How do nuclear-powered submarines work? A nuclear scientist explains

The Australian government has just declared an historic defence agreement with the United States and United Kingdom that will see a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines patrol our shores and surrounding waters.

Research into nuclear-based propulsion of marine vessels began in the 1940s with the dawn of the “nuclear age”. Since then, only six nations have owned and operated nuclear submarines: China, France, India, Russia, the UK and the US.

Considering Australia has just torn up a A$90 billion contract to construct a new arsenal of conventional submarines, yesterday’s announcement will probably come as a surprise to many.

Read more: Australia to build nuclear submarines in a new partnership with the US and UK

So what is “nuclear” about a nuclear submarine? The first thing to say is that a nuclear-powered submarine is not a nuclear weapon.

On the surface, they look like any other submarine. The key difference lies in the way they are powered.

In the early days of atomic research, scientists rapidly realised the huge amounts of energy released by “splitting the atom” can be harnessed to generate electricity. Nuclear reactors inside power stations have been powering homes and industry across the world for 70 years. Similarly, each nuclear submarine draws power from its own miniature onboard nuclear reactor.

At the heart of every atom is an atomic nucleus, made of protons and neutrons. The number of protons defines what chemical element that atom belongs to; nuclei with the same number of protons but varying numbers of neutrons are called isotopes of that element.

Some very heavy nuclei are highly susceptible to a process known as nuclear fission, whereby they split into two lighter nuclei with a total mass less than the original nucleus. The remainder is converted to energy.

The amount of energy released is immense, as we can see from Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², which tells us the energy is equal to the change in mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light!

Reactors in a nuclear-powered submarine are typically fuelled with uranium. Natural uranium mined from the ground consists mainly of an isotope called uranium-238, mixed with small amounts (0.7%) of the key isotope uranium-235.

For the reactor to work, the uranium fuel has to be “enriched” to contain the desired proportion of uranium-235. For submarines, this is typically about 50%. The degree of fuel enrichment is a crucial factor in maintaining a chain reaction that gives a consistent, safe level of energy output.

Inside the reactor, uranium-235 is bombarded with neutrons, causing some of the nuclei to undergo nuclear fission. In turn, more neutrons are released and the process continues in a so-called “nuclear chain reaction”. The energy is given off as heat, which can be used to drive turbines that generate electricity for the submarine.

What are the pros and cons of going nuclear?

One huge advantage of nuclear-powered submarines is they do not require refuelling. When one of them enters into service, it will be commissioned with enough uranium fuel to last more than 30 years.

The high efficiency of nuclear power also enables these submarines to operate at high speed for longer periods than conventional diesel-electric submarines. What’s more, unlike conventional fuel combustion, nuclear reactions do not require air. That means nuclear submarines can stay submerged at deep depths for months at a time, giving them better stealth capabilities and allowing for longer, more remote deployments.

The downside is the eye-watering cost. Each nuclear submarine typically costs several billion dollars to build, and requires a highly skilled workforce with expertise in nuclear science. With its dedicated training programs offered by world-class universities and government agencies, Australia is well situated to meet the increasing demands in this space, and will also benefit from existing UK and US expertise through the new trilateral security pact.

At this stage, details on where the fuel would be sourced are unclear. While Australia has an ample supply of uranium in the ground, it lacks the capacity to enrich or fabricate the reactor fuel, which could be sourced from overseas.

What will happen to the spent fuel? The 2015 Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission found commercial viability for long-term radioactive waste storage and disposal facilities in South Australia. Whether this eventuates will doubtless be subject to deliberations at local and federal government levels for years to come.

Read more: Why nuclear submarines are a smart military move for Australia — and could deter China further

Popular misconceptions

I’ll say it again. This is not a call by Australia to deploy nuclear weapons in our waters. For uranium to be designated “weapons grade”, it needs to be enriched to upwards of 90% uranium-235 - the fuel for a nuclear-powered submarine doesn’t come close.

In any case, Australia has never produced a nuclear weapon, and it is a party to nuclear nonproliferation treaties and international export control regimes, including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative.

