CRISPR and other tools aren’t science fiction anymore. If the wealthy get there first, what happens to everyone else?
Shhh!
You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud!
Just keep pretending our societies are equitable.
As someone suffering from a terrible genetic disease that will kill me soon, any amount of preventing these diseases under any circumstances gets a thumbs up from me.
Yeah, I think we should probably allow the technology that will prevent people being born with these diseases first, and then worry about how we’re going to deal with the other stuff. This technology isn’t going to be possible to hold back indefinitely anyway.
Sadly, the most probable future cloning related would be Gattaca
We need to make CRISPR as easy as 3D printing. Open source genetic modification.
Sure, we’ll get lunatics making doomsday viruses in their basement, but also other lunatics designing vaccines for them you can make with your own desktop bioreactor.
More importantly, we’ll also get people turning themselves into catgirls.
Screw cyberpunk; biopunk’s where it’s at.
Naw I think its wetware.
Eh. Climate Change is gonna ruin those plans anyways.
Or nuclear war or the ozone layer.
Human caused Ozone depletion has been recovering again from what I’ve read, unless you mean the Sun getting more active than predicted.
Nukes yeah :(
In Echopraxia, the transhuman pilot repeatedly calls the old guy a “roach”.
“I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
And one of my favorite Heinlein quotes:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
Ah once again i wish i read books… I think if I was to pick up a book it would be the novels behind the show The Expanse. I feel like they left a lot out of the show that was in the books.
We did the audiobooks of the expanse and loved them!
Definitely worth the read. The show was a great adaptation with some necessary compromises for a TV adaptation, but also, you have 3 (4) more books beyond season 6.
Aw man really? If there is an incentive to read that’s it.
There is already a separate class of rich people
The thing you are afraid of is already happening
Rich people and their kids get world class health care, including helicopter flights to hospitals for life saving surgery. The rest of us die in the waiting room.
Rich people and their kids never have to work a day in their lives. We all have to work until we die.
Rich people and their kids get to enjoy luxury, fulfillment, gratification and a style of living that we cannot possibly imagine. We have to pirate movies because we can’t afford to see them in theaters.
When?
Why do you think so many use surrogates now?
They’re 100% at least doing illegal selections, but I would be shocked if none of them are doing out right editing.
Unless genetic engineering has always been accessible to the ruling class and we cant comprehend the true mechanisms that keep us oppressed.
Imagine, its completely feasible to use a space craft or time dilation to travel forward in time. People could exsist on an entire plane of existence within our plane of existence.
Global warming?
No big deal, jump forward a few millennia and see how things developed. Still unliveable? Jump forward again.
Sure its risky and hard to imagine but its not impossible.
Gattaca offered the hopeful promise of profit maximization through mass production of genetic engineering, though it’s unclear if government subsidies helped with the profit maximization.
Time will certainly create political pressure to make the bestest babies for the races who deserve the bestest babies. Maybe that does mean no medicaid coverage.
The strongest case for only ultra rich having access, is that it’s just a status symbol. AI and robotics will do all the work, so why be smart or fit? How smart do you need to be to just support fascist genocide? Being smart is only a path to considering human needs above fascist supremacist needs as a path to sustainability, with sustainability considered of value. Stupidity far more useful to near term “theft profitability with no consequences” of fascism.
Clicked the link to see how many references to Gattaca there would be. Was not disappointed
Don’t worry, they’re absolutely stupid enough to practice CRISPR to the point where their kids are inbreeding within a generation because their CRISPR fixed genetics made them all too biologically similar to create effectively genetically diverse offspring.
Techno fuedalism is still fuedalism. So that means idiots all at the top.
Wonder what the new Hapsburg chin will be.
Here’s a scarier thought, if they can fine tune this shit enough they’ll probably just clone themselves and pull a ship of Theseus on themselves. Removing the only remaining equalizer between them and the rest of humanity.
The rich fucks at the top want to become gods. They won’t call it that but that’s the end game for the ones with the most hand on the wheel.
The House of the Scorpion explores this further.
That is just having heirs with more steps.
and an even greater dependency on industrial processes
I’ll be dead, humanity is fucked as i see it but things could change i guess.
Humanity has been fucked many times before. Humans migrated out of Africa TWICE. We have been nearly wiped out several times. Maybe this will be the last time. Maybe Humans will migrate out of Africa a third time…
Reference provided, but not read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations
The plot of the film Gattaca explores this, the idea of what society looks like when there’s a class of genetically engineered, “superior” people, vs. the naturally born, “inferior” class.
The Beggars Trilogy by Nancy Kress touches on this as well, but is more focused on the issues with superintelligence rather than just gene alteration, although, because people are vain, the preference for things like hair, skin and symmetry also exist in the story’s world. Oh yeah, and the coolest concept from this trilogy is a thing called “sleeplessness”, where people can alter there genes to remove the biological need to sleep, allowing people to be able to be productive for as many hours as they desire.
Tbh, I think GATTACA barely touched the topic. It focussed so much on the brothers’ rivalry that you could strip out the genetic engineering part and it’d barely change the movie
Yeah it’s a cool movie but the message of systemic disadvantages don’t matter if you try hard enough is a little questionable at best.
I don’t think that was the message at all.
The end message is that the doctor knew all along, and was helping him from the beginning. It didn’t matter how much work he put in, how hard he tried. How much he lied or cheated or “overcame his limitation”, at the end of the day he would have never succeeded without help from a fellow human.
Doing it all himself had started to make him prideful to some degree. And realizing that, in the background, he didn’t do it all himself was a last kick of humility to (ironically) ground the character before he leaves the ground forever.
He knew all along? I guess I didn’t pick up on that. I thought it was just at the very end.
