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The bio science was averaging success. Not their fault that the IT dept fumbled the ball.
Stories about “science gone awry” are almost always about non-scientists screwing up.
https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Dennis_Nedry
Dennis Theodore[1] Nedry was the main antagonist during the first half of the original Jurassic Park film. He was a computer programmer at Jurassic Park. Due to his financial problems and low salary, he accepted a bribe from Biosyn to smuggle dinosaur embryos off the island.
In both the film and the novel, he is slain by a Dilophosaurus. He was directly responsible for the events that happened in both the novel and film. A combination of factors led to his demise: despite working in a career around dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, he had a limited knowledge of them, and greed, which was intertwined by desperation to pay off his debt collectors and make himself rich after that.
The science also went wrong a lil bit. The Dinos weren’t supposed to be able to breed being all females; but they used frog DNA so some the dinos ended up turning into males and began breeding.
Seems like the “dire wolf” and “wooly mammoth” thing happened even in fiction; they weren’t actually dinosaurs. They were frogs that looked like dinosaurs.
It never would have happened if they just had stronger laws preventing the dinos from having easy access to gender affirming care.
You are under the assumption the scientists listened to the bean counters. I on the otherhand think it’s more likely that any (mad) scientist who could make dinofrogs via genetic manipulation would intentionally splice the ability to self-transition into their creation.
“Demand I make my dinofrogs infertile will you!? I’ll show you… I’ll show all of you!!!”
I mean, it’s about both, but… do people really not catch the whole angle about capitalism and greed? Newman straight up gets everyone killed for a pay day, and doesn’t even make it out himself. The only way it could be more obvious is if it had giant flash red text.
More a reflection of people’s attention spans these days compared to when the movie is released. Read any online discussion about media and it seems like people are on their phones for 40% of the show at minimum.
Hell the original film would probably not do well if released today because it doesn’t have the obvious shoehorned plot points that the new movies have to cut through the morons.
There were plenty of morons in the 80s and 90s. Half the population suffered from severe lead poisoning. The other half were hopped up on neo liberal propaganda.
deleted by creator
Hard no.
"Hold hands and say it like me
The most shady, Frankie baby, fantastic
Graphic, tryin to make dough, like Jurassic
Park did quick to spark kids who start shit"
-Biggie
Jurassic Park is about capitalist hubris.
Jurassic World is about why we should not allow BD Wong to create the reptilian equivalent of the torment nexus.
If anything Jurassic park is basically a lesson in properly vetting your staff.
Everything that happened happened because Dennis was the only IT guy and basically could do whatever he wanted with zero oversight. It’s not like the dinosaurs were going to break out on their own, even the raptors only got out because the fences were turned off.
He was getting paid peanuts for designing and building an essential system for the running of the park all on his own, working for a guy that constantly bragged about sparing no expense.
IIRC the only interaction between Hammond and Nerdy went something like “you should have negotiated a better contract! Stfu gbtw”, which can pretty much sum up the whole wealth divide between the owners who gain most of the benefit and the workers who actually do the things under capitalism. Except if they aren’t getting the better of everyone on average, they just shut the whole thing down or find others that they do get the better of.
It still comes down to Hammond not paying Nedry enough although he claimed he “spared no expenses”.
Spared no expense on HR, contact lawyers, and icecream.
I saw one of the more recent-ish movies. One of the dinosaurs removed its subdermal tracking device and the humans find it because it has a big blinking light bulb on it. A big blinking light bulb on a subdermal tracker. Are these movies self aware? Was that supposed to be a joke?
The tracker must have been made by the same manufacturer that makes all those bombs you see in movies, too. You can tell because they have beepers, digital countdown displays, and sometimes also blinking lights.
ACME™
I mean, the science did go wrong too. They tried making dinosaurs all one gender but used DNA from an animal that can spontaneously switch genders. Sounds like they fucked up to me.
Anyone that thinks that dinosaurs are amphibians shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a DNA sequencer.
Without capitalism, maybe they wouldn’t have continued when they found out there wasn’t enough DNA for complete dinosaurs.
Or maybe they would have had enough time to think things through, and use safer/more appropriate replacement DNA.
Just spit balling.
Yeah, “good enough to keep making money” is a very capitalist mindset.