The tactical advantage of submarines comes from their stealth and ability to pinpoint targets secretly without detection.

Maintaining safety, for both crew and the natural environment, is crucial onboard any sea vessel. Hollywood movies such as K19: The Widowmaker, in which a nuclear submarine malfunctions on its maiden voyage, play on our emotions and our instinctive fear of nuclear radiation.

But advances in modern safety controls and procedures mean reactor accidents in submarines are hopefully now consigned to the past.

The strategic and geopolitical outcomes of this policy decision are yet to be seen. But one thing is already clear: Australia’s latest foreign policy venture is also a firm embrace of nuclear science.

AJ Mitchell, Research fellow, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pregnant male seahorses support up to 1,000 growing babies by forming a placenta

Supplying oxygen to their growing offspring and removing carbon dioxide is a major challenge for every pregnant animal. Humans deal with this problem by developing a placenta, but in seahorses — where the male, not the female, gestates and gives birth to the young — exactly how it worked hasn’t always been so clear.

Male seahorses incubate their embryos inside a pouch, and until now it was unclear how the embryos “breathe” inside this closed structure. Our new study, published in the journal Placenta, examines how pregnant male seahorses (Hippocampus abdominalis) provide oxygen supply and carbon dioxide removal to their embryos.

We examined male seahorse pouches under the microscope at different stages of pregnancy, and found they develop complex placental structures over time — in similar ways to human pregnancy.

Read more: Curious Kids: Is it true that male seahorses give birth?

A pregnant dad gestating up to 1,000 babies

Male pregnancy is rare, only occurring in a group of fish that includes seahorses, seadragons, pipehorses and pipefishes.

Pot-bellied seahorse males have a specialised enclosed structure on their tail. This organ is called the brood pouch, in which the embryos develop.

The female deposits eggs into the male’s pouch after a mating dance and pregnancy lasts about 30 days.

While inside the pouch, the male supplies nutrients to his developing embryos, before giving birth to up to 1,000 babies.

Embryonic development requires oxygen, and the oxygen demand increases as the embryo grows. So too does the need to get rid of the resulting carbon dioxide efficiently. This presents a problem for the pregnant male seahorse.

Enter the placenta

In egg-laying animals — such as birds, monotremes, certain reptiles and fishes — the growing embryo accesses oxygen and gets rid of carbon dioxide through pores in the egg shell.

For animals that give birth to live young, a different solution is required. Pregnant humans develop a placenta, a complex organ connecting the mother to her developing baby, which allows an efficient exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide (it also gets nutrients to the baby, and removes waste, via the bloodstream).

Placentae are filled with many small blood vessels and often there is a thinning of the tissue layers that separate the parent’s and baby’s blood circulations. This improves the efficiency of oxygen and nutrient delivery to the fetus.

Surprisingly, the placenta is not unique to mammals.

Some sharks, like the Australian sharpnose shark (Rhizoprionodon taylori) develop a placenta with an umbilical cord joining the mother to her babies during pregnancy. Many live-bearing lizards form a placenta (including very complex ones) to provide respiratory gases and some nutrients to their developing embryos.

Our previous research identified genes that allow the seahorse father to provide for the developing embryos while inside his pouch.

Our new study shows that during pregnancy the pouch undergoes many changes similar to those seen in mammalian pregnancy. We focused on examining the brood pouch of male seahorses during pregnancy to determine exactly how they provide oxygen to their developing embryos.

What we found

By viewing the seahorse pouch under the microscope at various stages of pregnancy, we found that small blood vessels grow within the pouch, particularly towards the end of pregnancy. This is when the baby seahorses (called fry) require the most oxygen.

The distance between the father’s blood supply and the embryos also decreases dramatically as the pregnancy goes on. These changes improve the efficiency of transport between the father and the embryos.

Interestingly, many of the changes that occur in the seahorse pouch during pregnancy are similar to those that occur in the uterus during mammalian pregnancy.

We have only scratched the surface of understanding the function of the seahorse placenta during pregnancy.

There is still much to learn about how these fathers protect and nourish their babies during pregnancy — but our work shows the morphological changes to seahorse brood pouches have a lot in common with the development of mammalian placentae.

