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.
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.
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.
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 bring 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.
…
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.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 4 days ago
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.
MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
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.
MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
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?
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
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!”
ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 days ago
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.
ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
I’ve just realised - Hammond was such a cheapskate that even the seatbelts in the helicopters didn’t work properly.
chuymatt@startrek.website 4 days ago
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.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
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 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?
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 4 days ago
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.
dovahking@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That was the thing that always broke the immersion for me. Our ancestors hunted the mammoths with just spears and a hole in the ground. And you’re telling me that modern technology can’t come up with a way to properly neutralize or contain a dinosaur?
tyler@programming.dev 3 days ago
But it’s not a zoo, like even in the slightest. It’s a theme park.
They don’t have a full dinosaur genome so they literally make stuff up. Not only that, but just like with the Colossal Bioscience stuff that’s literally happening right now, there’s no learning for these brought-back-to-life creatures so they will not behave anything like their actual prehistoric counterparts. It is bad science because there’s no reason to be doing the science at all. It won’t replicate anything from the past (for so so so many reasons) and it has so many unethical things to get past before it’s even slightly in -eh- territory.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
This just rounds itself back to capitalism being the problem because the science was being done for a reason: to generate profit for Hammond.
Bad science is usually always conducted to suit the ends of someone trying to use the results for manipulative/exploitative purposes.