Pachyderms, dinkum.
As are war for oil and rousting the neighbors with the mewling of strange conquest it seems the resurrecting of the wooly mammoth from the slumber of extinction will be too compelling to halt.
The scientific importance can be argued.
I recall an eighties documentary wherein a French anthropologist lectures a council of carefully listening natives of BC Canada on the scientific importance of exhuming their ancestors. He uses as part of his justification that he is the only one who cares to do the work thinking to himself perhaps, Quand ces sauvages reviendront-ils à la raison?
[When will these savages come to their senses?]
He is frustrated and loud and the people who are of the land he is shouting to dig on look at him blankly, perhaps dumbfounded.
The Frenchman is so sure he is right that he cannot conceive of an argument against his modern way.
He shakes his head and clutches his skull and leaves through his notes while the people proven by generations living where this one sided argument flounders wait for him to burn it off and leave.
They know he will.
One old man whispers into the ear of another, "White men are so willing to die for nothing. It's a shame. They're pretty strong."
They wait until he finishes. He implores a response. One man says, I don't have the authority to answer your question.
The Frenchman blusteres, Who does?
No one answers. The first nations Canadians came together that day to ask him to stop digging up their ancestors.
He can't believe it.
The thing about any human endeavor is that once someone starts down a path they see the end of they will grind toward that end like a pitbull with its teeth in the knot at the end of a rope.
You can pick up the dog and spin him around. He has no leverage but he won't let go. There has been no generational genetic lesson worked into the responses of the pitbull for what happens when their prey leaves the ground.
For us it is the same.
Perhaps a hard lesson will be learned from rousting a massive beast from the slumber of extinction. We have no generational genetic lesson built into us with which to respond.
Some of us have thought about it.
Maybe there'll be a theme park.
We could call it, Very Post Post Jurassic Large Animal Totally Safe Containment Park.
*
Separating a thing from its place so we can really look at it seems to be the thing.
Taking a thing out of its place in time, taking a thing out of its place in the earth, in the body, in a cell, in the pattern of a molecule to examine its function seems like it might provide a clearer view of the separated thing, but without the matrix that holds it- in time, in space, in it's being or shape it is truly not the thing we consider it to be anymore.
All the component systems are integral to each other. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I am in no way saying it is time for science to stop and for technology to hold fast or go backwards. I am saying that perhaps the whole should be considered when the component faults.
Long consideration of the possible cascading faults should be done before re-adding some vintage component.
We have been quite lucky so far. A good gambler knows when the streak starts to seem unreasonable, takes his money and goes home. It's unlikely he'll stop gambling. But it serves his game to know when to consider his luck and walk away.
Any amount of speculation in detail will be read after what I've already said as paranoia at best and fear mongering at worst but consider perhaps the result of bringing rabbits to Australia.
They are small and harmless in their place.