Read more: The secret sex life and pregnancy of a seahorse dad

Jessica Suzanne Dudley, Postdoctoral Fellow, Macquarie University and Camilla Whittington, Senior lecturer, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New analysis shows Morrison government funding won’t cover any extra uni student places for years

The federal government’s promise to deliver more student places through its Job-ready Graduates Package was hollow rhetoric, as research released today demonstrates.

From university funding agreements, we now know the maximum subsidy payable to each university from 2021 to 2023.

My research shows the total amount made available isn’t enough to provide subsidies for any extra student places, let alone the extra 30,000 this year announced by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in his budget speech in May.

One year ago, the government legislated major changes to higher education funding, marketed as Job-ready Graduates. In selling these changes, the then education minister, Dan Tehan, said:

“[…] our government wants more Australians to have the opportunity to benefit from a university education. Because of the surge in demand caused by the COVID-19 recession we need those additional places from next year. Doing nothing for one or two years will not help the year 12s of 2020 and the Australians looking to retrain in 2021. Deferring our economic recovery helps no one and risks scarring a generation.”

The changes meant that, on average, student contributions should increase while government subsidies for student places decrease. An increase in student places was one of the major reasons given for accepting these changes. If we could rely on the government rhetoric about its policy, then every year this decade we should have seen more working-age Australians able to enrol in higher education than ever before.

Read more: The 2021-22 budget has added salt to universities' COVID wounds

What did the government promise?

The Job-ready Graduates promise was to increase the total subsidy for student places over time. This growth was in recognition of the extra demand that would arise in areas of high population growth and from the “Costello baby boom” generation reaching university age.

The government promised 27,000 extra domestic student places in 2021 and nearly 100,000 by 2030. In 2019, there were 627,545 Commonwealth-supported student places.

The government doesn’t fund a set number of student places. Under the Job-ready Graduates arrangements, it sets the maximum subsidy it will pay to a university for student places. Each student place attracts a set subsidy, with the amount varying depending on its discipline.

Each university is free to decide the number and mix of student places it provides. But it is paid the subsidy for student places only up to the maximum amount set for it by the government. If it provides places beyond its subsidy cap, it receives only the student contribution. This would usually not be enough to cover costs.

Read more: 3 flaws in Job-Ready Graduates package will add to the turmoil in Australian higher education

I advised the Senate committee inquiry into the changes that it was a mystery how the government had produced its estimate of the number of student places to be created. We now know the maximum subsidy payable to each university from 2021 to 2023 from the publicly available funding agreements of universities. We also know how this maximum amount is proposed to increase each year to 2030.

Unis continue to be short-changed on subsidies

With Job-ready Graduates, the government appeared to radically change its attitude to funding student places from the previous three years. In 2018 and 2019, it froze funding. In 2020, subsidies increased by less than inflation. These decisions effectively reduced the number of government-subsidised student places.

By 2019, there were 27,800 places in the system from which the government was withholding over A$322 million in subsidies.

Universities were bearing that cost when COVID-19 hit in 2020. The government response to the pandemic, notably closing the borders to international students, continues to reduce the revenue universities receive.

Read more: Universities lost 6% of their revenue in 2020 — and the next 2 years are looking worse

Hidden in the detail of the transition to Job-ready Graduates is another source of subsidy shortfall that will further limit universities’ ability to provide student places. “Grandfathered students” are students who started their courses before the changes took effect in 2021. They are protected from having to pay higher student contributions. To ensure funding for their places is not severely cut, the old, higher government subsidy rate continues for them.

In reality, university subsidy limits do not adequately allow for these grandfathered students. The shortfall is likely to be around $300 million over the time they take to complete their courses. Around $200 million relates to the period from 2023 to 2025.

Shortfall exceeds $1 billion by 2024

The total amount of government subsidy over the next decade is shown in the chart below.

The amount made available in 2021 is not enough to provide subsidies for any additional student places. The combined effect of the changes since 2018 is that, in 2021, the government has underdelivered on its promised subsidy level by the equivalent of 39,000 student places – the 27,000 extra places promised under Job-ready Graduates and 12,000 places in the system since 2019 that remain unsubsidised.

