The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Growing a mammoth in an artificial womb is over a decade away
“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.”
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.”
George Church's minimal gene-editing strategy is the right approach to de-extinction
“He has the right approach, which is to make, like, again, as few tweaks to this genome as possible, just so you get these basic features, and then let nature do the rest.”
Arctic permafrost holds more carbon than the entire US carbon output
“That part of the world was so rich in Grass and in large animals at that time, it's got lots of sort of organic matter, which has lots of carbon in it, in fact, more than like the entire output of the United States right now.”
Grasslands keep the ground colder by reflecting more sunlight than forests
“What's neat about grasslands is they actually keep the earth underneath them colder. First of all, they reflect away more sunlight than the darker kind of tree regions.”