Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: you know what's making a comeback, Julie m m Jean shorts. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: but what else? Asid washed geen shorts. Yes, asid washed
Speaker 1: gean shorts. But what else? The wooly mammoth? Possibly? Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, that's good. That's good news. Well is it?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, I just have this menagerae of
Speaker 1: animals in my backyard and that would be great to
Speaker 1: add the wooly mammoth too, Oh yes, yeah, with the
Speaker 1: Dodo bird two would be pretty great too, yeah. Or
Speaker 1: the Neandertal, our old friend, Oh yeah, Neider Tall of
Speaker 1: the awesome Roman around. Yeah. It seems like if you,
Speaker 1: if you pay any attention to the science news, there
Speaker 1: are all these stories coming down the pike pretty regularly,
Speaker 1: and it's always, let's bring We're bringing back the Neandertal.
Speaker 1: Wooly mammoth's coming. We're going to clone them, clone them up,
Speaker 1: fill our backyards with them, put them on display, study
Speaker 1: of them, and everyone gets really excited about it because
Speaker 1: it is a fantastic idea. Here's this extinct creature that
Speaker 1: we all grew up looking at in picture books and
Speaker 1: uh and suddenly it might actually be around us very
Speaker 1: own Jurassic Park, so to speak, exactly the Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: factor without the dinosaurs. Yeah, and people get pretty up
Speaker 1: in arms about it. Actually, Yes, so we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about that today. Um, but also talking about like maybe
Speaker 1: how they shouldn't get so up in arms, but that
Speaker 1: there is a possibility that the wooly mammoth could be
Speaker 1: coming to a backyard near you pretty soon. Yes, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and we have the Genome Project to thank for that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is all about just just just meticulously mapping, um,
Speaker 1: the genomic structure behind basically the recipe for the mammoth
Speaker 1: in the same way that we've we've taken the human
Speaker 1: genome and and looked at that, in the same that
Speaker 1: we the way that we event analyze the Neanderthal genome
Speaker 1: and uh and in various either there's like the canine
Speaker 1: Genome project, there's a uh, there's also the that the
Speaker 1: one related to two chimps. I mean that it's all
Speaker 1: about taking these species and just understanding them at very
Speaker 1: small levels and very detailed levels, right, and just to
Speaker 1: get you know, a little bit more specific about it,
Speaker 1: where he has a handle on the Human Genome Project,
Speaker 1: which really helped to drive a lot of what astrobiology
Speaker 1: is doing these days. So the Genome Project, what it
Speaker 1: meant to do is to basically take the complete string
Speaker 1: of nucleotide letters that make up the DNA sequence in ourselves, um,
Speaker 1: which is referred to as the genome. And this DNA
Speaker 1: sequence contained in a genome contains the complete code that
Speaker 1: determines which genes and proteins will be present in human cells.
Speaker 1: Basically what sort of attributes we have that are going
Speaker 1: to turn on and off, right. Um. So that project
Speaker 1: started in the nineties and it ended about two thousand
Speaker 1: and one. And so you do see this field of
Speaker 1: astrobiology really benefiting from this, and paleontologists in particular really
Speaker 1: saying okay, now now we can take all these different
Speaker 1: cells that we have, you know, we've thought this trilobyte sample,
Speaker 1: and we can try to map this on other organisms,
Speaker 1: you know, just from really simple life forms to like
Speaker 1: you said that the humans, um, the human humans and
Speaker 1: the inner tools um. So it's brought us to this
Speaker 1: present point where we have this Jurassic Park like possibility
Speaker 1: looming ahead of us. Yeah, the Jurassic Park factor is
Speaker 1: pretty big here. Um. And on one hand, I do
Speaker 1: have to point out Jurassic Park, the movie, the book,
Speaker 1: both of those. The big draw there was was the
Speaker 1: fact that people were going through this park and seeing
Speaker 1: these animals. Then the chaos happens by necessity, since it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's a fiction, it's a novel, it's a thriller.
