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Solving Climate Change By Bioengineering Humans?
derekmead writes "Forget CFLs, hybrid cars, and organic jeans. Buying our way out of climate change — even if it's green consumption — won't get us far.
A new paper (PDF), published in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment by NYU bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao, poses an answer: engineer humans to use less. The general plan laid out by Liao is straightforward, ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children. The philosophical and ethical questions, on the other hand, are absurdly complicated. The Atlantic also has a great interview with Liao, in which he talks about gene therapy and making humans hate the taste of meat."
It's one thing to use genetic engineering to fight disease and obvious medical problems. But using something with such dangerous potential to advance a social agenda which society can't even agree on is going way too far. It's dangerous enough to screw with Mother Nature even when the objective is crystal clear. Screwing with something as dangerous as genetic engineering and altering humans en masse is insane for an objective this murky (not to mention the fact that it would violate every university's or hospital's ethics policies in about a million ways).
First, do no harm--even if you think it's for a good cause.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children.
Pretty sure I've read this book before. Now, if I could only remember what it was called. Hmmm...
Well, no time to waste, lets go create our bold refreshed earth, now with vegetarian midgets!
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
People will like to eat whatever they grew up eating, no genetic engineering necessary.
Miranda.
Okay, completely setting aside the staggering ethical issues...
Let's say we all turn into hobbit-sized vegetarians and reduce our footprint. It doesn't fricking matter. Unless we do something about our fertility, our population will still keep growing and we will still eat the rainforests, it will just take a little longer for us to do it. And that's the thing: there really is only one variable that actually matters in the long run. With the right-sized population, we can all be 12-foot-tall gorillas that only eat the prime part of the cow and discard the rest.
Not that there aren't also ethical considerations on that side too, but jesus, it just irks me when so much effort is put into managing these little inconsequential variables that, in the long term, don't change a damn thing about our global impact.
The solution offered here is an example of the class of solution it is supposedly an alternative to:
Buying bioengineered humans is certainly an example of "buying our way out of climate change", and its far more speculative in its utility than any of the forms of buying our way out of climate change it is offered as an alternative to in TFS.
Was it Oryx and Crake?
Do I need to move into the deep wilds and avoid taking vitamins?
Don't you be taking our meat, boy. *spits*
why wouldn't you engineer humans to be less in number... o right can't use birth control.
Wouldn't it be easier to just herd the useless eaters into the ovens?
Oh wait; ovens means more stuff in the atmosphere. Sorry. Just throw them in mass graves instead.
(If you think this post was serious, you're as crazy as that nut is.)
Even if climate change is caused by human CO2 emissions, the majority of these emissions is because of trnsportation, electricity and other uses of energy. Basic human needs contribute little to the problem.
...intricate trolling attempt directed to make Alex Jones even MORE wonko.
This might be Liao's scene but his fix idea is not only completely unacceptable, but also...before we would had such a grandiose project underway we would probably already have perfected invitro-meat.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Is there any doubt that coercion would follow, since a lot of people would refuse? The effort to perfect man into someone's ideal image has always resulted in mass death.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
super soldiers that make up the people who refused this and didn't geneticaly tamper with their children to produce smaller people decide to just take what they want from the leaf eating midgets?
The Green Leopard Plague
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague
By Walter Jon Williams
Even if you did such, all that does it push back the wall some, there is still a wall there. We only have so much farmland, never mind the limits on other resources. If you really want to reduce consumption in a way that won't hit a wall you'll have to stop our population growth, and even reverse as it is pretty much too high as is. I don't think genetics are the solution there though. That's more a social issue.
The ethical concerns are only absurdly complicated when trying to justify something which is clearly unethical.
There was a sci-fi short that posited mankind colonizing other planets, but just as they had started spreading out, all the newborns were coming out "devolved" to Australopithicus. Evolution had driven the growth of intelligence and the brain to get mankind off the single vulnerable planet, but now that it had spread and was safe from a single-point disaster, evolution pointed to the efficiency of not maintaining that large energy intensive brain. Monkeybrains were quite good enough.
So that's actually the solution I propose. Monkeyboys and monkeygirls may fling feces but they don't burn petrochemicals or cause global warming.
Somehow I have the feeling that Dr. Liao sees himself as an Alpha, with lots of vegetarian Epsilons to do drudge work.
Problem is: Everyone sane is afraid of climate change for this very reason. Not because of "the environment". There is no moral imperative to save the species that exist today. We can not not kill all DNA based life. But we can change the current mix of species and climate for the worse for us humans. Because the current one enabled us to be the apex species on this planet. It could work out by itself. It could even get better for us. But who gambles human life on that chance? Fighting climate change is actually a very conservative position. But if we can not agree on that we might have to change ourselves rapidly.
