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Large Wildlife Collider

Strap magnets to big organisms and fire them towards each other
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You may recall the Monty Python sketch involving a mouse organ, where mice were trained to squeak at different notes and their tails were then hit with hammers in order to produce a melody. A demonstration of said keyboard was swiftly interrupted by a swarm of irate audience members who pursued the miscreant relentlessly. I can't remember if the sketch ended or how it did, if it did. I hereby pre-empt a similar reaction to this.

Also, I really, really miss Pina Collider.

This is not the kind of thing a vegan should think. Nevertheless I have, and it can be made vegan.

There is a nature reserve in Greater London referred to as the London Wetland Centre, and it' sounds really good. However, it can be abbreviated to LWC, which appears at first glance to stand for Large Wildlife Collider. This could be done. I'm not saying it should be done, merely that it could be.

In order to construct the Large Wildlife Collider, a hitherto relatively unspoilt corner of Greater London must be cleared and replaced by two linear induction railguns facing each other. A pair of large organisms should then be magnetised in some way, perhaps by giving them malaria, tattooing them all over with iron-based inks or implanting large subcutaneous lumps of iron. They should then be placed in evacuated tunnels in the railgun and accelerated towards each other at speed until they collide at the centre to produce a hybrid organism.

Examples:

A sheep at one end and a kangaroo at the other could be electromagnetically combined to produce, well, a woolly jumper.

A parrot and a cat could be fired at each other to produce either a carrot or a pat.

A blue whale and a redwood tree could be shot at each other to produce a purplewood treewhale.

Two cats could be propelled towards each other to please [8th of 7]. Possibly a lion and a tiger because after all this is a _large_ wildlife collider.

Ah well [nineteenthly], I hear you say, this idea is not very vegan at all is it? In fact it's decidedly non-vegan. This is true and it worries me somewhat. Therefore I propose a solution: only do it with non-animals or cadavers of animals, perhaps recently killed. Send people out to observe megafauna which is about to die, then airlift it to the LWC, tattoo it appropriately and twang it into a tree proceeding rapidly towards it in the opposite direction.

If the creatures concerned are merely brain-dead, it would be possible to investigate the results of combining their anatomy suddenly in order to see their immune systems fighting it out until only one survives, rather like Robot Wars.

Alternatively, non-animal matter could be involved, so maybe an enormous colony of honey fungus could be catapulted towards that colony of sea grass in the Mediterranean. In certain circumstances, the individual cells of the organisms concerned could become combined in such a way as to produce a mosaic or chimera of two different species, and if the species are sufficiently invasive and non-animal, fewer people would see this as cruel.

I suspect the most successful results would be achieved by the combination of sponges and other extremely soft organisms such as slime moulds. Apparently there's a sponge the size of a van off the coast of Hawai`i, so if two sponges around that size of different species could be found, this would be instructive. Also, a slime mould and a sponge would be genuinely interesting, perhaps a freshwater sponge.

Alternatively, maybe we should just shoot dinosaur fossils.

nineteenthly, Mar 02 2017

Mouse Organ https://www.youtube...watch?v=_OXfAPPckQU
Reminiscent of this [nineteenthly, Mar 02 2017]

[link]






       // a hitherto relatively unspoilt corner of Greater London //   

       <bafflement>   

       [+] for the idea of firing two cats at one another at a substantial fraction of C (even tho it's not a new concept).
8th of 7, Mar 02 2017
  

       Using biolistics to transform plants is a well-established method, so it stands to reason that something like what you're suggesting should work for generating hybrid animal species.
Cuit_au_Four, Mar 02 2017
  

       Fire two horses together and measure the temperature rise to get a conclusive definition of 1HP.   

       [+]
EnochLives, Mar 02 2017
  

       Hmm, it occurs to me that one horsepower has been considerably underestimated because it doesn't take E=mc^2 into account.
nineteenthly, Mar 02 2017
  

       Lord have mercy on us.
blissmiss, Mar 02 2017
  
      
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