Speaker 1: But with both of them, like when I watched them
Speaker 1: and read them as a as a kid, I didn't
Speaker 1: want anything bad to go wrong. I was like, let's
Speaker 1: let's just continue this ride. This sounds like a great place, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they they've introduced a number of of scientific ideas,
Speaker 1: So I mean, this was not Carnossaur. This was Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: This was you know, Michael Crichton, So there was there.
Speaker 1: He put a great deal of scientific thought into this.
Speaker 1: One was looking at actual actual research. But still it
Speaker 1: paints a very optimistic picture of what bringing back an
Speaker 1: extinct animal would be like. Um. Like, basically, as I recall,
Speaker 1: they uh, they weren't able to they were able to
Speaker 1: extract DNA from blood in a mosquito that is preserved
Speaker 1: in amber. Now, of course DNA degrades over time, so
Speaker 1: you would have to fill in the blanks. And this
Speaker 1: is a sixty five year old, million million old sample
Speaker 1: that we're talking ancient, ancient, and so it's pretty incomplete
Speaker 1: in terms of having a good specimen to work with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like having like, imagine the most waterlogged, raggedy um
Speaker 1: copy of The Great Gatsby. Imaginable, it's been in your
Speaker 1: grandparents basement and a waterlog Great, you get it out
Speaker 1: and you go to read it. Most of the words,
Speaker 1: most of the letters are just completely illegible. Whole chapters
Speaker 1: are missing. So you fill in the gaps, right, you
Speaker 1: think the characters Daisy fuentas. Yeah, and you you might
Speaker 1: look at to look to more recent books and say, well,
Speaker 1: here's a book that was you know, obviously this is
Speaker 1: influenced by the Great Gatsby. Let me just fill in
Speaker 1: the blanks with that, and uh in doing in doing
Speaker 1: that with within this book. Example, Sure, you could you
Speaker 1: could put together a book, uh and that you could
Speaker 1: probably read. It would probably makes sense, but it wouldn't
Speaker 1: really be the Great Gatsby. So that's what the whole
Speaker 1: Jurrassic Park thing was. Well, let's go to amphiby ends.
Speaker 1: We're gonna fill in the blanks. We're gonna somehow get
Speaker 1: this a genetic material into an egg. I don't remember
Speaker 1: the detail on how they got the eggs, because, as
Speaker 1: we'll discuss, that's a big thing once you know, how
Speaker 1: are you where are you going to grow this? Um?
Speaker 1: And uh And then they were, you know, they were
Speaker 1: hatching these things dinosaurs everywhere, et cetera. Yeah. Well, and
Speaker 1: in the case of the mammoth creation project, which sort
Speaker 1: of takes off that same idea. Um, you know, of
Speaker 1: course we've got the mammoth which have been extinct for
Speaker 1: ten years, but we do have frozen mammoths. We have
Speaker 1: exactly from the Russian permafrost. So these are well preserved,
Speaker 1: far far better preserved preserved than you'll find any kind
Speaker 1: of dinosaur remains. Um, you know, much more recent, much
Speaker 1: much better material to work with, which gives us that promise.
Speaker 1: Right and Professor Akira Irtani in Japan has been working
Speaker 1: on bringing back the Wooly for about thirteen years, and
Speaker 1: once Wooly Mammoth's yesterday Yeah, he does. He does, and
Speaker 1: he's uh, I don't really know what his exact intentions are,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say, but he does have a sort
Speaker 1: of line of logic and saying, well, you know, humans
Speaker 1: might have been responsible for um, for them going extinct,
Speaker 1: so we have to pay them back by resurrecting them,
Speaker 1: which sounds just like really like a bad version of
Speaker 1: pet cemetery to me. Yeah, indeed, I had to look
Speaker 1: up pet cemetery again when we were talking about it,
Speaker 1: just to mind every been Stephen King novel Pets Die
Speaker 1: see Barium in the Indian burial ground news a wind
Speaker 1: to go or something, and they come back to life
Speaker 1: and they're they're not right, and they're potentially evil. And
Speaker 1: this is where we have the quote sometimes dead is
Speaker 1: better and another great quote that I got off good Reads.
