I’ve long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like “science/genetic engineering is bad” or “you can’t control nature” to be a bit silly, given that, well, it’s a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It’s a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn’t do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that “these animals are special and can’t be safely contained” rather than “letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea”.
Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it’d be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it’s a monster movie.
That was the thing that always broke the immersion for me.
Our ancestors hunted the mammoths with just spears and a hole in the ground.
And you’re telling me that modern technology can’t come up with a way to properly neutralize or contain a dinosaur?
But it’s not a zoo, like even in the slightest. It’s a theme park.
They don’t have a full dinosaur genome so they literally make stuff up. Not only that, but just like with the Colossal Bioscience stuff that’s literally happening right now, there’s no learning for these brought-back-to-life creatures so they will not behave anything like their actual prehistoric counterparts. It is bad science because there’s no reason to be doing the science at all. It won’t replicate anything from the past (for so so so many reasons) and it has so many unethical things to get past before it’s even slightly in -eh- territory.
Hard agree. My takeaway is the moral of the story is always do quality engineering. There have been like 10 movies and they still don’t know how to construct an enclosure.
Why do they always only have one massive entrance to each enclosure? Why is it large enough for the Dinosaur to walk out of? Why don’t they have two doors in series, airlock style?
Where I’m from, when engineers complete their certification they get an iron ring made from the material of a collapsed bridge. This is remind them to not become arrogant and think about everything that could go wrong.
You wouldn’t be able to find a good engineer to design a park for animals no one really knows the behaviour of. Hammond would have to hire the people in this thread who think “yeah we could design something that will contain these animals, no problem at all!”
Well for starters I wouldn’t make the containment system an electric fence, have an electric fence by all means but have some physical metal rods as backup. Also maybe don’t make the dinosaurs bulletproof.
Hammond probably got told that but decided it was too expensive. After all how often is the power likely to go on out on * and island frequently hit by hurricanes?
Do you know how high the animal can jump? Do you know whether or not they’ll be able to climb those rods?
Also maybe don’t make the dinosaurs bulletproof.
How would you know which weapons an animal is vulnerable to before it’s fully grown?
The problem is you don’t actually know many the variables you’re trying to make a solution for. You’re assuming you would have thought of a lot of these things only after you’ve seen another solution fail. Hindsight is 20/20. But if you didn’t have the benefit of hindsight how are you going to solve a problem involving lifeforms with an unknown level of intelligence, and an unknown resilience to weapons, and having unknown behaviours? You’re only going to know you missed something after whatever you designed failed.
There’s the part of the movie where Hammond is eating the melting ice cream saying “next time we’ll do it better.” That would be you because you’re certain you can solve a problem that’s not defined by empirical evidence (it doesn’t exist because they’re new animals) but based on assumptions about a new lifeform being similar to existing lifeforms we currently have in zoos, and think keeping animals we have familiarity with is easy (it isn’t, animals in zoos actually do escape containment).
You’re showing the hubris the story is warning against. Science depends on empirical evidence, and there wouldn’t be any empirical evidence on the behaviour of new animals grown in a lab. And if you are completely ignorant of animal behaviour (because you think it’s irrelevant) you’re going to be very bad at building a zoo. But you’re countering that by ignoring all of the knowledge we have about building a zoo (animal behaviour is important!) because there’s hubris layered on top of hubris.
That’s actually a persistent myth. I’ve heard it myself as a wearer of an iron ring, but it isn’t true. The myth was that the first iron rings were made from the remains of the first Quebec Bridge, but they weren’t, let alone any over the century since. The bridge collapse did inspire the creation of the iron rings, though.
Wasn’t the issue with Indominus rex that the dinosaur tricked them into thinking it was gone and they left the door open, like idiots? Definitely some things in those movies are engineering issues, but it mostly was a problem because there were multiple points of failure in the system. This is the point I make about my work. My department catches behavior problems from reports, discussions, interviews, and providing technical assistance. We do tons of work regularly and there are overlapping ways to catch the same problem. When my department is given more work and no new staff, they can’t stay on top of everything. They still catch things because the work they are able to do usual catches one of the multiple opportunities. With enough workload added on eventually you end up missing something. When the stakes are life and death, you have multiple layers of protection programmed into the system.