I can see how that might change the message of the film somewhat.
It’s not expressly said. But that’s my take on it from a few different clues. For starters, he wasnt’ surprised by the invalid reading. Also the story that he tells about his son not being “all that was promised” came early in the film, with the doctor saying “who knows what he can achieve” like a wink or a nudge almost.
The issue wasn’t “try hard enough”. It was how systematic disenfranchisement hobbles people far more than their genetics.
Once you brand someone as “lesser”, their actual capacity is irrelevant. They won’t be given the opportunity to succeed (much less to fail and try again) while the presumed-superior cohort is offered advantage after advantage in order to prove they are better.
I mean… It was showing the extreme lengths he had to go through, the risks he has to take, just to compete for the same opportunities.
At the end it came down to him going for the launch despite knowing he’d likely get caught and the doctor letting him through despite knowing who he is, because his son was also not engineered, I think the message was people of the under class coming together to fight the system rather than just working hard
For the kinds of class based gene editing we are likely to see, it kinda isn’t. More attractive, bigger boobs, better predisposition to fitness, etc. That is all surmountable.
Where it falls apart are “goofy” looking people likely Michael Phelps who are straight up genetic freaks. But those aren’t the kinds of genes the rich want… For themselves.
I think it’s trying to show we are more than just our genetics, there’s a lot of nurture/environment/action that affects outcomes. The protagonist had drive, determination, exercised and worked for the dream. Most eugenic people didn’t have the same drive and took life for granted, so he could outperform them.
Its complicated in its portrayal, for sure. It comes off at a glance like “just signam grindset bro,” but really the protagonist had to lie, cheat and steal his way to his dream, while also being an absolute fatalist while pushing his body near to death. Even then, he still needed to convince a doctor to fake his results at the end. That’s not a pro “grindset” or “you can overcome” message really. It shows how absolutely fucked you are if you aren’t born into advantage, how weighted everything is against you.
The movie would have hit harder if he got to the end and got caught and denied his dream. Just end with him in prison, staring out a window up at the stars.
Agree but people only want to watch happy endings.
… did you watch Gattaca? Also it was kind of a flop so… you are in large company.
Spoilers for a movie that is almost 30 years old I guess
spoiler
Vincent’s brother is more or less mentally broken and likely to face career problems if people ever investigate what actually happened with the investigation… possibly because the astronaut died en route to Jupiter or whatever. Vincent himself is likely on a suicide trip. Jude Law’s character ACTUALLY commits suicide.
Gattaca’s ending is not a happy one. It is exactly what was said during the swimming scene. It is about putting your everything into an endeavor with no care for self preservation or “the swim back”. Which… very questionable understanding of genetics aside (very clear they were on the same sauce that Kojima was…), kind of is the “bootstraps” mentality distilled to a suicide run. Some people can succeed just by virtue of their birth and upbringing. Others more or less need to kill themselves to even have a chance. And… a lot of those people never even make it to the chance, let alone have a way to appreciate it.
I really can’t imagine what China is doing…
Trump is directly undermining national safety by abandoning higher education, college visas for foreigners, scientific studies etc.
15 years ago we knew exactly what China was doing. Now? Good luck
He is in many many ways. Thats what i mean with China.
…did you respond to the wrong comment?
I mean with CRISPR…
Chinese researchers publish in the same international journals everyone does, I don’t think they are using CRISPR any differently than anyone this side of the pacific is.
The verdict said the three defendants had not obtained qualification as doctors, pursued fame and profits, deliberately violated Chinese regulations on scientific research, and crossed an ethical line in both scientific research and medicine, according to Xinhua. It also said they had fabricated ethical review documents.
It’s illegal.
They follow the law?
I doubt any more or less than people here do
Is that the movie about (sorry for the bad synopsis) Where the guy vacuums his work desk because he wants to go to space?
That is correct
Thank you. I just wanted to make sure I remembered the right movie.
I now challenge anyone who haven’t seen it to deduce the rest of the plot, based only on my description.
Jude Law, something something treadmill
Gigolo Joe?
Washing yourself in the shower, difficulty level “going to space”
Okay, but the moral of the story was that “superior” people weren’t actually superior. They were just racist.
The protagonist outwits and outperforms them all.
In some cases there were absolute superior though. Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
The actual moral of the story was that it’s not worth it. Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
Having twelve fingers isn’t what makes you good at playing the piano.
Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
There’s an underlying question in the story that amounts to “if you’ve made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?”
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
Seems like a pretty bad execution of the concept, then.
That movie is 9/10. The ending is absolutely beautiful.
Spoilers!
I HAVE SPOILED NOTHING.
If you insist:
spoiler
Jude Law is in it
Same for Jules Vernes - The Time Machine book in the part where the traveler meets the Morlocks and the Eloi.
H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, not Verne.
My bad, dunno how I could confuse my authors
Both are very early science fiction pioneers, I can see how they could get mixed up. 🤷♂️
Not seen Gattaca, but a multi-tier, genetically structured society is the basis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is well worth a read.
Worth noting, it’s a pretty short book so don’t sleep on it.
came to say this is basically the premise of gattaca.
Don’t worry. The poor will just become extinct like the other hominids that are no longer with us.
It shouldn’t be anything too bad.
Nothing of value was lost /s
But seriously, what a fucking bleak endgame
Nothing lasts forever. Homo sapiens was bound to be replaced by another hominid at some point.
“homo techno” according to grymes, lmao.
We’re getting the movie Gattaca IRL before Half-Life 3 and GTA 6 smdh
Libertarians not even building Rapture yet and they’re going full Gattaca? How gauche.
everytime i see “smdh” i think “shake my dick hard” for some reason.