Speaker 1: What's been tried once has been tried once before and
Speaker 1: before and before, so I need to read it again.
Speaker 1: It was really disturbing book. Yeah, and it also flies
Speaker 1: in the face of like Stephen Jay gold Gold, Who's
Speaker 1: who's saying, like, you know what, all all of what
Speaker 1: is happening in the genes and an evolution is by
Speaker 1: chance essentially um not necessarily by chance, but survival of
Speaker 1: the fattest um and all these different conditions. You can't
Speaker 1: recreate this. So it's definitely flying in the face of
Speaker 1: what we've thought about what evolution is. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: all I mean, I don't know how much we want
Speaker 1: to get into it at this point, but just the
Speaker 1: idea of of bringing back wooly mammoth's in an age
Speaker 1: where we don't really have room for elephants anymore. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like the the elephants of their territory greatly reduce
Speaker 1: their animals that basically need like a large portion of
Speaker 1: a continent to roam around on, and they're even in
Speaker 1: the best of situations, they're they're greatly confined. Their numbers
Speaker 1: are often really endangered. Yeah, I mean we've seen examples
Speaker 1: of like marauding gangs of them invading villages and it's
Speaker 1: a territorial thing. They're not looking for beer as as
Speaker 1: we might have previously thought. Yeah, and so suddenly we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: let's bring some moy mamoths back to It's kind of
Speaker 1: like you if you encounter like that family member who
Speaker 1: who has like a perfectly good car that is that
Speaker 1: needs some attention. And then then suddenly they were like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to restore this, uh, you know, nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: What have you like pay attention to that? You don't.
Speaker 1: You can't even take care of this car. Why what
Speaker 1: are you gonna get this one for? You're not even
Speaker 1: taking good care of the elephants we have, right, so
Speaker 1: why are you bothering with the mammoth? Well, and this
Speaker 1: is the problem, right because professor a cure Tommy, he is,
Speaker 1: he's doing this, right, he's his His idea is to
Speaker 1: remove the nucleus from an egg cell of an elephant
Speaker 1: and replace it with DNA from a frozen wooly mammoth
Speaker 1: like you mentioned. Huh, and so this could theoretically create
Speaker 1: an embryo which would be implanted into an elephant uterus. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is another really key advantage of cloning the wooly
Speaker 1: mammot is that it has a very close relative still
Speaker 1: alive and driving today, despite our best efforts to make
Speaker 1: an extend. Actually they're divergent species, right, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: much closer relative. Whereas a dinosaur. You know, good luck,
Speaker 1: you know, getting a chicken to lay a dinosaur egg,
Speaker 1: and you know it's there's just a lot a lot
Speaker 1: more distance there between the the thing we're trying to
Speaker 1: clone in the more recent model, right, And so I
Speaker 1: mean a cur aritany is really he's making steps towards us,
Speaker 1: and he feels like he'll be able to do this
Speaker 1: in the next five years. And many people in the
Speaker 1: science community and helieve well, no, they believe that it
Speaker 1: can happen. And sort of people are on the on
Speaker 1: different sides of the front. Some sometimes justs are like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great, that's awesome, we should do that. We should
Speaker 1: we can study this like we've got the closest living
Speaker 1: relative living right now, and if we resurrect this ancient creature,
Speaker 1: then we can study them side by side and learn
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit more about life, you know, back
Speaker 1: in the day um, and other people are saying, well,
Speaker 1: that's not really necessary. Um. But in the meantime, there's
Speaker 1: something called Pisascene Park and there's a man named Sergey
Speaker 1: Zimov who's a conservationist who runs the park, and he's
Speaker 1: actually trying to recreate the natural habitat that existed in
Speaker 1: the area ten thousand years ago by reintroducing animals that
Speaker 1: were indigenous to that area, including reindeer, wild horses, and bison.
Speaker 1: And he says, my responsibility is to prepare the mammoth
Speaker 1: ecosystem a landscape typical for the mammoth. Therefore, if some
Speaker 1: crazy people have found enough money and they revived the mammoth,
Speaker 1: we will be ready. You know. He has he has
Speaker 1: a letter room to throw crazy does what I thought too.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, yeah, they're they're the crazy people.
