Apparently, based on contemporary accounts, opinion was varied, but they were meaty and easy to catch. A bit of selective breeding would probably make them ideal poultry farm animals.
But nowhere near as captivating for media soundbites and news posts. The dodo is one very symbolic bird and just about everyone recognizes it right away.
If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.
"But crypto is a terrible idea. People who violate banking regulations are criminals, Why do we need cash? I pay for everything with my card, it's sooo convenient!" Say many naval-gazing, privileged people on this very site who've never had to deal with the grotesquely regular bullshit of third world banking and government finance...
Get "canceled" in your own work or social sphere, or in social media in a way that filters down to your work or social sphere for saying, writing, being recorded doing (or saying) something that doesn't fit the dominant ideological narrative of modern culture, and maybe you'll rapidly find out just why and how some people get scared of cancel culture. Sure, Stalinist show trials or Maoist purges these things in our modern western world certainly are not, but examples abound and in a non-lethal modern context, they can be very damaging indeed.
Second this recommendation. I loved Contagion, and watching it during the early days of our own very real recent pandemic put a whole new spin to an already great film.
Deep Impact doesn't quite deserve a place with the others. Its depiction of an asteroid impact and many other things is surprisingly realistic considering the source material.
If the magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, completely, as it did on Mars at one point, it would take literally billions of years for our atmosphere to totally degrade away. It would take at least tens of millions for it to degrade appreciably. The magnetosphere of Mars failed just 500 million years after our red neighbor formed, and even after the several billion intervening years, and after having started with much less overall atmospheric bulk than Earth, Mars still has some atmosphere left (very little to be sure, but we're talking about billions of years of being bathed in solar wind and radiation). In other words, if our magnetosphere disappeared tomorrow, you likely wouldn't have to worry about major atmospheric failure for many generations of your family's lives.
Caveat: Even with the atmosphere fully present, the magnetosphere does indeed stop many charged particles that a gas barrier does not, and this would definitely be an immediate problem to surface life to some extent (how much is debatable however). We'd also be much more susceptible to electronic and electrical grid damage caused by a much larger percentage of solar storms that would have previously been too weak to do much because of our giant magnetic shield..
Yes, our magnetosphere has had extended periods (~hundreds of years) of being in a weakened state without disrupting all life on Earth. Our empirical evidence on the size of the impact is limited, mostly due to how long ago it was. It was a big enough impact that it did leave evidence.
It's not an humanity destroying event, but it is a big stressor on a world already going through a lot.
The very idea of art becoming "outdated" because of changing political and social norms is absurd. Even if most of us no longer share the sentiments behind a piece of human cultural history or its creators, doesn't mean we should reject it as a part of our history or not be able to appreciate something of it at the very least for reasons of historical learning. A vast proportion of history's most interesting thinkers, creators and writers were full of flaws that in some cases would today be considered literally criminal, should they be erased from modern appreciation because of this foolish idea of "outdated"?
For many of them, not even that. Is Socrates outdated, or Thomas Jefferson? How about Picasso? The first of these is widely believed to have been what we would today call a pedophile (this being common in his culture and time), the second was a slave owner and the third was an abusive, jealous womanizer.
Or how about Gone with the Wind itself: The novel and book deal with many universal themes of families, love and human ties being destroyed and deformed by terrible circumstances outside of individual control. Many, many victims of political and social tragedy from any time in history right to the present can easily identify with that central concept without being completely blinded into flippant, fashionable woke dismissal by focusing only on the type of society portrayed in the book and film. The movie's central emotional drama is nearly universal to human history. This is why it was so enormously popular, and its central emotional concept still is today.
A certain site that has the words "The" "pirate", "bay" and org in its URL. It's where a friend of a friend that I know through a second cousin stumbled upon their frequently used copy of Office 2007 (and quite a few other things)...