While the shortfall reduces over time, by 2024 the government is still subsidising around 14,000 fewer student places than it promised. It would need to provide about $1.1 billion more in subsidy from 2021 to 2024 to honour the claims it made to the public and the parliament.

The government explicitly set student contributions to influence student choices. It was trying to encourage students into disciplines that it considered would make them job-ready. If students respond as desired, they will shift from disciplines with low subsidies into more highly subsidised disciplines.

If successful, however, this policy would increase the average cost of subsidy per place. And that would reduce the number of subsidised places that universities could provide within their maximum subsidy level.

Read more: The government would save $1 billion a year with proposed university reforms — but that's not what it's telling us

If the government was serious about ensuring universities were able to support Australia’s economic recovery, it could have adopted a policy that was both more effective and simpler. As a first step, it could have provided the subsidies to support the student load already in the system in 2019. It could then have increased subsidy levels so that from 2021 to 2023 working-age Australians have the same opportunities to undertake higher education that they had from 2014 to 2017 before the funding freeze.

In the long term, the rate of growth in subsidies may restore these opportunities, but that time is two elections away. By then, reducing government debt may be the priority. If the government of the day decides to abandon the policy of increasing subsidies each year, it will not require any legislative change.

Read more: Big-spending 'recovery budget' leaves universities out in the cold

Mark Warburton, Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I asked historians what find made them go ‘wait, wut?’ Here’s a taste of the hundreds of replies

Often when historians visit an archive or conduct research, we are not sure what we’ll find. With the help of archivists and librarians, we may know broadly what is contained in an archival record or a database, but we never know what may or may not be useful to us. Approaching our research material with a particular set of questions or analytical framework, what we actually find may leave us surprised, confused or taken aback in another way.

On Twitter, I asked a simple question: Historians, what is the thing that made you go ‘wait, wut?’ in the archives or in your research? The response was overwhelming – over 300 replies and 450 quote tweets at last count.

Historians, archivists and other researchers got in touch with great stories of their archival finds and tales of bizarre research moments. These ranged from the quirky to the disturbing to the profound.

Below I have chosen a handful that fall into each category to give an idea of the wide spectrum of what historians have come across in the field.

The quirky

Many of those who responded told stories of bizarre (and sometimes amusing) finds in the archives. Some were actual objects, such as Robert Cribb finding “17 tubes of processed opium, ready for smoking, in the Dutch archives from 1946 Indonesia”, Daniel McKay coming across “negatives of an early Australian prime minister naked on holiday”, and “300 love letters from woman to woman around 1760, partly written in blood”, located by Susanne Wosnitzka.

Others found interesting correspondence. A.J. Bauer gave the example of transcripts of phone-sex calls in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, after a politician wrote to Reagan to intervene against “dial-a-porn”. Yasmin Dualeh uncovered a “letter from Prof Phillip Hitti calling out his Princeton colleague Albert Einstein for spreading false rumours about him to students”. Maurice Casey told of a letter written to Soviet leader Josef Stalin by a New York University debating team “seeking help with their upcoming debate on capitalism”.

More strange tales emerged from newspaper reports and transcripts of speeches that historians discovered in their research. Xesc Mainzer mentioned a 1970s story in a Majorcan newspaper of “an elderly Belgian woman loosing [sic] her denture when she bit a policeman’s leg”. In the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and Museum, Dustin Jones “came across a speech given by John Wayne at a charity dinner Ford also attended making absolutely one of the least accurate predictions I saw in my studies”. What was the movie actor’s prediction? That “Watergate will be a footnote” in future history books.

The disturbing

Historians also attested to the disturbing material that astounded them in their research, with the often bureaucratic and sterile nature of archival documents belying the troubling matter unearthed.

Lachlan Clohesy found notes of a talk by British nuclear physicist Sir Ernest Titterton about Australia’s potential nuclear arsenal. This talk “included making the point that if we had nuclear weapons, the cost of killing per man, woman and child would be cheaper than conventional warfare”. Clohesy added that Titterton’s notes included the actual prices.

