Question Of The Day: The Ides Of March & De-extinction

Howdy all! Today is the 15th, and that means that it’s the Ides of March. Don’t know what that is? Well, it’s a date in history that is marred with all kinds of peril. Most notably, the killing of Orange Julius. He was stabbed with many straws and the conspiring politicians had their fill of his deliciously smooth Ceasar-ness. Actually, that’s not true, but all of this stuff is: Beware the Ides of March!

HOW. TERRIFYING.

Now. Let’s talk about this:

We’ll expand more on why this is here in a second

Since I have this weird love of science, I am totally all over what is being talked about today on the TED-ernets: De-extinction. What this is, mostly, is fiddling with extinct animals and resurrecting them a la Jurassic Park. While that seems really interesting and amazing, it kind of ignores how many extinct spieces became extinct in the first place.

Behold: The last Thylacine 🙁

You have to admit that we’ve kind of jacked up our environment. Thanks to the destruction of many a habitat, the introduction of non native species, over-hunting, so on and so forth, we’ve made this once friendly place rather unfriendly to the animals that were here before us. De-extinction kind of just skips over all of that and kind of goes “Let’s just bring all those things we wiped off the face of the earth because of reasons.”

~ De-extinction on Twitter ~

I am not denying what an amazing feat this could be (I obvs haven’t read enouth to know if this is entirely possible because I’m awful) and how much hard work goes making something like this happen. The thing is, where would we put all of the resurrected animals? How would we protect them? We can’t even deal with the ones that we are killing off now, let alone future trophy animals brought back from the crypts of extinction.

My thoughts on saving the planet involve a very touchy subject (population) so I will just zip it for now. So what does all of this have to do with the Question of the Day? Well, if you made it this far into this post, here it is. Let’s take the plotting of the Ides of March, how the Jurassic Park theme was ruined, and de-extinction to make a question baby.

All you have to do is tell me about something that went awry in your life and how you recovered from it. Things happen in life but we usually all stabilize, right? Did your friends help you out? A favorite album? Tell me things.

How did you bounce back after the last time something went wrong?