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(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
So... in the actual book(s), the problem is a bit of both.
The 'science' goes wrong because... well, they do not have complete dinosaur genome sequences.
And they fill in the gaps with a lot of DNA from a certain kind of frog.
A frog, that is later discovered to change its sex, transform from female into male, in environments/situations that are not sufficiently male/female balanced.
The explanation as to why the dinosaurs will not be a problem is that they only make female ones, so the population will remain exactly as they engineer.
... this does not work, because some of the dinos transform their sex, and begin breeding, which they essentially entirely did not account for.
So... 'the science' absolutely fucked up there.
...
Also in the book(s)... Hammond is much, much more clearly an unscrupulous capitalist... think roughly somebody that would have their accounts managed by Patrick Bateman, or maybe like a modern techbro, but his tech isn't crypto or ai or hyperscaling whatever bs app... its genetic engineering.
(cough 23andMe cough)
The original movie makes him into... much more of a genuinely enthusiastic, but more innocently naive, and sympathetic character... he is much more straightforwardly a thinly veiled corpo asshole in the book.
And because of this, the book punishes him, where the movie basically does not.
In the book, near the end, as it looks like the surviving cast have escaped imminent danger, and is reasonably safe and secure, awaiting rescue...
... Hammond is very directly killed by his own hubris.
He decides he has some better idea about what to do, wanders off from the group, gets lost, and is torn to shreds by a pack of compies, compthagnasus, basically 10 or 20 or so of fairly small, maybe 1.5 foot ish tall tiny versions of velociraptors.
He makes a final, direct, hubristic act, and is literally torn to shreds by thousands of tiny cuts, but all at one time, the figurative recompense for his lifetime of shitty, reckless, self serving decisions.
Critchton was a damn good writer, RIP.
Anyway, the second movie, Lost World... is very, very loosely based on the second book, but it features a compy attack event as an inciting incident, the initial event...
...but they swap it to occuring to basically a completely innocent family who is vacationing on a nearby island, just a totally different and made up set of characters, where its now just some random assholeish wealthy corpo father who is being hubristic, and iirc, a little girl is seriously injured, but not killed...
Its much less hubristic of a bad decision from the father, as he legitimately had no idea this random island was infested with fucking dinosaurs.
Also, iirc, the Lost World movie just throws away these characters, this family, after this gets the plot rolling, I don't think they are ever on screen again.
Its not a well written intro.
...
So the books feature capitalism, capitalists, as another majorly bad thing that fucks up.
The idea as I see is that... these two things, when both unrestrained and pursued recklessly, well one of them would be bad enough on their own, but when you combine both of them, shit gets real bad, real fast, high likelihood of catastrophic co sequences.
Its the 'tech is not inherently good nor evil, it all depends on how a society uses it' line of thinking.
It just says hey, here's a worst case scenario for you to chew on, how seriously you should consider this.
Like maybe a modern version of this would be LLMs.
Theoretically, an LLM on its own, used reasonably, responsibly, can be a tool for arguably mostly good. You could theoretically power one of these things with wind, solar, geothermal, have a societal structure where its provided as a controlled and regulated public good, not a private for profit business.
But when you couple this with the ravenous nature of capitalism, well, a whole fuckton of shit starts cascading out of control into negative consequences... vital processes and info get fucked up by LLMs hallucinating shit and make heuristic decisions en masse that lead to say, millions of people being denied or charged out the ass for healthcare...
Major corporations massively downsize their work forces and replace them with 'good enough' (but not really, actually) LLMs... which then craters demand in a consumption based economy, so now we have a Great Depression 2.0...
And the widespread usage of these things to answer anyones questions and do everyone's home or coursework, means that now humans are net stupifying themselves, as they no longer need to learn how to do critical analysis, research and source verification, etc.
...
Its been a while since I've seen the original movie, fhe first sequel... and then yeah, never saw anything after that, because they just look immensely, increasingly stupid and nonsensical, not even having internal logic that is coherent or consistent... so I can't well comment on how the movie universe has evolved.
Actually... "science" is a process of discovery about the natural world. To then use that knowledge gained would be engineering.
Technically, yes, colloquially, no.
It is very, very common for people to use science as a noun or even verb, to describe just... doing anything that requires an at least moderate understanding of some or multiple scientifc fields to be able to do properly.
It is true that I ignored colloquialism.
Although... tbh that might be the least accurate definition?