Blast From The Past

When the construction company was digging the hole for the foundation for my parent's house many years ago, they frequently found interesting items such as glass bottles and old toys. While I now know this stuff was nothing but junk, at the time I thought it was practically buried treasure. Since the house sits on what used to be an old stone quarry I expect there to be tons of interesting stuff just under the surface. This set such a level of expectation that I figured every time I went to play in the backyard I would trip and find something which would get me on the news, like a large rock made up of precious stone. As you probably guessed, that didn't happen. (Turns out when your house is on an old stone quarry digging more than 6 inches below the surface requires heavy machinery or dynamite. Really cuts down on how deep a 7 year-old can excavate.) But the hope of making an amazing discovery without actually having to do much digging lingered on. That is why I felt a small twinge of jealousy the other day when I read a story about an 11 year-old kid in Russia who went out to play and stumbled upon one of the most well-preserved Woolly Mammoths ever uncovered.

The mammoth, dubbed Jenya after the boy who discovered him, probably died 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. But it's not just finding a mammoth a thousand miles from Moscow which is interesting. (Given the news I have seen, I'm kind of surprised President Putin wasn't out there with a shovel.) What makes this mammoth so valuable to the scientific community is that not only does it still have one of its tusks but clumps of hair, skin and soft tissue, along with marking on the body which have led scientists to believe it may have been killed by humans, thereby showing how they attacked larger animals which would also be important to anthropologists. The point is this kid is off to an amazing career as an archaeologist and it is totally by accident. As long as he hasn't seen any of the "Ice Age" movies and gotten too attached to the characters, I see no downside for him. However, even more interesting than a Woolly Mammoth being accidentally discovered by a child in Siberia is the throwaway line from near the end of one of the stories I read, which said that scientists are hoping to get DNA from the remains because they are trying to one day clone mammoths to bring them back from extinction. My feeling is that I don't really know if we need mammoths back since we appear to be running out of room for the arctic animals we already have. But apparently this is part of a larger contest run by the X Prize Foundation, who are offering a large sum of money through their "Jurassic Park Prize" to the first people to bring an extinct animal back to life. I can only assume the people who came up with this competition never actually saw the movie.

Now, if you spend a couple minutes at the X Prize Foundation website you will see that their motto is "Revolution Through Competition". They have realized what many companies still have not and that is money will always be the best motivator. They take private donations and offer up that cash for solutions in the form of a competition, with the first person to come up with an answer taking the pot. Currently they have a lot of really good competitions going on. For example, they have a competition to see who can be the first people to find an early detection and treatment of Lyme disease. Another contest is to see if anyone can invent a more accurate earthquake early-warning system. Both of those are good ideas and would help society in many ways. However, there are also a couple contest going on which I'm not sure are the best use of these beautiful minds. For example, the competition to make sure people can parachute to Earth from sub-space. It would be great to have an escape system in place if something happened to the International Space Station, but that is not what I would call a planet-wide problem. I've always said that some problems should be left until the bigger ones are solved and I'm not sure something which will probably end up as a way for millionaires to go thrill-seeking should be a high priority.

Along those same lines, I'm just not sure bringing long-dead animals back to life is a big problem. Outside of paleontologist, does anyone need a live dinosaur? That feels like a good idea for the first 20 minutes and then, crap, we have a dinosaur to take care of. Plus, I'm worried the whole thing will be a giant letdown. If you have ever seen alligators at the zoo you know the lizard enclosure is usually pretty boring. I'm sure the intention behind the contest is mainly to bring back animals which have recently gone extinct or come up with ways to save animals currently on the verge of extinction. However, when you call something the "Jurassic Park Prize" that really makes people want to shoot for the moon. Perhaps a re-branding is in order, such as the '"Hey, remember dodo birds? Wouldn't those be kind of fun to see again?" Prize'. I'm just saying, before we start playing God and bringing back giant lizards which would knock humans from the top of the food chain perhaps we should make sure we will be able to control the experiment. Everyone thinks their discovery will be the one which will save the world, but remember splitting an atom seemed like a good idea at the time and then it was turned into the nuclear bomb. All I'm saying is that not everything which can be done should be done.