Forget Mars and mammoths — we’ve got real problems
I’m in awe of people who invent things. The camera! Cellphones! Mint chocolate! These and other marriages of science and innovation shine a light on the vast spectrum of human creativity — the ability to generate an idea, test it, tinker with it and land it.
Of course, some inventions, like the nuclear bomb, attest more to human darkness than brightness.
Today, the world is awash in big ideas — often backed by big spenders.
Two at play are the corporate race to space (which pits Amazon founder Jeff Bezos against Tesla founder Elon Musk) and efforts by a startup company called Colossal (among others!) to bring back the woolly mammoth, which became extinct more than 4,000 years ago. Both initiatives have been framed as potentially bettering the world.
According to the Washington Post, “Both Bezos and Musk portray their space ambitions as a way to help humanity — by creating a city on Mars, as Musk would like, or building colonies in Earth’s orbit, as Bezos envisions.”
George Church, the biologist leading the team of geneticists at Colossal working to re-create the mammoth, believes that if a population can successfully be established, it could help mitigate climate change by converting, through their waste and foraging impacts (and with the assistance of a warming climate) the northern tundra to grasslands that sequester and store more carbon. (In a recent interview on Canadian radio, he said his team is having ongoing conversations with the Indigenous people who call the tundra home, and who have not yet weighed in on the project.)
Ben Lamm, founder of a Texas artificial intelligence company and a key Colossal financial backer, called the mammoth project “a proof of concept for Colossal’s technology,” which could be used for “thoughtful, disruptive conservation,” according to Global News.
Yet, ethical issues abound with both projects. Elephants are highly social and sensitive animals. Is it ethical to keep them in captivity, experiment on impregnation and/or gestation techniques, and play around with their genes in the hopes of merging current species with unfrozen DNA from the past just because one has the resources to do so?
Further, who would be responsible for them once released? What if they don’t adapt to the current environment and starve? What if they freeze because their hair isn’t thick enough? What if they destroy the tundra and don’t create grasslands?
London School of Economics philosopher Heather Bushman identifies issues of concern for human-created woolly mammoth calves in the New York Times: “You don’t have a mother for a species that — if they are anything like elephants — has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time. Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that they’re being looked after?”
Nature is resilient, but of its own accord and time scale. Who’s to say how likely it is for adaptations to succeed in the highly unnatural circumstance of plopping a species into a landscape it hasn’t occupied for millennia, if ever?
Some ethicists have spoken about the risks of bio-contamination in space travel, as humans could unwittingly upend a sensitive ecosystem on Mars by bringing unwanted contaminants.
But a far more central ethical issue with these initiatives exits: the state of our home planet here and now.
What if, instead of looking back 4,000 years, or out to space and planets, the clever thinkers behind these projects were to focus their sights on what’s in front of us: a world much in need of attention and repair, and species that are not yet extinct, but could be, if we don’t act quickly to recover them and the habitats they rely on.
What if the resources garnered to fund these projects were put into addressing less disruptive, more healing initiatives? Most of the challenges facing the planet are borne of our current economic system, which favours growth at all costs, usually to the detriment of fellow travellers (human and non-human alike). How about shifting financing from these vanity projects to advance humanitarian, social justice and ecological restoration initiatives instead?
If the woolly mammoth project goes awry, those behind it might have the resources to resettle on Mars. Not so the rest of us. It sure would be nice if millionaires and billionaires on our shared planet put more effort toward fixing it than creating potential new messes and escape routes.