this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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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.
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?
Do you know how high the animal can jump? Do you know whether or not they'll be able to climb those rods?
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.
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.