complex.
- Is it, in fact, a good thing to bring back an extinct species?
- Is it better - or more ethical - if it’s one we, ourselves, made extinct?
- Are the risks worth it?