I like these nerdy takes. After re-watching Jurassic Park for the first time in years, and with more software engineering experience, I’m curious to read a post-mortem of Jurassic Park.
There is a scene in the book where, IIRC, a program is run periodically that counts the number of dinosaurs in each paddock based on some sort of dino-scanner.
The program was written in such a way that it expected a certain number of dinosaurs in a paddock and returned a successful result when it reached that number. However, once it reached the threshold, it did not count more dinosaurs. Once modified, the program outputted the correct total, thus identifying that the dinosaurs were producing offspring in a single sex environment.
The main lesson of Jurassic Park is that the park designers are morons, incompetent to an actionable degree, over and over. Despite what Hollywood thinks, containing large animals is actually very easy. You "just" did a sheer trench around them. The larger the animal, the more afraid of heights it has to be.
Take a look carefully next time you are in a zoo. No active electric fences, lots of very dangerous animals, all contained. Dinosaurs would be almost no different.
It's a clear case of "but then the movie wouldn't happen".
As a bonus round, note the strange absence of guns as a final fallback and the blitheringly idiotic reasons deployed that they don't exist, can't be used, or don't work somehow. Granted, you need more than a .22 in case of emergency but this has been a solved problem for over a century.
The first movie I still enjoy even so. I don't let this interfere with my enjoyment of a cinematic classic, and rich eccentrics hiring the totally wrong people who overconfidently do everything wrong I can track with. The sequels, especially the ones with more parks, I have a much harder time with. Jurassic World really should have worked just fine, at least up until the volcano hit. And I don't mean worked fine as-is, as it is also disastrously misdesigned. I mean, a real, correctly designed park is certainly not "easy", but well within reach for a modern corporation even remotely concerned about liability.
I agree with most of your points, but one detail worth keeping in mind is that the "dinosaurs" depicted in the film are not necessarily reflective of their original species at all; InGen focused exclusively on producing animals (and plants!) that aesthetically matched the expectations of park-goers. The book offhandedly mentions failed prototypes exhibiting all kinds of problems, like tendencies to scratch their own skin off, and plants and animals are haphazardly juxtaposed from vastly different time periods and climates. Even following best practices from zoos would not necessarily prepare InGen to deal with accidentally hyper-aggressive faux-dinos that are not the robust products of natural evolution.
The main engineering lesson of Jurassic Park is to consider whether fail safe is actually deadly. It depends, are you more afraid of a fire or rampaging "velociraptors"?
In the case of housing dinosaurs, there really isn’t a fail safe scenario, apart from marooning TRex to some sort of canyon, much like how lions are often housed in zoos.
