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Environment

28th Jul 2022

Company to make ‘real life Jurassic Park’ complete with the long-extinct woolly mammoth

Kieran Galpin

Surely nothing could go wrong, right?

In a bid to tackle climate change and maintain permafrost that contains harmful gasses, a company is looking to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

Despite going extinct 4,000 years ago, bioscience company Colossal is hoping to resurrect the woolly mammoth as they believe such creatures could help maintain permafrost in areas like Siberia by knocking down trees and creating natural grasslands.

“There is no silver bullet when it comes to climate change,” founder Ben Lamm told LADbible. “It’s going to take a while to get to Arctic re-wilding, we’re going to have our first few calves in four to six years, and it’s going to take six to seven years before they can be truly self-sustainable and knocking down trees, so it’s going to take a while.”

He continued to explain that they are looking for “alternative energy sources” but feel their project could “sequester a lot of carbon and keep the permafrost cooler.”

Lamm continued: “Methane is about 30 times worse for the world than carbon. There is more carbon and methane trapped in the Arctic than anywhere else.

“Our hope is that we can get to thousands of elephants in a reasonable time period, and if we can, we can really play a role in suppressing carbon and methane in the Arctic, that’s our goal and that’s where I think we can leave the biggest impact.”

However there are those who have accused the company of “playing God” after all, they are quite literally creating life that has been dead for thousands of years.

“Regardless of your philosophical or religious views, I think that wherever you fall on that spectrum, we can all agree that we have a duty to protect this planet,” Lamm pushed back, saying we have a “duty” to protect this planet.

He also took a subtle jab at Elon Musk, saying: “Someone said that until Elon [Musk] figures out Mars there is no ‘Planet B’, right?

“We’ve got this one, this is our station in this universe right now, so we have a duty to protect that and everything that exists on it.”

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