Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man

[NanTheDark]

Time is, technically, a dimension, so we do, technically, live in a 4D world...

There is no fourth dimension. ...?

Anyway, they should bring the Mylodon back. :3

[Raz]

Time is, technically, a dimension, so we do, technically, live in a 4D world...

There is no fourth dimension. ...?

Anyway, they should bring the Mylodon back. :3

I agree. Mylodons were pretty chill. I thought I said that in one of my earlier posts but I guess not

[sirknightingfail]

If we venture into the resurrection of extinct species we would have to take extreme precautions to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong, because humans won't be recreating human life if we go extinct. If we venture too far into genetic engineering, we might end up creating some sort of super-monster with the ability to destroy all of mankind. That's probably why we end up doing genetic experimentation on smaller things rather than on something with massive intelligence, but a thing that might prevent extreme destruction is that abnormalities can usually be detected early on and if we create a monster baby, we could kill it before it stops attacking people.
Bringing back old things is very different from trying to create new things, despite what it appears to be, inserting genes is usually fine if it doesn't conflict with others. It's what happens when we try to create DNA sequences that do weird things. If that starts happening, I'd happily volunteer to have it tested on me through artficial viral insertion, but they would have to knock me out before inserting the needle into the bone and prove that what they have will work without a doubt unless our current ideas about biology, chemistry, and physics are off. They would have to get approval from a large portion of the scientific, ideological, and political communities lest they risk being imprisoned or exiled from the scientific community for the purpose of science if they would want to do anything that has been unattempted.

[darthbrowser]

From my field, I can assure you there are plenty who are only going off scientific consensus anyway. For a well-known example, remember the H5N1 bird flu strain engineered two years ago? That project certainly didn't have the support of the "ideological and political communities."

The problem with applying the dystopian fears often associated with science-fiction scenarios to the real world, espicially the present, is that most of those represent an extreme and very inprobable course of history. Science fiction which relies on a scientific premise, such as the creation of a "monster," will usually do whatever it takes to create an energetic plot to encourage sales. Science fiction which incorporates such advances but doesn't rely on them for the plot, such as Star Wars or Star Trek, tend to be far more probable, realistic depictions of future technological capabilities.

That being said, a godzilla-esque "super-monster" represents the most extreme of that improbable spectrum. A far more likely danger would be an engineered biological weapon - humans are quite easy to kill from an immunological perspective.