If you put high voltage electric fences around humans they’re pretty well contained. The intelligence level of the dinosaurs was never relevant but the movie did kind of try and suggest that somehow the velociraptors were special simply because they were mildly more intelligent than the rest.
They made a big thing about how raptors can open doors, my cats can open doors.
And your cats would eat you if they could. I’ve had cats gnaw on my fingers and toes, like they were seeing if that would work. Cats are actually worse than dinosaurs, and modern birds, and reptiles, because they usually stop killing when they’re full.
No. It was basically the paleontologist is a Luddite to the extent he did not realize he needed to find the other end, as he had another seats female end as well. He made two females work… which could be a reference to the rest of the movie.
It’s Frankenstein… scientists creating life from the parts of dead animals without any regard to the consequences.
Zoos can be poorly built and which can create horrible conditions for animals, but at least with with living animals we know what they eat and how they live in the wild and we can attempt to construct a micro-habitat for them to have decent lives in. With dead animals brought back to life, we wouldn’t know how to do this.
What does a Triceratops eat? Why is that Triceratops sick? Will a T-Rex be happy living in a paddock being fed goats, or will it be trying to escape? Certain animals are very skilled at escaping enclosures and you have no idea which animals fall into that category. Which animals are going to be afraid of humans? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them, maybe some of them? If the goal is to make a zoo where people can actually see the animals that might be relevant to how the zoo is designed. Which animals will throw things at people, or spit at people?
I think you’re showing the hubris of science that both Frankenstein and Jurrassic Park are warning against. There’s a whole science involved with designing a zoo and they often get things wrong like the maximum height a pissed off tiger can jump. With genetically engineered animals that resemble dinosaurs, there would be more unknown variables than known variables. You’re assuming you know those variable are irrelevant because apparently “good engineers” don’t need to care about factors they don’t understand?
No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.
There’s the hubris. You’re assuming “we got this” on something that isn’t going to be understandable until after the animals escape.
Science is about trial and error. Zoos function because over a very long period of time mistakes have been made and we learned from those mistakes. We’ve learned these lessons over centuries.
You’re talking about a zoo where every animal in it we have zero experience with handling.
You’re thinking handling animals we have centuries of experience with is the same as handling animals we have zero experience with because there’s a tendency in the science community to be reductive towards other disciplines. Just as you might think that running a zoo is super easy - barely an inconvenience, an expert in genetic engineering (but no experience in running a zoo) might think the same. And the guy running the company might think “well he’s an expert that saying it’s no problem” and think they don’t need to put any effort into studying the behavior of the animals. The “clever girl” dude warns Hammond they should put just down the velociraptors because he spent time watching the animals and studying their behaviour (they never attack the same place twice). But I don’t think that guy had a PhD, so he was ignored.
Right now we have occasional one off story about a tiger jumping higher than tigers were known to be able to jump, getting out and mauling some people. That’s one mistake on one animal. An animal we have centuries of experience in handling, and we still get things wrong sometimes.
A zoo trying to contain many different animals that we have zero experience in handling would have these kinds of events happening constantly, and possibly have multiple issues happening at once possibly resulting in a cascading system failure. Which is what the story portrays. But all it takes is one scientist acting like they’re experts in a subject they look down their nose at other disciplines (how many zoos have you run that qualifies you to say it’s not a problem?) to convince an owner there is no need to worry about those naysayers who aren’t brilliant genetic scientists.
In addition to what you’re saying, a big part of the movie is why are we doing this? Is there anything to be gained from it? We’re currently having that conversation with the “dire wolves” that Colossal Bioscience has created. They’re not actually dire wolves, in any sense of the word, so all we’re learning is how to genetically modify creatures. We’re not learning anything about the creatures themselves. There’s no purpose to doing the same with Dinos, there’s no dna left to match against and the environment is completely different, they wouldn’t act the same at all.
Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!
There’s a recent Behind the Bastards episode on the main dude behind Colossal (who is actually a very well known scientist) and exactly how he is using science to do bad things without considering the consequences.
I’ve long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like “science/genetic engineering is bad” or “you can’t control nature” to be a bit silly, given that, well, it’s a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It’s a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn’t do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that “these animals are special and can’t be safely contained” rather than “letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea”.
Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it’d be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it’s a monster movie.
That was the thing that always broke the immersion for me. Our ancestors hunted the mammoths with just spears and a hole in the ground. And you’re telling me that modern technology can’t come up with a way to properly neutralize or contain a dinosaur?
