This argument is so frustrating. It's commonly seen with space projects, like a space hotel. It assumed several things that are usually not true:

* The project is using a non-negligible percentage of all resources available to the problem space

* Everyone agrees on what the problems are

* Everyone agrees on the priority ordering of problems that need to be tackled

* There isn't greater waste or opportunity for resource allocation from other projects first (e.g. video game dev or plastic surgery research)

* it's the responsibility of everyone to always be focused on working on the highest priority problem on some global list of problems.

It's very flawed logic IMO.

also

the flawed assumption that we can't work on more than one problem at a time.

that throwing all of our resources at a problem will speed up the solution to that problem without reaching a point of diminishing returns of investment.

that all scientist, engineers, researchers, doctors, etc are interchangeable and are equally motivated and capable to productively research problems in unrelated fields and that if their chosen research were de-funded and were to be moved to another field they wouldn't just quit and do something they are more interested in.

ignoring that knowledge gained in one field might also advance progress in another.

Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore people that they're going to change tack and use all of their brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead. They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as protected as it is now.

I would agree with you if we were playing with a fixed pot of money, but I think this project could bring support from an entirely new audience. I think a lot of people have a hard time conceiving of environmental protection as something positive and exciting. They see it as an essentially negative aspiration, like someone who sees healthy eating as an essentially negative application of discipline, pointlessly denying yourself doughnuts, because the positive benefits are too doubtful or abstract for them.

Reviving mammoths is dramatic, exciting, and overtly new and creative. It's like landing on the moon. I think it could excite people who groan at traditional environmental initiatives.

I know it's a failure of vision to see environmental protection as an essentially negative aspiration, just like it's a failure of vision to see healthy eating as essentially negative. But a lot of people see it that way, and they aren't going to willingly put their money behind reducing CO2 emissions or protecting habitat for endangered voles. Maybe for them this can be a gateway drug to giving a shit.

Your answer is spot on. The way I see the project is that it could somehow bring people to think that we can somehow save species using technology. I don't like that much because it frames the conservation effort to a specific object whereas an animal doesn't disappear like that, it disappears because its environment can't support it anymore.

Alors, regarding the negativity, and you can call me a totalitarian, I think much of the way we see things come from our education. So I think we can actually teach children to recognize the obviousness of healthy eating. That education of course is balanced by what you learn from society and also from the dreams projected by that society. For me reviving dead animals is a useless dream.

As for environment protection, the question of being exciting is not there. It won't be exciting at all for the masses. But in the end, if nothing is done, it won't be exciting either. My idealist brain doesn't accept that but my pragmatic brain understands that we'd need some political/philsophical/sociological super powers to change that. One of those super power is propganda. We know it works (even if the examples from history are unfortunate). But then again, propaganda doesn't mean dictatorship, just look the level of communication we receive about covid.

We'd need an Elon Musk that would build a project around crowd hacking instead of sending cars to space. That's what we usually get into the form of charismatic leaders. Maybe that's what we need (or maybe I'm biased by my own personality who ikes charismatic leaders :-))

I think you are right on a moral level. But on a pragmatic level these genetic projects are perhaps promising also for conserving existing species. Conserving a species in the traditional way, by conserving it's ecosystem, is costly and often failed. Especially if the ecosystem in question is competing with farmland, cities or heavily impacted by global warming and pollution. Storing some DNA is cheap and will get cheaper. Doing tricks with this DNA will also get cheaper if we do it more often. I know it is unrealistic to think we can restore an entire ecosystem from a jar of DNA, but we can maybe repair a damaged ecosystem this way. We may also be able to keep small populations, normally impacted by inbreeding, more genetically diverse. This may be our chance to domesticate and protect what is left of the biodiversity on earth.

Well, they are also working on helping the black-footed ferret recover and they started on that project before doing mammoths, so maybe cut them some slack?

Even putting aside the whataboutism here -- the limitation is not "enough money exists on earth" -- it's not actually true that keystone megafauna goes extinct every year.

The disappearing species are boring.

umbrella species are useful.