this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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[–] Lugh@futurology.today 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

People often talk about declining human demographics, but they rarely consider growing new humans artificially as a means of dealing with it. As nightmarish as it sounds, maybe that day is nearer than we think. Israeli scientists have already grown mammal embryos outside the womb to half their gestation period. If you have cloned embryos of "perfect" humans, perhaps growing them at scale outside the womb is nearer than we think.

[–] mobius_slip 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

With all due respect, you couldn't explain this possible future in a single paragraph without using the term "'perfect' humans". This illustrates the extremely slippery slope of how it probably isn't a good idea to do this en masse because we're already dehumanizing them by thinking about them as a source of societal output or deifying them as some weird, eugenics influenced super race.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 months ago

That's actually pretty horrifying in many different ways. God help us all.

[–] Espiritdescali@futurology.today 4 points 10 months ago

I can see the rich pouring money into this tech to grow organs for themselves. The clones would need to be segregated though, as otherwise there might be issues with property rights etc. They could be put on an island, the rich have a few spare I'm sure. We could tell the clones that the rest of the world was too damaged for humans to live there. It would need to be hidden perhaps as there would be moral outrage if it was discovered the clones were intended to have organs harvested from them. God help then if one of the clones escapes though.

Wait, no, thats the plot to The Island with Ewan McGregor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

God help us all

[–] Endward23@futurology.today 1 points 9 months ago

As far as I remembered, the problem with eg. Dolly was that we doesn't know enough about epigenetics. Time change and we are on a more sophisticated, still far away from perfect, level.