Billionaire Wants To Build A Robotic Jurassic Park

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

jurassic-park-3dYou can’t help but feel that you’ve been through this before, or perhaps you’ve at least seen this scenario play out in a movie somewhere. An Australian billionaire named Clive Palmer plans to build a pair of massive theme parks and populate said parks with hundreds of dinosaurs. That’s the record scratch moment. Did Jurassic Park teach us nothing? This sort of experiment is destined to fail, miserably, and most likely to the detriment of the tourists and park goers.

We can calm the hysterics here for a moment. Palmer hasn’t developed some newfangled scientific method for cloning the long extinct reptiles. Instead the main attraction will be robotic dinosaurs. Palmer Coolum Resort in Brisbane, Australia will house up to 165 of them by the time it is finished. And Palmer has already placed an order for 117 of the animatronic specimens for a park in China, including the 22 foot tall Mamenchiasaurus, the 1.2 ton Brachiosaurus, and an Aptosaurus, which tops out at 68 feet in length.

A similar question presents itself, did we learn nothing from Westworld? Or even the episode of The Simpsons where they go to Itchy and Scratchy land and the machines run amok? This is destined to go off the rails and result in herds of mechanical dinosaurs rampaging around, scooping up and swallowing entire families.

Palmer made his money in mining, digging things out of the middle of the Earth, and between that and the fact that he’s worth billions of dollars, you get the impression that he doesn’t hear the word no very often. In addition to creating his own version of John Hammond’s ill fated Jurassic Park, this is a guy who also recently announced that he’s going to build an exact replica of the Titanic. Obviously named Titanic II, Palmer plans to follow the exact rout taken by the original, ideally without plowing into an iceberg, sinking, and killing everyone on board.