On a similar topic, Stephen Schwartz found that US Army Lieutenant General James M. Gavin had told Congress in 1957 that to win a nuclear war, the United States would need 151,000 nuclear weapons. Also on the topic of calculating deaths, Pépé Roswaldy came across a Dutch colonial magazine promoting native land resettlement in Indonesia in the 1930s (which resulted in a number of deaths) and reporting an officer as saying: “The death number is just okay, nothing unusual.”

There were also more gruesome discoveries. Gabe Moshenska told of finding a description by famous Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson of “his own diseased penis” in the papers of Thomas Pettigrew at Yale. Narrelle Morris mentioned an encounter in the National Archives of Australia with “a rusty razor that a Japanese suspected war criminal tried to commit suicide with”, stating: “I drew it to the archivist’s attention.”

The profound

There were also the surprising finds that were of particular importance to the historians and to our understanding of the past. Becky Erbelding from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum came across the only known photos of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when a photo album was sent to the museum.

Peter Job told of a document that Indonesian intelligence provided to an Australian diplomat in Jakarta in 1975. This document, Job explains, was a list of members of Fretilin, the East Timorese independence group, to be targeted after an Indonesian invasion. Job argues that this “[s]hows level of pre-invasion complicity” by Australia.

For Adam Rothman, it was an 1866 US Senate report on “rumors that newly freed people in the US were being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Cuba and Brazil”. This led to Rothman writing a whole book based on this realisation.

Other historians also revealed that a chance find led them to new research projects. For example, Anna Hájková heard of a story of a forced relationship between a German women’s guard and a young female prisoner during the final year of the second world war. Intrigued by a tale from an oral history recording, Hájková developed this story into a ground-breaking work of queer history.

These are only a few of the many stories that people revealed in reply to my tweet. As we do research into the past, historians are often confronted or surprised by what we come across. Some findings can be amusing titbits on the side of our research. Others greatly shift our knowledge of certain events or people.

Nearly every historian has a story of a research find that made them pause and, via Twitter, we were able to hear of so many.

Evan Smith, Research Fellow in History, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ray-Ban Stories let you wear Facebook on your face. But why would you want to?

In partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban, Facebook has released its first pair of smart glasses, offering wearers the ability to capture photos and videos without even needing to pull out their phone.

The glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories, are now available for A$449 and are functionally similar to devices already on the market, such as SnapChat Spectacles. They allow users to capture images and video and upload them to their social media accounts, via an app called Facebook View.

Users will be able to share content on Facebook and other Facebook-owned platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as non-Facebook apps such as Twitter, TikTok and SnapChat. Besides two 5-megapixel cameras, the glasses have three microphones and built-in speakers, so they can respond to voice commands and also be used for calls.

The glasses are the latest step in Facebook’s initiative to develop wearable tech. As chief executive Mark Zuckerberg puts it, such devices represent “a future where phones are no longer a central part of our lives”.

It’s not augmented reality (yet)

Facebook has stressed the glasses do not have any augmented reality (AR) functionality – that is, the ability to overlay one’s view of the physical world with digital images.

That said, during his product launch video, Zuckerberg presents the glasses as a stepping-stone to more fully realised forms of wearable AR — something Facebook has repeatedly hinted at over the past few years. As he puts it, “glasses are going to be an important part of building the next computing platform”.

With its 2014 acquisition of virtual reality (VR) company Oculus – and numerous other startups in areas such as computer vision – Facebook’s VR and AR development wing, Facebook Reality Labs, has grown so much it now reportedly employs 20% of Facebook’s workforce.

As we argued in a recent paper, Facebook sees AR and VR as a central component of its future, and envisions this technology having a similar impact to the mobile computing revolution of the past decade or so.

This was most recently exemplified in the company’s framing of its social software and hardware in terms of the “metaverse” — a seamless blending of the real and virtual worlds.

