4 ms·

In a scary future, this could be used to grow a population fast. Once they can copy the entire pregnancy from (artificial) inception to ready made baby, they ca

by flexie 9y ago

In a scary future, this could be used to grow a population fast. Once they can copy the entire pregnancy from (artificial) inception to ready made baby, they can grow a population from just the sperm and eggs of a few men and women. Send 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. You no longer need thousands of ships for that or to wait for generations. They might even be able to "bake in" chips and sensors in the process for better control of the population.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, there was a colonisation attempt before the main one in that series where fertilized embryoes were sent on ships with all they needed to rebuild civilisation. Turned out some fraction of the people born thusly became psychopaths and killed off all the rest, dooming the entire thing, so in the books all that is left is artifacts. I always found it a very nice touch and highly plausible that such an attempt failed spectacularly.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  We already have that: at least 5-10% of the population is naturally born that way now. We try to socialize them out of it, which has some success, but for those who it doesn't, the dumb ones become hardened criminals, and the smart ones become politicians and CEOs. This colonization idea needs to wait until we can figure out the genetic basis of sociopathy, and then we can genetically engineer it out of the fertilized embryos, and instead GE them to be much more interdependent and social than we are.
cstross 9y ago
end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right? Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes. The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in. (If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I wonder what a few hundred years of using external gestation would do to early development.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  The premature-birth thing can be fixed now with artificial wombs: we'll just keep kids in there longer, perhaps 2-4 years. Throw in some genetic engineering and some techniques to rapidly indoctrinate and train these people and we can grow a clone army! Bwahahaha!
upvotinglurker 9y ago
The novel Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh depicts more or less this scenario: "normally" raised human colonists (who happen to include a lot of genetics, biology, and psychology experts) need to expand their population quickly, so they create babies in artificial wombs. Womb conditions simulate a particular human pregnancy with sound, movement, temperature, hormones, etc. After birth, children are socialized with a combination of brainwashing delivered via sensory "tapes" under hypnotic drugs, and orphanage/boarding school style care, with the front line caregivers themselves being artificial womb products. They are conditioned to be unable to disobey, so are essentially slaves, but are also conditioned to derive deep satisfaction from their work, with each worker genetically and psychologically optimized for a specific field/job. The resulting people are depicted as not "normal" in their psychology and social behavior, but in some ways superior (able to approach problems more rationally and systematically with less emotional involvement, for example). It's an interesting study by an author who clearly recognizes this scenario as slavery and ultimately wrong, but is also willing to explore a variety of both positive and negative implications.

by flexie 9y ago

semi-extrinsic 9y ago

In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, there was a colonisation attempt before the main one in that series where fertilized embryoes were sent on ships with all they needed to rebuild civilisation. Turned out some fraction of the people born thusly became psychopaths and killed off all the rest, dooming the entire thing, so in the books all that is left is artifacts. I always found it a very nice touch and highly plausible that such an attempt failed spectacularly.

Arizhel 9y ago
We already have that: at least 5-10% of the population is naturally born that way now. We try to socialize them out of it, which has some success, but for those who it doesn't, the dumb ones become hardened criminals, and the smart ones become politicians and CEOs. This colonization idea needs to wait until we can figure out the genetic basis of sociopathy, and then we can genetically engineer it out of the fertilized embryos, and instead GE them to be much more interdependent and social than we are.

cstross 9y ago

end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right? Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes. The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in. (If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)

maxerickson 9y ago
I wonder what a few hundred years of using external gestation would do to early development.
Arizhel 9y ago
The premature-birth thing can be fixed now with artificial wombs: we'll just keep kids in there longer, perhaps 2-4 years. Throw in some genetic engineering and some techniques to rapidly indoctrinate and train these people and we can grow a clone army! Bwahahaha!

upvotinglurker 9y ago

The novel Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh depicts more or less this scenario: "normally" raised human colonists (who happen to include a lot of genetics, biology, and psychology experts) need to expand their population quickly, so they create babies in artificial wombs. Womb conditions simulate a particular human pregnancy with sound, movement, temperature, hormones, etc. After birth, children are socialized with a combination of brainwashing delivered via sensory "tapes" under hypnotic drugs, and orphanage/boarding school style care, with the front line caregivers themselves being artificial womb products. They are conditioned to be unable to disobey, so are essentially slaves, but are also conditioned to derive deep satisfaction from their work, with each worker genetically and psychologically optimized for a specific field/job. The resulting people are depicted as not "normal" in their psychology and social behavior, but in some ways superior (able to approach problems more rationally and systematically with less emotional involvement, for example). It's an interesting study by an author who clearly recognizes this scenario as slavery and ultimately wrong, but is also willing to explore a variety of both positive and negative implications.