This Is Gonna Get Hairy

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have exciting news. The future is now. Or the past is now. It's kind of hard to get the right conjugation when we're talking about virtual time travel. Taking a page from Michael Crichton (get it, cause he's a writer), Russian and South Korean scientists have teamed up to bring a woolly mammoth back to life. They plan on cloning embryos from frozen woolly mammoths and implanting them into live elephants.

Its woolly ain't it?

This will result in the most confusing live-birth of all time. I have sympathy for the future mother of the first woolly mammoth in nearly five thousand years. She's expecting a normal healthy baby elephant, only to find that the child she's been carrying for 22 months is hairier than Robin Williams. I imagine this will lead to the first elephant divorce.
The big question in all this is why? Why do we want to bring back woolly mammoths? Are they known for their delicious flavor? Are they more fuel-efficient than a Prius? Can their wool be made into terrific sweaters to sell in Ireland? Do they make good pets? Can a woolly mammoth be house trained? I can keep going with the questions.
I think this is an example of scientists doing science for the sake of science. They're doing it just to see if they can. I applaud the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake, but there are a couple flaws in this plan. First of all, because its being implanted and gestating in an elephant, it won't be a pure woolly mammoth. It'll be half woolly mammoth. It won't be woolly, so much as it will cottony. We can still expect it to be big, but I think it'll be much softer and friendlier.

The young Woolly Meatloaf

More important are the potential risks involved in unleashing such a creature on the world. First there's the obvious risk of an increase in wool allergies. Mammoth wool is full of allergens. I assume. But there's also the bigger risk of a woolly mammoth rebellion. Resentful at having been forced back into existence, woolly mammoths will rise up and crush their trainers, leading eventually to the Mammoth Massacre of 2029. 

Not to fear though, the US Navy is already preparing for this eventuality. Following on the heels of the recently unveiled heat ray, the US Naval Research Laboratory is in the development stage of a grenade-throwing robot. Though it is clearly more useful in other applications (fighting rogue woolly mammoths), this new death machine is being designed to fight shipboard fires. SAFFiR, or Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, will be equipped with cameras, gas and smoke sensors, and fire-suppressing grenades. A fire-suppressing grenade sounds about as useful as a surgical battleaxe, but I'm not a military scientist. 

So after, the rampaging woolly mammoths have been dealt with by the grenade throwing robots, all we have to do is hope the grenade-bots don't become self aware. Though I have no doubt that DARPA is already working on something to fight the self aware grenade-bots. Perhaps by then the world will finally be ready for dogs that shoot bees when they bark.

First try. Needs more dog, less bee