Elon Musk is working on sending a manned mission to Mars, but apparently one of his companies also has the technological capability to launch a theme park populated by dinosaurs.
Or at least that’s the claim being made by Max Hodak, who, along with Musk and some other partners, co-founded the neurotech company Neuralink.
On April 3, Hodak took to Twitter to claim that “we could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to.”
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As he explained, these dinos “wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs,” but would be the result of “maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species.”
we could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to. wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but 🤷♂️. maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
But is that actually possible? CNET begged to differ, pointing out that resurrecting species that have been extinct for millions of years isn’t quite as easy as Steven Spielberg made it look.
Noting that “it’s pretty much impossible to resurrect a dinosaur,” CNET added: “The science of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead isn’t really as sound as Hodak makes it seem though. Even humanity would have a tough time building a Jurassic Park in the next 15 years. First, we’d need some DNA from the prehistoric tyrants and unlike in the film ‘Jurassic Park’, where the DNA is retrieved from mosquitoes in amber and fused with frog DNA, that information has completely degraded.”
A better candidate, CNET explained, would be a wooly mammoth. “We can still extract DNA from these creatures and could theoretically build and implant a mammoth embryo in a modern-day elephant,” the site wrote, noting that, on the plus side, “mammoths aren’t quite as bloodthirsty as Tyrannosaurus rex.”
