The conventional wisdom regarding technology is that it is enormously destructive to life on Earth. Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson, for example, recently wrote that human intelligence is "a misfortune for the living world," and a chart accompanying his New York Times Magazine article adds that "scientists fear that species are being eradicated at thousands of times the pace that new ones are created."
Whether or not this fear is justied, it misses the point. Technology is more than pollution and the cutting down of rain forests; it is also bio- engineering, and the possibility of actually reclaiming living organisms lost to the Earth long before the appearance of people and technology.
Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park explores this possibility, but from the negative perspective of monstrous dinosaurs brought back to life from fossilized DNA. This negativity is not surprising - science ction has by and large turned its back on the sunny side of the future. And much polemic writing about genetic engineering - such as Jeremy Rifkin's Algeny - has painted scenarios of killer bacteria emerging from profit-hungry gene labs to ravage an unsuspecting population. But clearly the same genetic reconstruction that could bring back dangerous creatures could also retrieve the sweetest flower that blushed unseen and died eons ago, as long as enough of its DNA survived.
This means that extinction isn't what it used to be - it may be going the way of the dodo. Whereas extinction once meant gone for good, now the possibility of DNA recreation means that the complete loss of all physically living organisms need not be irreversible.
Theorists - both current and throughout the ages - have always understood this: The culture of the Sumerians is not entirely lost, as long as their writing survives.
Of course, the translation of DNA code into a living species is much more complicated, and the recovery of an extinct species's DNA is much like the discovery of a computer disk from the ancient 1970s: Unless we have a working machine into which we can put the computer disk, its programming will go unimplemented. But the good news about the natural biological world - in contrast to the much-limited technological world of our own creation - is that it teems with many living things that run on DNA, many models into which the appropriate disks of ancient DNA might be successfully inserted. In the case of dinosaurs, the Jurassic Park model of extinct saurian DNA inserted into the living DNA of frogs is certainly plausible - though as yet we haven't recovered nearly enough dinosaur DNA to turn a frog embryo into a Tyrannosaurus.
But limitations in current physical resources are often insignicant in science and technology, where opportunities in theory are sooner or later fullled. Snatching extinction from extinction through DNA reclamation points toward an achievement of immortality based not on individual survival, or even the physical survival of species, but rather on the survival of hot biological information that can drive the programs and mechanisms of life. Heaven may well be a huge directory of DNA codes, and coming back from the dead - as far as a species goes - may be as simple as nding the right place in which to insert that code.
