Elon Musk’s Business Partner Claims Brain-Implant Startup Could Build Real-Life ‘Jurassic Park’

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup Neuralink is changing the game for how humans, computers, and animals interact. But the technology, as suggested by a recent tweet from the Tesla CEO’s business partner Max Hodak, could be taken to a whole new level: namely, creating a theme park of human-engineered dinosaurs straight out of Steven Spielberg’s beloved 1993 “Jurassic Park.”

“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,” Hodak wrote on Twitter. See below.

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He followed up the tweet to suggest that the tech could also be used for conservation efforts to protect current species, but that it could be pushed even further. “Biodiversity (antifragility) is definitely valuable; conservation is important and makes sense. But why do we stop there? Why don’t we more intentionally try to generate novel diversity?” he wrote.

But not so fast, as CNET put those claims to rest in a followup post stating that it’d simply be impossible to recreate dinosaurs today: “It’s pretty much impossible to resurrect a dinosaur. 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. 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 over the millions of years it has spent in the ground.”

Still, CNET added that the wooly mammoth could be a worthy target for “de-extinction.” “We can still extract DNA from these creatures and could theoretically build and implant a mammoth embryo in a modern-day elephant. The question is: should we? ‘Jurassic Park’ offers a pretty good reason not to, but mammoths aren’t quite as bloodthirsty as Tyrannosaurus rex.”

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