Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

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The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.

Now, Wouldn’t That Be Something

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When I was a kid interstellar exploration was something that people talked about as if it were only a matter of time before we figured it out.  Fifty years later and I think we’re all a lot older and wiser.  Even completely automated space craft reaching the nearest stars has begun to look like an improbability anytime within the next millennium.  The scope of the resources needed to get something from here to even Proxima Centauri is staggering.  Of course, I’m talking about a total project time that only totals into decades of time.  If we’re interested in a 40,000-year round-trip, we could start working on it right now.  But something like that is so laughably useless that I’d be embarrassed to even admit considering it as one of the options.  To make the trip in a time frame that makes it useful the ship would have to accelerate to and decelerate from some considerable fraction of the speed of light.  Let’s postulate 30% as the fraction.  With that capability the trip would take something like twenty-five years round-trip.  Sure, that’s a long time but our civilization should have a long enough attention span to follow up on the project and mine the results when the probe returns (if it returns).  But the scope of such a project is too titanic for our current technological stage.  It’s too grand.

Let’s look at more manageable projects.  What’s doable?

I don’t have much enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s manned trip to Mars.  Four or five years in space is a lot of radiation for astronauts to absorb.  I don’t see the sense in it.  I prefer the robot exploration thing we’ve been doing with the Voyager and later probes.  The recent flyby of Pluto was very impressive.  But I think much more ambitious unmanned exploration of the solar system is warranted.

I think the best bang for the buck is finding out if Europa has life in its ocean.  I can imagine a series of visits.  The first should be an orbiter that sends down a probe to take reading.  Once the presence of water oceans has been confirmed a lander can be sent to try and find life.

I realize this is a large order to fill.  I don’t know exactly how thick the ice crust is over the ocean.  It may be many miles.  If that is the case a very creative solution may be needed.  Possibly a nuclear powered “drill” might be an option.  Of course, if all else fails we could set off a nuke.  Then again if there really are “Europans” we might start an interplanetary war.  So maybe some thought will have to be expended thinking about the best way to search for life there.  But I see a series of missions to attempt to answer this question as one of the most meaningful and exciting challenges that currently exist for mankind.

Of course, I’ve been talking of the cuff.  Doing a quick AI search I see that the exact thickness of the ice is estimated to be between 5 and 20 miles thick.  NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, launching in October 2024 and arriving at Jupiter around 2030, will use radar to penetrate the ice and measure its depth more precisely.  So, chances are I’ll be old and broken down before much of anything is known about this ocean.

But I still find the prospect exciting.  Imagine if some kind of multicellular life exists in that ocean.  I hesitate to even imagine intelligent life there but it’s not impossible.  We might find that wherever there’s liquid water and organic molecules life tends to develop from spores that float around in outer space.  Now wouldn’t that be something?

Welcome to Pleistocene Park.  Sort of

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As you’ve probably heard the Dire wolves are back!   …     Sort of.

Colossal Biosciences has sequenced the genetic code of the extinct dire wolf and used it to produce living animals.    …    Sorta kinda.

“Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists (photog’s note:  The scientists themselves are normal sized.  Only the company name is larger than life.)   deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.”

So they reused the whole genome of the dire wolf to clone these animals?  Ah, no.

 

“It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf”

…

“The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome.”

So they edited 14 genes out of 19,000 and that was all that was necessary to turn a common gray wolf into this long extinct species?  In the immortal words of Doc Holliday, “I beg to differ.”

But okay I won’t minimize the work that has been done here.  This is groundbreaking science and technology.  Colossal Biosciences (boy that’s some name) is also working on the Wooly Mammoth project.  They’re going to edit the DNA of one of the modern elephants (Indian?) and supposedly resurrect the mammoth.

 

“The effort to produce a woolly mammoth is on something of a tight schedule.   …    Asian elephants—the extinct woolly mammoth’s closest surviving kin—require 22 months, the longest gestation period of any mammal.

And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028.

No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro.”

Well, it’s good that they’re being realistic about what they’re doing.  These are the first faltering steps in the path that will lead to a deep understanding of how to restore an extinct species.  I think the only way that restored species will occur will involve studying several generations of progressively closer and closer versions of these “restored creatures.  Even the fact that these animals are gestated in the wombs of different species must have profound effects on their biology.  I’m guessing real “de-extinction” is a hundred years away.  I won’t see it happen but I’m excited to see the beginning of it.

Not quite, “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

Update:

Here’s a video discussing this.