In last week’s New York Times, an editorial board with a bit less to mull over between election night and inauguration took a stand on one our generation’s most overlooked issues: should we or should we not resurrect a wooly mammoth? Hold on to your butts, kids—Jurassic Park is becoming a reality.

The op-ed board took a vague opposition to the resurrection on the grounds that the big lug would get lonely. And he’d be such a freak in our world of non-prehistoric creatures. It was all very Mary Shelley. But the paper’s final point is a bit paradoxical: the Times feels that the wooly mammoth would be facing similar global climate conditions to those that wiped him out in the first place. Oh, the irony! Are we just as bad as the dinosaurs?

But from a more optimistic perspective, perhaps resurrecting the wooly mammoth might serve as a symbolic antidote to scientific woes. If this time around we can make dead dinosaurs come to life, what will we think of next? So, resurrecting the wooly mammoth: a) hopeful? b) weird and depressing? or c) totally fucking irrelevant? All of the above, perhaps. All of the above.

Photo by Flickr user Walter Parenteau used under the Creative Commons