Speaker 1: And and again it comes down to like, let's why
Speaker 1: why maybe he should help focus our energy and preserving
Speaker 1: existing environments that are vanishing and disappearing rather than ones
Speaker 1: that are long gone right, right, And actually there's a
Speaker 1: man named Adrian Lister. He's a paleontologist and in London,
Speaker 1: I believe, and he says that it's natural habitat of
Speaker 1: the mammoth has more or less disappeared. That's probably why
Speaker 1: it went extinct extinct in the first place, many thousands
Speaker 1: of years ago, because the kind of grassland habitat of
Speaker 1: the far North that it formerly lived in doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 1: so you would have to keep it in captivity. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if someone was like, we're going
Speaker 1: to bring Ragtime back, and you'd be like, well, good
Speaker 1: luck finding a market for that. That's why it's not
Speaker 1: around anymore, because nobody wants it. Oh no, I'd listened
Speaker 1: to some ragtime. A few people will listen to some ragtime,
Speaker 1: but I don't see it. You know, shot popping up
Speaker 1: on the top four you like me? Some tinny piano
Speaker 1: ever went in a while. This presentation is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Intel, sponsors of tomorrow. But again, you know,
Speaker 1: the only mammoth has huge potential here in scientists in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight have already sequenced the wooly mammoth
Speaker 1: genome so um. What was cool about that part of
Speaker 1: it is that they were able to find out more
Speaker 1: about the wooly mammoth's um with their environment might have
Speaker 1: been like, and why they went extinct. So here's here's
Speaker 1: the other side of the fence where people are saying, yes,
Speaker 1: let's pursue this path, not necessarily resurrect them, but let's,
Speaker 1: you know, map the genome and let's find out more
Speaker 1: about the circumstances. Because ultimately, astrobiologists want to get to
Speaker 1: the down to the brass tacks here of life as
Speaker 1: it originated, as it survived, as it when extinct in
Speaker 1: how that implicates our universe, not just our Earth. Are
Speaker 1: there space mammoths maybe there could be, could be? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're out fair right now, little helmets on. Well, the
Speaker 1: other thing that I like about like speaking of it
Speaker 1: in terms of not necessarily putting putting the genetic material
Speaker 1: into the living packet arm and having it to give
Speaker 1: birth to holy math. Because our cloning technology continues to advance,
Speaker 1: but it's not perfect yet. I mean, we're we're it
Speaker 1: still has has very high percentage levels of failure. Um
Speaker 1: The embryos are often either not suitable from planning into
Speaker 1: the fetus or they die sometime during gestation or shortly
Speaker 1: after birth. So I like elephants, and you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not really crazy about the idea of let's let's impregnate
Speaker 1: this artificially impregnate this elephant with some offspring that is
Speaker 1: arguably doomed to die. You know, I have to say
Speaker 1: that when I worked at the zoo, or worked at
Speaker 1: a zoo, I should say, the zoo views you in
Speaker 1: the world a zoo. I would have these nightmares every
Speaker 1: once while, and they always involved elephants, and it was
Speaker 1: like messages from the elephants saying like, you gotta get
Speaker 1: us out of here, or we're going to just run
Speaker 1: wild and uh, you know, run over all the monkeys
Speaker 1: and the small children. Um. But it was always like that.
Speaker 1: In fact, Steven Tyler once showed up in the dream
Speaker 1: riding the horse, like the horse excuse me, and there's odds, yeah,
Speaker 1: riding the elephant out of the zoo. So yes, I
Speaker 1: mean I feel, you know, at least if I haven't
Speaker 1: thought about it consciously, subconsciously, it does seem like there's
Speaker 1: for me at least a problem with that scenario of
Speaker 1: resurrectoring the wooly mammoth because you hate just for our pleasure. No, no,
Speaker 1: I hear them. No, I like them. I like him.
