Book: Jurassic Park

[MightyDavidson]

And that's not even considering that their immune systems would be 65million years out of date, compared to modern viruses & bacteria.

Presumably the genetic engineering would take care of that. They're not ancient beasts poofed back to life with magic or something, they're cloned and if the cloning is good enough to ensure all the dinos are female, it's good enough to make sure they can survive in a modern environment.

[J!!]

Yeah, and it could also explain away the oxygen problem, or hand-wave away anything inconsistent with later discoveries (ex: lack of feathers).

My point was less the technical problem, and more that those sorts of details tend to get forgotten when thinking about the sorts of things. It's what separates something like Star Trek from something like The Expanse.

[stellar_coyote]

I remember reading Jurassic Park for the first time as a senior in high school, it became one of those rare cases where I preferred the movie to the book.

When asked why the response went something like this:
"Remember those little speeches Jeff Goldblum gave in the movie?"
"Yeah."
"Imagine them going on for pages."

[CareerKnight]

Oh, and ''its a Unix system!'' Anyone else notice how many films and TV shows back in the '90s had to have some kid in it who could hack computers? And how often it always seemed to involve rapid and random tapping on a keyboard in front of some nonsense graphic?

Hitting random buttons on the keyboard (which still hasn't gone away fully) is the new "shake the steering wheel back and forth so people know you're driving" in movies.

Something Chuck hasn't mentioned is that it's questionable whether a hypothetical cloned dinosaur could even survive in the modern earth's atmosphere, which has a significantly lower O2 content than they evolved to breath.

The period of excessive oxygen in the atmosphere leading to larger insects was millions of years before the Dinosaurs. Insects during their time were about the same size as today so I don't think the level of o2 would be any problem for them.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I remember reading Jurassic Park for the first time as a senior in high school, it became one of those rare cases where I preferred the movie to the book.

When asked why the response went something like this:
"Remember those little speeches Jeff Goldblum gave in the movie?"
"Yeah."
"Imagine them going on for pages."

Jurassic Park is the epitome of a movie outshining a book.

[Archanubis]

Bonus video!

https://youtu.be/bVznKZzPncI

[AndrewGPaul]

Dammit, Chuck, not only did I replicate your Excel chart*, but I’ve just spent ages showing that that function should flip back and forth between (5 +- sqrt(5) ) / 8. Took me ages because I kept cooking up by getting a sign wrong, or making a mistake when expanding the terms.

*clever of you to stop at 40 iterations before that chart goes wrong. by the way, Excel can only handle fifteen decimal places. Also, if you make the formula for the initial x =ROUND((5 + SQRT(5) )/ 8, C1) then you can play about with the effect of the precision of the initial conditions by simply changing a number in cell C1.

[ComHop]

While I preferred few aspects of the book over the movie (mostly a more flushed out Nedry and Muldoon surviving), I thought the movie was better overall. The book had a few oddities.

Muldoon running around with a rocket launcher (an M72 LAW if I remember correctly) was the oddest part in my memory. A rocket launcher would be fairly low on a list of weapons you would want to deal when dealing animals for dozens of reasons (possibly the T-Rex being an exception but its was tranquilized anyways). Even odder that Hammond would only allow tranquilizers and a rocket launcher as the two options. Not tranquilizers and a hunting rifle, or a shotgun, or an assault rifle, or a battle rifle. A rocket launcher. Also who would allow an obstinately "biological preserve" to have an anti-tank weapon from either legal or security perspective.
(Also the Costa Rica has had a military since the 40's)

[AndrewGPaul]

I liked the scenes with the ‘ raptors towards the end. Some of that came back - along with other scenes from the book that didn’t make it into the the third film.

I didn’t read the book until several years after I saw the film, though. The only Crichton I’d read before then was The Andromeda Strain. I don’t think I connected the two, really.

[Les]

One bit I remember from the book that filled me with later incredulity was Ian's declaration that 'the Internet', "Would destroy the future of scientific, intellectual and philosophical progress."

Why? Because progress requires revolutionary thought and revolutionary thought requires thinking outside of the established orthodoxy, which of course can only happen literally Outside that orthodoxy. With instant global communication once a new field opens an Orthodoxy will immediately establish itself and humans being social animals of course everyone will adopt that orthodoxy and the field will inevitably stagnate....

...because human people only disagree on hows/whats/wheres/whens/whys when they don't know any better and instantly agree when they all get to talking to each other.