EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the Portland Mercury‘s Dinosaur Editor, Elinor Jones, decided to go visit the REAL Jurassic World! Then she decided not to. Then she decided that she really should. But maybe not? If you too are considering vacationing at Jurassic World, we hope Jones’ points and counterpoints will be of use.
There’s an exciting place called Jurassic World where people can go and play with dinosaurs! Should I go?! I have been thinking a lot about whether or not I should go.
I mean, where else can you see real dinosaurs? If I wanted to see still-dead dinosaurs, I’d go digging around in Montana. Boring!
Of course, it’s possible that humans weren’t meant to see real-life dinosaurs. Mother nature nestled millions of years between their existence and ours. Dinosaurs bones and computer imaginings are cool enough on their own.
No, they’re not! They’re boring!! We all know they’re boring. Since dinosaurs exist again, I must pet them, or possibly even ride them.
Then again, dinosaurs have been awfully… chompy. People have died. A lot of people.
But of course they have! Dinosaurs and humans have never lived together before; reintroduction was bound to be a challenge, and when have us humans ever backed down from a challenge? Airplanes could have been really hazardous if done wrong (you’d fall from the sky!) but we made them safe with our human brains. And now we use planes all the time. To go to cool places. Like JURASSIC FREAKING WORLD.
But it’s so unnecessarily dangerous! I do my best to stay away from animals that could kill me.
Snakes kill hundreds of people a day throughout the world and we still put them in captivity and smush our ugly faces up against a half-inch of glass with the expectation of survival. In fact-checking the most dangerous non-human, non-parasitic living thing, I learned that upwards of a million people per year are killed by animals. You could be trampled by a cow in boring-ass Oregon! May as well go to Jurassic World and get nibbled on by something cool.
UGH, now I have to be afraid of freaking cows?! Look, I just want to live my life without challenging Mother Nature or being mauled to death by something whose instincts I don’t fully respect. It’s enough to worry about bears and snakes and cows. Maybe I really don’t need to pet a goddamn dinosaur.
Although the dinosaurs aren’t just for petting. They’re also being engineered by evil corporations into super-dino killing machines!
Okay, that’s got to be a bad idea!
Or is it the best idea? Thanks to all our DNA-meddling, these days dinosaurs are basically a human invention, so using them in warfare is really no different from using a drone. And it’s better to make a raptor assassin than using a li’l baby lion cub! Maybe if dinosaurs didn’t want to go to war they’d have evolved to look cuter playing in a cardboard box. And using raptor assassins is way better than using people. People are people, with moms.
If dinosaurs are the sames as drones, why isn’t there a Drones World? And DINOSAURS HAVE MOMS! Remember the T-Rex mom who was super protective of her baby that one time in San Diego?
Plus, It’s been a long time since John Hammond’s first attempt at a dinosaur theme park. The first Jurassic Park he built was 25 years ago! I’m sure they’ve ironed out the kinks by now. For one, they’ve replaced the open-air Jeeps with gigantic glass hamster orbs. Surely those are safer!
The kinks that they needed to iron out were people kept getting eaten by dinosaurs. Those hamster balls cannot possibly be safe. For one, they don’t have wheels, which we all know are T-Rex biting decoys.
But………………….. I wonder if dinosaurs taste good?!?
I’m a bad person. Maybe I should be eaten by a dinosaur.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Elinor Jones decided to visit Jurassic World. She died.