Hammond literally goes around gaslighting the entire group by saying “spared no expense” when in reality he cheaped out and cut every corner. His undoing was Dennis, who was the lowest bidder in a security contract. Instead of picking the absolute best, Hammond went with the lowest bidders. Even the T. rex fence should not have been so easy to break down, power or not. The entire park was built cheap and fast. Hammond was a capitalist playing conservationist.
No no no, it’s all about paying your IT people well and being nice to them. If John had been nice to Needry, then Needry wouldn’t have needed to betray him. Pay your IT people, be nice to them and everything would have been fine.
Worst I can do if my boss pisses me off it’s change his password on a Friday, and then go home.
I’ve long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like “science/genetic engineering is bad” or “you can’t control nature” to be a bit silly, given that, well, it’s a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It’s a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn’t do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that “these animals are special and can’t be safely contained” rather than “letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea”.
Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it’d be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it’s a monster movie.
Hard agree. My takeaway is the moral of the story is always do quality engineering. There have been like 10 movies and they still don’t know how to construct an enclosure.
Wasn’t the issue with Indominus rex that the dinosaur tricked them into thinking it was gone and they left the door open, like idiots? Definitely some things in those movies are engineering issues, but it mostly was a problem because there were multiple points of failure in the system. This is the point I make about my work. My department catches behavior problems from reports, discussions, interviews, and providing technical assistance. We do tons of work regularly and there are overlapping ways to catch the same problem. When my department is given more work and no new staff, they can’t stay on top of everything. They still catch things because the work they are able to do usual catches one of the multiple opportunities. With enough workload added on eventually you end up missing something. When the stakes are life and death, you have multiple layers of protection programmed into the system.
Why do they always only have one massive entrance to each enclosure? Why is it large enough for the Dinosaur to walk out of? Why don’t they have two doors in series, airlock style?
They do it for butterflies at museums…
Well you can’t have butterflies escaping into nature. They’ll wreak havoc by pollinating everything.
pollinate me uwu
The new one has an airlock style containment [although still comicly large]. Not that it prevents everything from going to shit anyway.
Where I’m from, when engineers complete their certification they get an iron ring made from the material of a collapsed bridge. This is remind them to not become arrogant and think about everything that could go wrong.
You wouldn’t be able to find a good engineer to design a park for animals no one really knows the behaviour of. Hammond would have to hire the people in this thread who think “yeah we could design something that will contain these animals, no problem at all!”
Well for starters I wouldn’t make the containment system an electric fence, have an electric fence by all means but have some physical metal rods as backup. Also maybe don’t make the dinosaurs bulletproof.
Hammond probably got told that but decided it was too expensive. After all how often is the power likely to go on out on * and island frequently hit by hurricanes?
but have some physical metal rods as backup.
Do you know how high the animal can jump? Do you know whether or not they’ll be able to climb those rods?
Also maybe don’t make the dinosaurs bulletproof.
How would you know which weapons an animal is vulnerable to before it’s fully grown?
The problem is you don’t actually know many the variables you’re trying to make a solution for. You’re assuming you would have thought of a lot of these things only after you’ve seen another solution fail. Hindsight is 20/20. But if you didn’t have the benefit of hindsight how are you going to solve a problem involving lifeforms with an unknown level of intelligence, and an unknown resilience to weapons, and having unknown behaviours? You’re only going to know you missed something after whatever you designed failed.
There’s the part of the movie where Hammond is eating the melting ice cream saying “next time we’ll do it better.” That would be you because you’re certain you can solve a problem that’s not defined by empirical evidence (it doesn’t exist because they’re new animals) but based on assumptions about a new lifeform being similar to existing lifeforms we currently have in zoos, and think keeping animals we have familiarity with is easy (it isn’t, animals in zoos actually do escape containment).
You’re showing the hubris the story is warning against. Science depends on empirical evidence, and there wouldn’t be any empirical evidence on the behaviour of new animals grown in a lab. And if you are completely ignorant of animal behaviour (because you think it’s irrelevant) you’re going to be very bad at building a zoo. But you’re countering that by ignoring all of the knowledge we have about building a zoo (animal behaviour is important!) because there’s hubris layered on top of hubris.
That’s actually a persistent myth. I’ve heard it myself as a wearer of an iron ring, but it isn’t true. The myth was that the first iron rings were made from the remains of the first Quebec Bridge, but they weren’t, let alone any over the century since. The bridge collapse did inspire the creation of the iron rings, though.