Speaker 1: That's how I felt that I was sort of connecting
Speaker 1: to them in that vel. So it's like, let's create
Speaker 1: this animal and then put in a zoo or a
Speaker 1: lab or some crazy dudes recreation of his reindeer infested
Speaker 1: recreation of prehistoric times. Yeah, I don't. I don't really
Speaker 1: know how that would go down. Is what I'm saying
Speaker 1: is is that these elephants were sending me messages when
Speaker 1: I worked at the zoo and telling me do not
Speaker 1: put Steven Tyler on my back, um, and do not
Speaker 1: make my ancestor the wooly mammoth do the same. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they traveling and the monkeys, though the monkeys probably
Speaker 1: had it coming. Yeah, a quick plug for an upcoming
Speaker 1: Discovery show and let's Discovery BBC product. But Human Planet
Speaker 1: about all these like amazing things that indigenous groups and
Speaker 1: tribes continued to perform in the world. One of them. Uh,
Speaker 1: one of the sequences shows this, uh, this tribesman who's
Speaker 1: like taking out he's a farmer, not a farmer, he's
Speaker 1: a hurd herdsman. He's hurting these cows and he has
Speaker 1: to take him to this one watering hole otherwise they're
Speaker 1: all going to die. And he gets there and the
Speaker 1: elephants have already claimed it and he has to drive
Speaker 1: the elephants away with like a stick. And there's a
Speaker 1: huge chance he's gonna get trampled. It's it's it's great,
Speaker 1: you should all right the promise of trampling. Yell. But
Speaker 1: back to back to cloning. Another interesting thing about our
Speaker 1: our buddy Akira here is that is that in Japan,
Speaker 1: human cloning is currently severely frowned on illegally even punishable
Speaker 1: by ten years in prison. Uh so he's just kind
Speaker 1: of working this out of his system with Wooly Mammo.
Speaker 1: Maybe the hand of humans maybe, Yeah, that's a whole
Speaker 1: ethical quagmire in and of itself. But but but even that,
Speaker 1: like human cloning, you can you can get more into
Speaker 1: the the the idea that this is something that can
Speaker 1: that can benefit humanity, that we can learn a lot
Speaker 1: about about our ourselves, of our bodies and the treatment
Speaker 1: of diseases. But that's completely off the table. So let's
Speaker 1: clone Willie mammoths. Where it seems like the area of
Speaker 1: of really beneficial scientific achievement is um it's maybe a
Speaker 1: little slimmer, Yeah, definitely. In fact, there's a woman name
Speaker 1: by the name of Patul kiss Arslan and she's a
Speaker 1: postdoctoral fellow UM with NASA Astrobiology Institute Center for Reallybisomal
Speaker 1: Origins and Evolution. And she actually gave a talk at
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Science tavern Um a couple of days ago.
Speaker 1: It was really interesting, And she works with ancient genes
Speaker 1: and ancient genes as you know, exactly a super very
Speaker 1: holy um that ancient geans, as you know, are are
Speaker 1: in all of us, right in all life forms. Um,
Speaker 1: there's the whole thing. Like like, the most relatable example
Speaker 1: is why like a fetus early early in its development
Speaker 1: looks the same and numerous species exactly why it might
Speaker 1: have a tail, right or actually it does have a tail.
Speaker 1: So if you see that in mammals right, Um, it
Speaker 1: could end up being a fish or it could end
Speaker 1: up being a human. So there's this the ancient genes
Speaker 1: that are either going to um turn off or turn
Speaker 1: on depending on what the species is. It could grow
Speaker 1: up to be Richard Harris, it could grow up to
Speaker 1: be a killer whale. You never know. Film reference. But
Speaker 1: but Arslin, she was actually saying that they're basically using
Speaker 1: these ancient genes as a genetic alphabet. It's it's a
Speaker 1: common language for them to decode with. And so they're
Speaker 1: taking ancient genes and they're taking something like a modern
Speaker 1: day equal I, right, and they're putting those ancient genes
Speaker 1: in with that, and they're looking to see what it does,
Speaker 1: how it evolves, how how does it react to its environment,
Speaker 1: and so, like you said, on a smaller scale or
Speaker 1: like a less pacadermal um there they want to find
Speaker 1: out with these ancient genes how they're going to react
Speaker 1: because they feel like this can tell us something about
Speaker 1: ourselves here on Earth, but also again out in the universe.
