This is really cool, and I would love to bring back extinct and near-extinct creatures. Thing is it’s pointless if we live in a world that continually threatens their existence. What’s the point of a wooly mammoth if people just want to mount its head on a wall? And at this point it will pretty much have to live in captivity because I can’t see how introducing them into the modern wild isn’t the same as potentially introducing an invasive species.
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There are parts of the world that naturally had mammoths until just a few thousand years ago though. We’re kind of the invasives there. If we still had a real population of mammoths somewhere, complete with all the things like microbiomes and parental instruction people are pointing out are missing, I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to talk about reintroducing them other places.
Ok, I know they were a part of healthy North American ecosystems, but bringing back rocky mountain locusts is one I might actually be a little concerned about.
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I’d just be happy with thylacines.
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The whole set of arguments about extinctions is based on wanting to keep the world the way it is now, with techy side quests into cloning. But the world is always about change. Trying to minimize or repair the environment that humans have done over the last few hundred years is a necessary goal for humans to be able to continue our continued current lifestyles. Trying to fix the environment in a static state is impossible-beavers create new types of habiats just by doing their thing. Corals do the same, anchoring ocean communities. Even tree populations shift and change.
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The world is always about gradual change. Right now it is also experiencing abrupt changes of the sort normally reserved for the catastrophes that mark geological eras. Compared to the things we’ve been causing, everything else might as well be static – it’s not like new species can arise in the span of a few centuries to replace the ones we’re losing.
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Thylacines would likely be a bigger challenge than mammoths even though they went extinct more recently because we have close relatives of mammoths that could serve as surrogate mothers.
Elephants and mammoths diverged around 6 million years ago, but the closest living relative of the thylacine is the Tasmanian Devil which is part of a genus that diverged from Thylacines around 40+ million years ago. That’s about as close a relation as a New World Monkey is to a human being.
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Does “ethics of cloning extinct animals” need to go on the list too?
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I’m glad some good is coming from what seems to be a stunt or vanity project. it’s just frustrating to see this kind of thing and know all that money could be used for something imminently useful and advance science at the same time. But hey, humans are a disappointing species 
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Done!
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No one is trying to bring them back, but there is some disagreement on whether Rocky Mountain locusts are actually extinct. The only difference between them and the current species is the lack of swarms, which makes for some really interesting questions. If there was a genetic change that caused them to stop swarming, maybe we could then prevent swarms in other locust species. There is precedence in other locusts of separate swarming and non-swarming populations of a species, but currently no one knows why
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Oh sure. Rain on my fantasy with your facts
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Oh, hell, @chenille, you’ve got the locust scientist thinking now! Somehow this will all be your fault! 
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Is it wrong to say that at this point I would take an apocalypse brought on by hubris and playing god instead of just boring old greed? Like at least Hammond (movie version) was blinded by wanting something cool.
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Depends on who is preaching the ethics. There are plenty of ethical positons that are without value.
That’s still hubris and playing god, just a different motivation for hubris and playing god.
… maybe they can do some of these giraffe-rhinos
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The solution is obvious: clone more cloning scientists.
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