If you put high voltage electric fences around humans they’re pretty well contained. The intelligence level of the dinosaurs was never relevant but the movie did kind of try and suggest that somehow the velociraptors were special simply because they were mildly more intelligent than the rest.
They made a big thing about how raptors can open doors, my cats can open doors.
And your cats would eat you if they could. I’ve had cats gnaw on my fingers and toes, like they were seeing if that would work. Cats are actually worse than dinosaurs, and modern birds, and reptiles, because they usually stop killing when they’re full.
I’ve just realised - Hammond was such a cheapskate that even the seatbelts in the helicopters didn’t work properly.
No. It was basically the paleontologist is a Luddite to the extent he did not realize he needed to find the other end, as he had another seats female end as well. He made two females work… which could be a reference to the rest of the movie.
I love this. To quote an expert: “Life, uh, finds a way.”
It’s Frankenstein… scientists creating life from the parts of dead animals without any regard to the consequences.
Zoos can be poorly built and which can create horrible conditions for animals, but at least with with living animals we know what they eat and how they live in the wild and we can attempt to construct a micro-habitat for them to have decent lives in. With dead animals brought back to life, we wouldn’t know how to do this.
What does a Triceratops eat? Why is that Triceratops sick? Will a T-Rex be happy living in a paddock being fed goats, or will it be trying to escape? Certain animals are very skilled at escaping enclosures and you have no idea which animals fall into that category. Which animals are going to be afraid of humans? Maybe none of them, maybe all of them, maybe some of them? If the goal is to make a zoo where people can actually see the animals that might be relevant to how the zoo is designed. Which animals will throw things at people, or spit at people?
I think you’re showing the hubris of science that both Frankenstein and Jurrassic Park are warning against. There’s a whole science involved with designing a zoo and they often get things wrong like the maximum height a pissed off tiger can jump. With genetically engineered animals that resemble dinosaurs, there would be more unknown variables than known variables. You’re assuming you know those variable are irrelevant because apparently “good engineers” don’t need to care about factors they don’t understand?
No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.
Im saying those factors should be understandable
There’s the hubris. You’re assuming “we got this” on something that isn’t going to be understandable until after the animals escape.
Science is about trial and error. Zoos function because over a very long period of time mistakes have been made and we learned from those mistakes. We’ve learned these lessons over centuries.
You’re talking about a zoo where every animal in it we have zero experience with handling.
You’re thinking handling animals we have centuries of experience with is the same as handling animals we have zero experience with because there’s a tendency in the science community to be reductive towards other disciplines. Just as you might think that running a zoo is super easy - barely an inconvenience, an expert in genetic engineering (but no experience in running a zoo) might think the same. And the guy running the company might think “well he’s an expert that saying it’s no problem” and think they don’t need to put any effort into studying the behavior of the animals. The “clever girl” dude warns Hammond they should put just down the velociraptors because he spent time watching the animals and studying their behaviour (they never attack the same place twice). But I don’t think that guy had a PhD, so he was ignored.
Right now we have occasional one off story about a tiger jumping higher than tigers were known to be able to jump, getting out and mauling some people. That’s one mistake on one animal. An animal we have centuries of experience in handling, and we still get things wrong sometimes.
A zoo trying to contain many different animals that we have zero experience in handling would have these kinds of events happening constantly, and possibly have multiple issues happening at once possibly resulting in a cascading system failure. Which is what the story portrays. But all it takes is one scientist acting like they’re experts in a subject they look down their nose at other disciplines (how many zoos have you run that qualifies you to say it’s not a problem?) to convince an owner there is no need to worry about those naysayers who aren’t brilliant genetic scientists.
In addition to what you’re saying, a big part of the movie is why are we doing this? Is there anything to be gained from it? We’re currently having that conversation with the “dire wolves” that Colossal Bioscience has created. They’re not actually dire wolves, in any sense of the word, so all we’re learning is how to genetically modify creatures. We’re not learning anything about the creatures themselves. There’s no purpose to doing the same with Dinos, there’s no dna left to match against and the environment is completely different, they wouldn’t act the same at all.
Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!
It’s funny though, reading those books it seems that Michael Crichton has deep disdain for scientists.
He had a deep distain for the privatization of science.
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.