Read more: What is the metaverse? A high-tech plan to Facebookify the world

These future computing platforms might look something like the company’s announcement of Project Aria — an internal Facebook research project testing the viability of wearable AR smart glasses. Facebook has also been attempting to further integrate AR features into its Oculus VR technology.

One problem for prospective users is that these technologies will require intensive data capture and processing of our bodies, homes and other intimate data.

‘Designed with privacy in mind’

Even without AR functionality, there are still clear privacy concerns associated with a Facebook device that can record whatever you’re looking at.

Perhaps attempting to pre-empt a backlash, Facebook has developed a dedicated privacy policy for the new technology, assuring us:

Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and Facebook View are ads-free experiences, so you won’t see ads when using the glasses or app. And we don’t use the content of your photos and videos for personalised ads. If you share content to any other app, that app’s terms will apply.

But as with previous forms of smart glasses, such as the widely derided Google Glass, the main privacy issue isn’t protecting yourself from unwanted ads, but protecting other people from being surreptitiously recorded.

Ray-Ban Stories features a small light on the side of the frame, which is illuminated when recording. But it can easily be covered over, and while this would violate Facebook’s terms of service, it’s hard to see how Facebook would realistically stop anyone doing it.

Ultimately, Facebook has put the onus on users to behave responsibly. As outlined in the Stories privacy page, Facebook’s suggested “best practices” include not using the device in private spaces, and advising users not to “engage in harmful activities”. (Facebook’s responsible innovation principles for its AR development staff are similarly vague.)

What does Facebook expect to achieve?

Smart glasses have always been a tricky sell. Google Glass was an abject commercial failure because of privacy concerns. Despite being just down the road from Silicon Valley, some bars in San Francisco reportedly banned anyone wearing them, and some residents even reacted with violence.

Given this ignominious track record, what is Facebook hoping to achieve here? We believe — based on Facebook’s broader investments in VR and AR technologies — the ultimate aim is to gradually normalise wearable surveillance technology many people currently have deep and understandable reservations about.

Read more: Shadow profiles - Facebook knows about you, even if you're not on Facebook

By branding them as a Ray-Ban product rather than a Facebook one, with classic styling rather than a high-tech look, and able to upload to many different social media platforms, the company is trying to sell us on the concept of “smart glasses”, rather than “Facebook glasses”. But if video Ray-Bans become mainstream, who knows what other data-intensive gadgets are lurking just around the corner?

Ben Egliston, Postdoctoral research fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology and Marcus Carter, Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures, SOAR Fellow., University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bringing woolly mammoths back from extinction might not be such a bad idea — ethicists explain

US startup Colossal Biosciences has announced plans to bring woolly mammoths, or animals like them, back from extinction and into the frosty landscape of the Siberian tundra.

Colossal has received US$15 million in initial funds to support research conducted by Harvard geneticist George Church, among other work. The proposed project is exciting, with laudable ambitions — but whether it is a practical strategy for conservation remains unclear.

Colossal proposes to use CRISPR gene editing technology to modify Asian elephant embryos (the mammoth’s closest living relative) so their genomes resemble those of woolly mammoths.

Read more: What is CRISPR, the gene editing technology that won the Chemistry Nobel prize?

These embryos could then theoretically develop into elephant-mammoth hybrids (mammophants), with the appearance and behaviour of extinct mammoths. According to Colossal, the ultimate aim is to release herds of these mammophants into the Arctic, where they will fill the ecological niche mammoths once occupied.

When mammoths disappeared from the Arctic some 4,000 years ago, shrubs overtook what was previously grassland. Mammoth-like creatures could help restore this ecosystem by trampling shrubs, knocking over trees, and fertilising grasses with their faeces.

Theoretically, this could help reduce climate change. If the current Siberian permafrost melts, it will release potent greenhouse gases. Compared to tundra, grassland might reflect more light and keep the ground cooler, which Colossal hopes will prevent the permafrost from melting.

While the prospect of reviving extinct species has long been discussed by groups such as Revive and Restore, advances in genome editing have now brought such dreams close to reality. But just because we have the tools to resurrect mammoth-like creatures, does this mean we should?