We'll all be genetically engineered humans, probably patented by Monsanto, and will then have to pay a licensing fee to reproduce. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Instead of ideas such as making people smaller why not simply confront the fact that we need to severely restrict births. A lower population eats less meat, needs less roads and cars and allows general preservation of the environment as well as having natural land for wild life. Simply have rules that allow only the best young people to have one child in one marriage. Problem solved and no test tubes or fancy thinking need be involved at all.
In the last couple of hundred years the human population on earth has exploaded. There are just too many of us. If we where half as many, environmental issues would perhaps not go away but our impact would be waaaaaaaaay less. It's even very simple to achive this in a realtively short time. Just don't have to many kids (yes, I know this is /.). If each person has one child or less (i.e. two per couple or less) the population will stop growing and start to decrease. It's that simple.
But it's worth all due consideration.
Double plus good indeed.
This falls firmly into the Orwell/Mad science category. He wants to genetically modify people so they prefer the diet he believes to be optimal.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
A bioethicist advocating eugenics.
Just a question of drastic vs draconian methods in reducing population resource use. But at least a try in a direction of technological escape velocity - why stop at taste or midgets, lets cluster baby brains on city sized monstrosity roaming around in ocean, feeding on any organic substance. Or better yet - one swift blow to population numbers by...
professor of philosophy and bioethics
His insights in nutritional science are likely to be as correct and relevant as /.s insights into modern interpretive dance. This was a LOL article.
Old world thinkers have just barely moved beyond the "vital force" principle in organic chem... still hung up on the differences between humans and animals being some mysterious vital force. Sorry, there's just not that much difference.
His theory seems to be he can create a bovine protein allergy. He might succeed at creating a bioengineered lupus-like autoimmune disease.
He might manage to make us allergic to hemoglobin (what could go wrong), or maybe unable to digest some essential amino acid that is in meat and also some plants... kwashiorkor here we come!
Another fun one would be cross species contamination into carnivorous species... Bye bye lions and tigers and housecats and wolves and dogs and...
You know what would be fun? Catholic mass is into the transubstantiation thing where the wafer turns into the body of christ. Unable to digest meat means unable to digest the host. Therefore catholics can't take the pill. The meat allergy pill, I mean, not the birth control pill. Although the jokes are already firing up about "eating meat". Except on Fridays during lent when you're not supposed to eat meat. Except for fish, which is a plant. This will be fun to watch.
Seriously though, it might be an interesting bioweapon. Imagine something that spreads like AIDS so religious types can blame the victim for their sex life, but it gives them fatal kwashiorkor.
Another fun one would be to build the industrial facilities to generate and package enormous quantities of some obscure non-essential amino acid, then release a plague that converts human digestive systems into having that formerly non-essential amino acid now be an essential amino acid. Then sell the food supplements to keep them alive... at a high profit of course. This is a subcategory of the old game of give new 3rd world mothers enough baby formula to supply the baby until they stop making milk, then say ha ha and charge whatever you can get out of them lest they watch their babies starve. Ha ha, its a great day to be an American isn't it....
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It works for me!
So if humans are not eating the cows how will their numbers decrease? Are we just going to kill them all? Planned extinction of species that product too much CO2?
So, are we absolutely sure this guy isn't some good scientist gone mad? I mean the whole concept sounds like the start of a crazy bond movie plot, where the Mad Scientist gets fed up with the world's corruption and decides to make a genetically engineered army that will make the work a better place and distract the governments as he creates his G.E.N.E. Bomb that when detonated near space will forcibly convert all of the world to his ideal. "Do expect me to talk?" "No, I expect you to eat your salad Mr. Bond."
Tasty, tasty murder...
Mmmmmmmm... Bacon...
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Suprised this hasn't been mention. If any thread fit that tag, this sure enough would.
How about we stop the global populating increasing at the current exponential rate? Then we can look at the minor efficiencies of all the other stuff.
While the Chinese One Child Policy may not be ideal at least it recognizes reality - too many humans creates too many problems. Note, I'm not saying the human population should be decreased (except perhaps, by natural population decline - which is exhibited in advanced countries).
Much of the catastrophic predictions of Malthusian correction are based on the current uncontrolled human population growth. If that growth can be slowed considerably, stopped, or even (naturally) reversed then there is a chance that our technologies might catch up with our consumption (eg. improved recycling, synthetic generation of some resources from our waste, etc).
Nobody who proposes this shit should use the word "ethics", or any derivative of it in their title.
This guy is a crackpot, plain and simple.
using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children
...bought the album that had the song on it.
