The day had started out calm and sunny, until, for some strange reason, I opened the newspaper. There I learned that there is a mad scientist working to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth. Seriously. A company named Colossal is working on it. And the mammoth could be running around the Arctic Circle again in 2027. It must be quite an experience to come back to life in Siberia after 4,000 years and have your head smashed in by Putin with a missile.
The plan is seamless. They are creating a mammoth embryo from DNA samples from previous investigations. Since they are missing some parts of the DNA, they have borrowed some from the Asian elephant, with which the mammoth shares 99 percent of its genetic code. The remaining 1 percent will be taken from Al Gore.
Environmentalists are worried, but not because, instead of a mammoth, a giant dinosaur could be born and end up crushing children in parks and pushing little old ladies on pedestrian crossings — nothing like that. They are worried because they consider it cruel to bring into the world an animal that may have forgotten how to defend itself in its habitat. In fact, I don’t know much about the evolution of species, but, if it’s extinct, I imagine it failed in that area once already.
I’m fine with scientists having fun in their labs. I do it in my work, too, when I sit down drunk, to write, fill the page with random characters, and tell my editor I’m taking a conceptual writing approach. But then you have to accept the consequences. I say that because there was a Chinese guy having fun once in a lab in Wuhan, and you know the rest of the story. It is likely that the guy is now more extinct than the woolly mammoth, even though to this day nobody assumed the consequences of all that.
A few years ago, we learned that Bill Gates invested in a solar geoengineering company. To put it in a way we can all understand, it’s all about blocking the sun a little bit. What you do with your finger sometimes, but on a cosmic scale. The consequences are so uncertain that 400 scientists signed a letter asking for an agreement not to use this technique. As this is a crazy and completely stupid idea, the U.N. is now very interested in advancing it. Just this week, Switzerland has proposed the creation of the first U.N. expert group on solar geoengineering to examine opportunities to turn off the sun. I hope I will be called in as an expert, as no one spends more hours than I do in the sun at the beach bar from May to September, and I know exactly how to defend myself from the heat in those circumstances, although my doctor is always critical of my techniques.
Now all scientific experiments are sold as a form of salvation for Humanity. The same people who proclaim the climate apocalypse invest in multimillion-dollar projects to curb its consequences. You know — you ride a scooter to work, and they invest a week’s profits in a company that manufactures rockets to take children and women to another planet when everything starts to burn. We all save the planet, and in the meantime, I guess, they speculate and win. Because guys like Gates never lose.
Now that farmers all over the world are at war against green laws that cause their ruin, I miss guys like Gates in the middle of the tractor demonstration, explaining to the farm kids that they’re going to spray the sun with I-don’t-know-what to make it less hot. That would be a nice sight. Especially when they ask him what happens if something goes wrong and a blue screen appears on the sun, forcing us to warm up in the future with Scarlett Johansson movies.
Not so long ago, the scientific community and the media were talking about bioethics. There were discussions arguing about where the moral boundaries of scientific experimentation should be. As the Left wanted, today there are no moral limits in almost any field, and mad scientists and entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the vacuum. Now they are merely outraged by the consequences when something goes wrong.
I don’t know about you, but, personally, from politics to science, I’m starting to get a bit fed up with experts creating a problem for every solution. The only good thing about this is that, if they finally manage to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, we will be one step closer to them being able to bring Joe Biden back to life.
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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