Speaker 1: You know, if the primal life forms, UM, they're basically
Speaker 1: evolving before our eyes. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's it
Speaker 1: comes down to the whole principle of an understanding life
Speaker 1: and contemplating life out of the world's the only model
Speaker 1: of life that we have is the one we have here,
Speaker 1: So we need to really understand that model and all
Speaker 1: that it entails, UM and understand all the details, many
Speaker 1: of the details as we can possibly uncover regarding its
Speaker 1: genesis and it's uh in its development over time, and
Speaker 1: then we can apply the same standards to contemplating what
Speaker 1: may or may not be forming elsewhere in the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Arsenin was actually um, she had a lot of
Speaker 1: questions from the audience about the ethics of this because
Speaker 1: and she basically said, look, I'm not doing the willing
Speaker 1: mammoth here. What we're doing is we're just really trying
Speaker 1: to find out where life came from, how did it emerge.
Speaker 1: Picturing them is like sort of drunken accusations of like, hey,
Speaker 1: where you get off cloning the mammoth man. No, it
Speaker 1: was much more like, can you explain the rabbisome will
Speaker 1: reaction and the extremphile environment so on and so forth
Speaker 1: and how it um? But no, there was there was
Speaker 1: no no drunkard heckling or anything like that. Um. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it was all very civil. But there was beer and
Speaker 1: that was nice. Um basically, I mean she didn't field
Speaker 1: a lot of those questions. And what she said is, look,
Speaker 1: scientists are pretty much self regulating. And when I when
Speaker 1: I heard her say that, I thought, you know, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of what we're talking about right now, is
Speaker 1: um the same sort of topic that came up when
Speaker 1: cloning was first put on the table, right we were
Speaker 1: all scared that we were going to have versions of
Speaker 1: ourselves out there or you know, all sorts of tinkering
Speaker 1: that can go in. In fact, they are probably still
Speaker 1: shoes surrounding that. But we have a better hold on
Speaker 1: it now and we can see that you know, as
Speaker 1: you said, like in Japan, it's against the law to
Speaker 1: clone humans. So the idea is that this technology is here,
Speaker 1: I's you used for exploration, but you know, when when
Speaker 1: everything settles down, most likely you won't be creating these
Speaker 1: Jurassic parks and you know, charging fifty dollars for admission.
Speaker 1: But the hope at least, well that's yeah, that's the hope.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You can you can sort of nitpick,
Speaker 1: I guess, and make arguments about you know, various situations
Speaker 1: where some sort of scientific achievements sort of leap frog
Speaker 1: a little ahead of the common sense to keep it
Speaker 1: in check, you know, like like looking back to days
Speaker 1: when say cocaine was completely legal in the States, and
Speaker 1: like people were drinking it and their soda water and
Speaker 1: and buying it, you know before they go out and
Speaker 1: work at the docks. And then eventually people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe we should out love this or granted, these are
Speaker 1: very different issues, you know, very different social issues than
Speaker 1: than cloning, but but also like got when you look
Speaker 1: at at music on the internet, the pirrating of music
Speaker 1: and the whole argument that well, we just we let
Speaker 1: it get ahead and get ahead of ourselves and suddenly
Speaker 1: everybody sharing music and we didn't even think about putting
Speaker 1: the various rules in place and the various barriers in
Speaker 1: place to to shape it the way we wanted to
Speaker 1: shape it. So the cart before the horse Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I I guess so far, I mean, with cloning, it
Speaker 1: seems like we've done a good job of staying staying
Speaker 1: ahead of the technology, uh and keeping it sort of
Speaker 1: closed in so it doesn't just go wild. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so again that's the hope here. Yeah, but someone like
Speaker 1: myself doesn't have anyander tall or wily mammoth or dodo
Speaker 1: bird in their backyard. Well, here's the thing too, about