But it’s not a zoo, like even in the slightest. It’s a theme park.
They don’t have a full dinosaur genome so they literally make stuff up. Not only that, but just like with the Colossal Bioscience stuff that’s literally happening right now, there’s no learning for these brought-back-to-life creatures so they will not behave anything like their actual prehistoric counterparts. It is bad science because there’s no reason to be doing the science at all. It won’t replicate anything from the past (for so so so many reasons) and it has so many unethical things to get past before it’s even slightly in -eh- territory.
This just rounds itself back to capitalism being the problem because the science was being done for a reason: to generate profit for Hammond.
Bad science is usually always conducted to suit the ends of someone trying to use the results for manipulative/exploitative purposes.
Hard agree. My takeaway is the moral of the story is always do quality engineering. There have been like 10 movies and they still don’t know how to construct an enclosure.
Why do they always only have one massive entrance to each enclosure? Why is it large enough for the Dinosaur to walk out of? Why don’t they have two doors in series, airlock style?
They do it for butterflies at museums…
Well you can’t have butterflies escaping into nature. They’ll wreak havoc by pollinating everything.
pollinate me uwu
The new one has an airlock style containment [although still comicly large]. Not that it prevents everything from going to shit anyway.
Where I’m from, when engineers complete their certification they get an iron ring made from the material of a collapsed bridge. This is remind them to not become arrogant and think about everything that could go wrong.
You wouldn’t be able to find a good engineer to design a park for animals no one really knows the behaviour of. Hammond would have to hire the people in this thread who think “yeah we could design something that will contain these animals, no problem at all!”
Well for starters I wouldn’t make the containment system an electric fence, have an electric fence by all means but have some physical metal rods as backup. Also maybe don’t make the dinosaurs bulletproof.
Hammond probably got told that but decided it was too expensive. After all how often is the power likely to go on out on * and island frequently hit by hurricanes?
Do you know how high the animal can jump? Do you know whether or not they’ll be able to climb those rods?
How would you know which weapons an animal is vulnerable to before it’s fully grown?
The problem is you don’t actually know many the variables you’re trying to make a solution for. You’re assuming you would have thought of a lot of these things only after you’ve seen another solution fail. Hindsight is 20/20. But if you didn’t have the benefit of hindsight how are you going to solve a problem involving lifeforms with an unknown level of intelligence, and an unknown resilience to weapons, and having unknown behaviours? You’re only going to know you missed something after whatever you designed failed.
There’s the part of the movie where Hammond is eating the melting ice cream saying “next time we’ll do it better.” That would be you because you’re certain you can solve a problem that’s not defined by empirical evidence (it doesn’t exist because they’re new animals) but based on assumptions about a new lifeform being similar to existing lifeforms we currently have in zoos, and think keeping animals we have familiarity with is easy (it isn’t, animals in zoos actually do escape containment).
You’re showing the hubris the story is warning against. Science depends on empirical evidence, and there wouldn’t be any empirical evidence on the behaviour of new animals grown in a lab. And if you are completely ignorant of animal behaviour (because you think it’s irrelevant) you’re going to be very bad at building a zoo. But you’re countering that by ignoring all of the knowledge we have about building a zoo (animal behaviour is important!) because there’s hubris layered on top of hubris.
That’s actually a persistent myth. I’ve heard it myself as a wearer of an iron ring, but it isn’t true. The myth was that the first iron rings were made from the remains of the first Quebec Bridge, but they weren’t, let alone any over the century since. The bridge collapse did inspire the creation of the iron rings, though.
Wasn’t the issue with Indominus rex that the dinosaur tricked them into thinking it was gone and they left the door open, like idiots? Definitely some things in those movies are engineering issues, but it mostly was a problem because there were multiple points of failure in the system. This is the point I make about my work. My department catches behavior problems from reports, discussions, interviews, and providing technical assistance. We do tons of work regularly and there are overlapping ways to catch the same problem. When my department is given more work and no new staff, they can’t stay on top of everything. They still catch things because the work they are able to do usual catches one of the multiple opportunities. With enough workload added on eventually you end up missing something. When the stakes are life and death, you have multiple layers of protection programmed into the system.
