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Totally! I think your example is a good illustration of the difficult questions we will face as genetic screening becomes more and more practical and affordable
by jkn 13y ago
Totally! I think your example is a good illustration of the difficult questions we will face as genetic screening becomes more and more practical and affordable, thanks a lot for sharing. (I can't help but wonder what you would say to a doctor that tells you, "So do you want me to press this little button to make sure your children won't have the same condition?")
However, it might also be that in the long term, the quality of the gene pool objectively deteriorates. Taking it to the extreme, imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance... I guess this is also something we should consider.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y ago>imagine if nobody can grow older than five years without medical assistance I think that way before that happens we'll have something like "virtual", "immortal" "bodies". In other words I think that before we need all that medical care the original William Gibson's idea that we'll all end up stored somewhere in a computer memory connected to a network will happen. No body or genes really needed - we just "sit" in RAM, interact with others via network and are - immortal. Ray Kurzweil says it may even happen in our lifetimes. Heard Stephen Hawking mentioning something similar. Reaching point that we can live forever and don't really need our body for that. Or our body can be strengthened by armor, hardware of various types, to be much better and advanced than our bodies are. This reminds me a little bit the dilema local Government in Paris had in 1890s -- what we'll do with all the horse dung if the number of horses grows at the current rate? And then cars came along and it was all irrelevant. Seems to me it's also the same with depopulation. Who cares if there will be 20 billion of us in 50 years if we finally start colonizing other planets and the Moon?