Speaker 1: about neandertals and and dodo birds and the idea of
Speaker 1: bringing them back because we had a well, because we
Speaker 1: had a hand in their extinction, um, in which you
Speaker 1: can make a better case with things like dodos, which
Speaker 1: you can clearly say, yes, humans kill off the dodo
Speaker 1: Neander tolls is a little more complex issue, as we
Speaker 1: discussed in our up plant in the Andertals podcast. But
Speaker 1: but then you have thinks like just today, at the
Speaker 1: day we recorded this, New York Times had an article
Speaker 1: of the Eastern cougar being officially declared extinct um. And
Speaker 1: then and then there are there are other more recent
Speaker 1: uh extinctions that can be laid at the feet of humans,
Speaker 1: such as the Asiatic cheetah and the Tasmanian tiger, and
Speaker 1: both of those, there are efforts in place to to
Speaker 1: collect the genetic information we would need and prepare to
Speaker 1: clone them. And of course even if you could clone them,
Speaker 1: there they're huge obstacles to to bringing an extinct species back.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're huge obstacles to to bringing a near
Speaker 1: extinct species back. The genetic diversity will be shrunk down
Speaker 1: so much that you know, it's like, oh, well, now
Speaker 1: we have a million deer, but they're also in bred
Speaker 1: that it's just ridiculous. So but but I'm kind of rambling,
Speaker 1: but my point is the mammoth is slightly old news,
Speaker 1: so I can I can more easily get behind efforts
Speaker 1: to bring back more recently extinct species. No, and that's
Speaker 1: a lot of people, actually, that's what they say when
Speaker 1: they were there were being critical of um bringing back
Speaker 1: the wooly mammoth. This are saying, why don't we just
Speaker 1: concentrate on what we have right now and try to
Speaker 1: preserve as much as possible, you know, our existing biodiversity.
Speaker 1: So we'll let me I'm in the last person to
Speaker 1: accuse scientists of playing god, but I mean it is
Speaker 1: one of those things where it's like wooly mammoth extinct,
Speaker 1: not if I have anything to say about it, and
Speaker 1: then you know, push the button bring them back. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, just completely you know, sticking
Speaker 1: it to fate and sticking it to history saying yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm human, I'm awesome, and I just brought back
Speaker 1: a wooly mammoth. That's right. Yeah. Next thing, you know,
Speaker 1: Ted Turner has a has a line of steak restaurants.
Speaker 1: Open the big big statue of wooly mammoth out front.
Speaker 1: You're gonna each mammoth burger and guys are going crazy
Speaker 1: because it's the most masculine thing ever. And I actually
Speaker 1: saw this spoof online. I'm hoping it's a spoof, and
Speaker 1: it was like Ted Nugent is just giving like tenta
Speaker 1: and dollars to the research of bringing back the wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth so that he can hunt them. Hunt okay, yes,
Speaker 1: hunt okay to hunt them? Yes. Yeah, sorry, I'm a
Speaker 1: little kneedsal, a little colder hunt. Well, I mean Ted's
Speaker 1: pretty wild dude, so so yes. But Ted Nugent is
Speaker 1: exactly the type of person I'm talking about. You can
Speaker 1: easily see him either hunting or a mammoth once it's
Speaker 1: been cloned, hunting or or indeed making beef turkey out
Speaker 1: of it and selling it online. Right, you know that's
Speaker 1: the dark side of this. I suppose, yes, the nugent factor,
Speaker 1: but we need to start using the the nugent factor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the Branson factor, which is like the more benign
Speaker 1: and the nugent factor not sup benign. All right, then
Speaker 1: there you go. Yeply mammoths, ancient jeans, and hey, I
Speaker 1: think we have some listener mail to wash all that
Speaker 1: down with. Let's check it out, all right, um, our
Speaker 1: listener j writes in, and Jay says, Jays from Arkansas.
Speaker 1: By the way, I just finished listening to your podcast
Speaker 1: on doppelgangers, and I really enjoyed it. I have an
Speaker 1: additional phenomenon to mention that I believe falls into a
Speaker 1: into a category all its own when talking about doppelgangers.
Speaker 1: I have experienced this three different times that I can remember.
