Growing a mammoth in an artificial womb is over a decade away
Ross Anderson · a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real · Jan 2, 2019 · at 16:26
Author Ross Anderson discusses the technical timeline for artificial womb technology required to gestate recreated woolly mammoths.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 14.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And it's, you know, 200 pounds at the end of it, and you're going to do all that like really complex fine-tuning, maternal fine-tuning, like hormonal work, In this huge closet-sized tank, like, that is, that's more than 10 years away.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ross Anderson
Animal suffering in early mammoth generations is justified by rewilding benefits
“My view is that it's worth what will probably be some considerable suffering on the part of those, the first few, if not more, generations of these mammoths, and like, I am alive to that, and I actually try to talk about, in particular, the social suffering.”
Elon Musk's genuine sincerity drives his ability to fund radical ideas
“Yeah, like, he's really good at packaging crazy sounding ideas and, like, Getting lots of governments, investors to throw lots of money into them, and while managing to keep control of them. Part of that is the narrative, right? He does hook it into, like, lar…”
Ice Age megafauna survived 30 interglacial warming cycles before their extinction
“Glaciations, like the ice age, was not three million years of glacial cold. It was like 10,000 year bursts of glacial cold, and then interglacials, they're called, where things would warm again. And these animals had weathered like 30 of those.”
African megafauna survived human expansion by co-evolving alongside humans
“One of the running hypotheses is that the megafauna of other continents were what's called naive prey, because like humans show up, harmless little thing, whereas in Africa, they, the megafauna there had grown up Alongside us, evolutionarily.”