It would have been a more serious one if we did. And I'm not even talking about the cloning. Is there really, among the 8 billion of us now, no one who is at l

It would have been a more serious one if we did. And I'm not even talking about the cloning. Is there really, among the 8 billion of us now, no one who is at least half as brilliant? I think there is, but they fall out all the time. My good childhood friend is such a person - a prodigy child whom I heard about thanks to his achievements in math contests years before I met him in middle school. Of course he did great there because everything was just so simple to him. Something went wrong mid-college and he never realised his potential to the fullest. I think there's a lot more randomness to which of the potential von Neumanns will shine than we would like to admit.