Speaker 1: In each time it happens, it really creeps me out.
Speaker 1: Here it goes. I will be walking through a public
Speaker 1: place such as a mall or grocery store, when I
Speaker 1: see something, when I see someone that I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: in a long time, An old friend, a former teacher,
Speaker 1: a co worker, someone from my childhood, et cetera. However,
Speaker 1: when I get closer to them and prepare to greet them,
Speaker 1: I realized that it's not them at all. It's someone
Speaker 1: that looks very much like them. They're doppelganger, I suppose.
Speaker 1: So I turned and going about my business, shopping or
Speaker 1: whatever I'm there to do. But the really creepy twist
Speaker 1: is that before I leave this place, I run into
Speaker 1: the person that I thought I saw earlier, the real
Speaker 1: person this time. Three times this has happened to me,
Speaker 1: and it's forced me to think, Okay, was it the
Speaker 1: real person the first time and I just thought it
Speaker 1: was someone else because it has has been a long
Speaker 1: time since I've seen them, Or was it really adoptel
Speaker 1: ganger that reminded me of an old friend? And then
Speaker 1: by chance, I ended up seeing the very person the
Speaker 1: same day in the very same place. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: it really makes me wonder. It's sort of a surreal experience. Huh.
Speaker 1: You know, I I've had I've had similar experiences, but
Speaker 1: it's not that I've run into the person that's but
Speaker 1: I was really thinking a lot about that person, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, they turned up out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: and it's someone who hadn't been in my life for
Speaker 1: a long time. Yeah, well, that's just your mental powers
Speaker 1: of reality, right right, that's just the um visible strings
Speaker 1: pulling them towards me. Right. Well, now Jay doesn't mention
Speaker 1: um and he just says he's from Arkansas. If Jay
Speaker 1: were perhaps from a small like a really small town
Speaker 1: in Arkansas, and I could see where one could potentially
Speaker 1: have one of these and mis identification syndromes going on,
Speaker 1: and and then we're actually run into the people that
Speaker 1: they're misseeing. I don't know, that's that's a very nonclinical
Speaker 1: look at the situation. It's a nice shot though. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I would I would say it sounds like this
Speaker 1: is more just sort of a curiosity in Jay's life.
Speaker 1: But but again I will stress that if you do
Speaker 1: have a situation where you really think you're encountering double
Speaker 1: gang ers are mysterious doubles, are weird twins that shouldn't exist,
Speaker 1: you should definitely go to a doctor about it because
Speaker 1: it's probably a probably some sort of mental disturbance, and
Speaker 1: it might be there are many of these that are
Speaker 1: easily treated too, So it's not necessarily like if I
Speaker 1: go to the doctor about this, my life is over
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be an institution. No, there there's a
Speaker 1: way out on Yeah, there's there's our treatments for these
Speaker 1: types of things. But hey, j thanks for sharing that
Speaker 1: with us. We'd love to hear about about really cool,
Speaker 1: kind of weird experiences like this because the and you
Speaker 1: know when and and we've been completely non judgmental about
Speaker 1: these because because we've discussed in a number of these
Speaker 1: there are there are things that can go on in
Speaker 1: in in life, in in your in your head that
Speaker 1: are just that're gonna be a little weird and uh
Speaker 1: and they're they're they're tied to natural phenomena. But but
Speaker 1: but they'll they'll really throw you for a yes, And
Speaker 1: I have to say, I'm probably the last person that
Speaker 1: can judge in this area, um as I've already talked
Speaker 1: about my own weird dreams and experiences. So yeah, there
Speaker 1: you go. Non judgment zones. So hey, if you have
Speaker 1: any coppelganger experiences in your life, if you have thoughts
Speaker 1: on bringing back wooly mammoths, um, if you would like
Speaker 1: to ride, hunt, or eat a wooly mammoth hunt. Then
Speaker 1: let us know. You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter
Speaker 1: as blow the Mind, and you can always drop us
Speaker 1: a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
Speaker 1: the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
Speaker 1: right corner of our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone
Speaker 1: app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.