…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…
I recall the last chapter of the first book (it’s been awhile since I’ve read it tho) mentions reports dinosaur attacks in nearby villages. But movies are “show don’t tell” so a similar scene is shown. Spielberg isn’t going to show a child being killed, but the point is the same.
Also I think Spielberg making Hammond be for the most part a kindly grandfatherly kind of guy was a smart move. We do see him as being a ruthless kind of person when talking to Nedry, but super kindly when dealing with customers. Many times that’s how it goes, people have said Donald Trump is a nice guy when they meet him in person. And many times billionaires will talk about their lofty altruistic visions, like Mark Zuckerberg talking about wanting to “help the world communicate.”
Hammond being a mustache twirling villain isn’t as interesting as Hammond being a billionaire wanting to secure his legacy by making something the world has never seen before while being out of touch with reality.
You don’t become a billionaire without being able to get investors to buy in to your “vision”. Elon Musk was really good at getting people to invest in projects that’ll never work (like Hyperloop and Starship) by promoting a a rose tinted vision of these projects working. Could even get scientists on board with these projects because those scientists are just thinking about specific problems. not how the whole thing will work together. At least until Musk freaked out about his kid being trans and started hitting the drugs. Hammond in the movies is somewhat similar to Elon Musk before he went nuts… or before he started became very public about how nuts he is.
Eccentric billionaire that seems altruistic, but in the end just an arrogant asshole that gets people killed because of their negligence.
Well shit, I didn’t think the Jurassic park books would ever end up on my reading list but here we are
Yeah, if you didn’t know, the whole movie franchise is ultimately based on the book, Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton, who I honestly feel does not get enough credit as a genuinely compelling sci-fi thriller style of author… all the way back in 1969 he wrote Andromeda Strain, he’s written a lot of … yeah, sort of gritty, dense, thriller sci-fi novels.
The original series of movies… well, the first one is a pretty good, pretty adaptation if you’re going for a wider, more family friendly audience… some characters are kind of merged together to keep the plot simpler to follow… its a reasonably faithful adaptation in terms of sticking to the exact contents of the novel, and of course, just a wildly succesful and beloved movie.
Crichton wrote Lost World, a sequel to his book… but the movie sequel Lost World… is basically an entire alternate timeline, a totally different story, only vaguely sharing some similarities with the book Lost World.
Then, every movie after that is just fan fiction, utterly diverged from the actual way the characters are portrayed in the books, plot is completely different, only really just keeping a few characters from the older movies around, but they’re no longer anything like they are in the books, and of course you’ve got all the new characters just shoved into this completely divergent timeline… bleck.
I would strongly encourage you to read at least the first book.
Either every, or nearly every chapter begins with a sort of… disembodied, tangentially relevant thought from Malcolm, who is often relating whatever is roughly going to go on in that chapter to the actual mathematical principles and formulae of chaos theory.
The book functionally gives you an actual ‘Intro to Chaos Theory 101’ lesson as you read through it, with many of the chapters serving as an example, in at least some analagous way, of the concepts in these sort of disembodied, psuedo narration blurbs from Malcolm.
Its some of the best ludonarrative, or maybe… meta, self referential at another scale, consistency, and depth that I can remeber reading in something that is also paced so well that I again call it a ‘thriller’.
There’s an unexpected amount of philosophical rants and theory dropping throughout the book. Welcome, but unexpected for people who go in to read an action novel.
Welcome to Fight Club.
Thought you were getting a mostly dumb, dude bro story about guys in an underground fighting ring?
Surprise!
Our trailers were intentionally deceptive, we had to trick you into consuming something more cerebral, that may actually cause you to have a complex thought.
They’re very, very good. I reread them for probably the fourth time just last week.
Just hopping in to recommend the books. They’re seriously good and the movies don’t do them justice at all
I’d say they do them justice to some degree no? I quite enjoyed the first movie, it changed some stuff from the book for sure but I feel like it captured the same feel for the most part and does the story justice. Admittedly, the lost world was a bit of a mess as they combined some stuff from different books and changed the ending for the worse I’d say but Ive seen much worse adaptations in the theatre.
Top comment! Only thing I feel not mentioned, even the science problems can ultimately be attributed to capitalism, as a lack of regulation.
Great post.
As an aside, I saw the Lost World once and remember it being really, really bad as a kid.
Yep, I was very dissapointed as well, having read both books after seeing the first movie, lol.
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?