If you put high voltage electric fences around humans they’re pretty well contained. The intelligence level of the dinosaurs was never relevant but the movie did kind of try and suggest that somehow the velociraptors were special simply because they were mildly more intelligent than the rest.
They made a big thing about how raptors can open doors, my cats can open doors.
And your cats would eat you if they could. I’ve had cats gnaw on my fingers and toes, like they were seeing if that would work. Cats are actually worse than dinosaurs, and modern birds, and reptiles, because they usually stop killing when they’re full.
I’ve just realised - Hammond was such a cheapskate that even the seatbelts in the helicopters didn’t work properly.
No. It was basically the paleontologist is a Luddite to the extent he did not realize he needed to find the other end, as he had another seats female end as well. He made two females work… which could be a reference to the rest of the movie.
Sam Neill, the actor who did the scene, has been asked about the scene before and confirmed it is 100% unintentionally foreshadowing.
It was just supposed to confirm that Grant is in fact a Luddite who struggles with tech of all sorts.
I love this. To quote an expert: “Life, uh, finds a way.”
It’s Frankenstein… scientists creating life from the parts of dead animals without any regard to the consequences.
Zoos can be poorly built and which can create horrible conditions for animals, but at least with with living animals we know what they eat and how they live in the wild and we can attempt to construct a micro-habitat for them to have decent lives in. With dead animals brought back to life, we wouldn’t know how to do this.
What does a Triceratops eat? Why is that Triceratops sick? Will a T-Rex be happy living in a paddock being fed goats, or will it be trying to escape? Certain animals are very skilled at escaping enclosures and you have no idea which animals fall into that category. Which animals are going to be afraid of humans? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them, maybe some of them? If the goal is to make a zoo where people can actually see the animals that might be relevant to how the zoo is designed. Which animals will throw things at people, or spit at people?
I think you’re showing the hubris of science that both Frankenstein and Jurrassic Park are warning against. There’s a whole science involved with designing a zoo and they often get things wrong like the maximum height a pissed off tiger can jump. With genetically engineered animals that resemble dinosaurs, there would be more unknown variables than known variables. You’re assuming you know those variable are irrelevant because apparently “good engineers” don’t need to care about factors they don’t understand?
No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.
There’s the hubris. You’re assuming “we got this” on something that isn’t going to be understandable until after the animals escape.
Science is about trial and error. Zoos function because over a very long period of time mistakes have been made and we learned from those mistakes. We’ve learned these lessons over centuries.
You’re talking about a zoo where every animal in it we have zero experience with handling.
You’re thinking handling animals we have centuries of experience with is the same as handling animals we have zero experience with because there’s a tendency in the science community to be reductive towards other disciplines. Just as you might think that running a zoo is super easy - barely an inconvenience, an expert in genetic engineering (but no experience in running a zoo) might think the same. And the guy running the company might think “well he’s an expert that saying it’s no problem” and think they don’t need to put any effort into studying the behavior of the animals. The “clever girl” dude warns Hammond they should put just down the velociraptors because he spent time watching the animals and studying their behaviour (they never attack the same place twice). But I don’t think that guy had a PhD, so he was ignored.
Right now we have occasional one off story about a tiger jumping higher than tigers were known to be able to jump, getting out and mauling some people. That’s one mistake on one animal. An animal we have centuries of experience in handling, and we still get things wrong sometimes.
A zoo trying to contain many different animals that we have zero experience in handling would have these kinds of events happening constantly, and possibly have multiple issues happening at once possibly resulting in a cascading system failure. Which is what the story portrays. But all it takes is one scientist acting like they’re experts in a subject they look down their nose at other disciplines (how many zoos have you run that qualifies you to say it’s not a problem?) to convince an owner there is no need to worry about those naysayers who aren’t brilliant genetic scientists.
In addition to what you’re saying, a big part of the movie is why are we doing this? Is there anything to be gained from it? We’re currently having that conversation with the “dire wolves” that Colossal Bioscience has created. They’re not actually dire wolves, in any sense of the word, so all we’re learning is how to genetically modify creatures. We’re not learning anything about the creatures themselves. There’s no purpose to doing the same with Dinos, there’s no dna left to match against and the environment is completely different, they wouldn’t act the same at all.
Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!
There’s a recent Behind the Bastards episode on the main dude behind Colossal (who is actually a very well known scientist) and exactly how he is using science to do bad things without considering the consequences.