A cause worth considering

De-extinction is a controversial field. Critics have referred to such practices as “playing god” and accused scientists in favour of de-extinction of hubris.

A common worry is that bringing back extinct species, whose ecological niches may no longer exist, will upset existing ecosystems. But when it comes to mammophants, this critique lacks bite.

Colossal says it aims to recreate the steppe ecosystem (a large, flat grassland) that flourished in Siberia until about 12,000 years ago. It has been estimated the total mass of plants and animals in Siberia’s tundra is now 100-fold less than when it was a steppe.

Simply, this ecosystem is already compromised, and it’s hard to see how reintroducing mammophants would lead to further damage.

Reintroducing species can transform ecosystems for the better. A well-known example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, which started a cascade of positive changes for local flora and fauna. Mammophants may do the same.

Furthermore, climate change is one of the great moral challenges of our time. The melting of the Siberian permafrost is expected to accelerate climate change and exacerbate ecological disaster.

This is such a serious problem that even ambitious projects with a low probability of success can be ethically justified. Often our moral intuitions are clouded when considering new technologies and interventions.

But technologies which originally seemed scary and unnatural can slowly become accepted and valued. One tool that is sometimes used to overcome these tendencies is called the reversal test, which was originally developed by Oxford philosophers Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord as a way to tackle status quo bias.

This test involves assuming the new thing already exists, and the novel proposal is to take it away. Imagine an endangered population of mammophants currently inhabits Siberia, where it plays an important role in maintaining the ecosystem and protecting the permafrost.

Few would argue attempts to save these mammophants are “unethical”. So if we would welcome efforts to save them in this hypothetical scenario, we should also welcome efforts to introduce them in real life.

So according to the reversal test, the key ethical objections to Colossal’s project should not relate to its aims, but rather to its means.

The main ethical concerns

Let’s look at two ethical concerns related to de-extinction. The first is that de-extinction could distract from more cost-effective efforts to protect biodiversity or mitigate climate change. The second relates to the possible moral hazards that may arise if people start believing extinction is not forever.

1. Opportunity costs

Some critics of de-extinction projects hold that while de-extinction may be an admirable goal, in practice it constitutes a waste of resources. Even if newly engineered mammophants contain mammoth DNA, there is no guarantee these hybrids will adopt the behaviours of ancient mammoths.

For instance, we inherit more than just DNA sequences from our parents. We inherit epigenetic changes, wherein the environment around us can affect how those genes are regulated. We also inherit our parents’ microbiome (colonies of gut bacteria), which plays an important role in our behaviours.

Also important are the behaviours animals learn from observing other members of their species. The first mammophants will have no such counterparts to learn from.

And even if de-extinction programs are successful, they will likely cost more than saving existing species from extinction. The programs might be a poor use of resources, especially if they attract funding that could have otherwise gone to more promising projects.

The opportunity costs of de-extinction should be carefully scrutinised. As exciting as it may be to see herds of wild mammophants, we shouldn’t let this vision distract us from more cost-effective projects.

That said, we also shouldn’t rule out de-extinction technologies altogether. The costs will eventually come down. In the meantime, some highly expensive projects might be worth considering.

2. Broader implications for conservation

The second concern is more subtle. Some environmentalists argue once de-extinction becomes possible, the need to protect species from extinction will seem less urgent. Would we still worry about preventing extinctions if we can just reverse them at a later date?

Personally, however, we are not convinced by these concerns. Extinction is currently irreversible, yet humans continue to drive an era of mass extinction that shows no sign of slowing. In other words, moving towards increasing extinctions is the status quo, and this status quo is not worth preserving.

Also, de-extinction is not the only conservation strategy that seeks to undo otherwise irreversible losses. For example, “rewilding” involves reintroducing locally-extinct species into an ecosystem it once inhabited. If we welcome these efforts — and we should — then we should also welcome novel strategies to restore lost species and damaged ecosystems.

Read more: WHO guidelines on human genome editing: why countries need to follow them

Julian Koplin, Resarch Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, Melbourne Law School and Murdoch Children's Research Institute, The University of Melbourne and Christopher Gyngell, Research Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.