This paper is written specifically to raise a fire storm with much wailing and gnashing of teeth on all sides.
Meanwhile, Liao loves every minute of the spectacle and writes a couple of grant proposals based on it.
Sorta like when Limbaugh or Beck or Imus etc, says something outrageous specifically because he's not been the center of attention lately.
Really. You know, it is statements like these that make intelligent people seriously dislike science as a whole.
Does anyone here honestly believe if everyone stopped eating meat the issue of earths natural climate change would stop?
Or even how about it would change the natural cycle of change in our favor?
Put this in context of a planetary eco system, which is a structure so vast no way are we going to understand it anytime soon. A planetary eco system inside another gigantic structure which is our solar system guarantees we won't understand anything anything about these systems anytime soon.
And these people want to start tinkering with them _on purpose_.
Really? Seriously?
Well, you got my vote for doomsday if these idiots ever do get enough political power and enough idiots to follow them to start doing experiments on our own climate system.
I would be all for this, as long as space travel was as simple as getting in a car.
Because, given the F*up'ed world we live in, thanks in part to western science, I want to be able to leave when the planet becomes uninhabitable because someone used metric instead of english units to pour hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere.
(No seriously, that is one of the things they want to do...._HYDROGEN SULFIDE_).
Leave the f'in planet alone!
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Problem solved.
More seriously: if this bioengineering would ever pan out then there will be two classes of people:
low-maintenance workers, and their not-so-low-maintenance masters.
Controlling our genetics is one thing but, trying to make us vegetarian, meek, small and docile is just creepy and silly. If you were going to manipulate our genes why not go for Gigantic, Strong, Arrogant, Meat Eating, World Beaters. Oh guess it has been done. Still, don't want my kids to be a bunch of Hobbits no matter how good the books were.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
similar to the one mentioned, namely the project to dissuade humans from the taste of meat. My team works in shifts to identify common foods and cravings people may have. we have assembled around 30 meals we've identified as generally enjoyed
in the US, and after nearly a decade of extensive testing and development im proud to say we've made significant progress. Of the commonly consumed edibles we've engineered, many test subjects eat only some of the food. often times they refuse to eat certain items entirely. By changing the color and texture of the food we've ensured that even the most visibly palletable foodstuffs remain of limited interest to numerous test groups.
the project ive overseen has the potential for proven commercial success. should any reader need more information on patent licensing, design or independent consulting/partnering please feel free to contact me.
regards,
Mike Archer, President
AppleBees Restaraunts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
After millions of years of evolution, humans become large and at the top of the food chain,and this guy wants to override all that to make them leaf-eating midgets. So while there may never be consensus on the intelligent design notion of a higher power guiding our development, at least now we have the option for unintelligent design with a stupid power screwing it up.
So he wants to make everyone into Indians?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Is this wacky proposal being seriously considered anywhere?
Meanwhile, nobody seems to want to study geoengineering.
We are probably only a few decades from being able to build space-based reflectors that block a nontrivial amount of sunlight from hitting Earth. We can already "seed" clouds to make them rain under some circumstances; maybe we can figure out how to encourage clouds to form, since at least some sorts of clouds seem to reflect heat away from Earth. I have read about proposals to drop something in the ocean (was it powdered iron?) to encourage algae to grow, thus locking in carbon dioxide. In short, there are numerous engineering approaches for cooling the Earth that do not involve mad-scientist gene tinkering.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
What about the ability to photosynthesize if we are to modify our genes? Or the ability to digest cellulose?
Why are we talking about bioengineering humans to cope with climate change in such a complicated and silly way?
I'd have suggested bioengineering humans so that they are physically adapted to the new climate. After all, if you want to cross the ethical line somewhere, don't take twenty thousand baby steps at twenty thousand places along the border, take twenty steps at a single point and get it over and done with.
I'm perfectly at ease with the idea that genetic manipulation of humans and other creatures is merely us speeding up the evolutionary process. On the other hand, I think it needs to be done responsibly and in the open. The moment we slap moralistic irons onto every one who tries, we make outlaws who will work in secret for fear of being chewed out and having no peer to openly consult with, will flout or forget critical factors to acceptable research. Okay, that just came out of nowhere. :)
Geekism is your _only_ God!
These are invocations of insanity, this must be the opposite of bioethics. Seriously though, don't let this kid in your house.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I would settle for loving the taste of vegetables - can we do that instead? After all, it might not be prudent to rule out the consumption of more, uh, creative sources of meat.
Some men just want to watch the world burn
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
The only way you'd get people to submit to something like this is by going to full blown total war... and then winning. Which means you're dealing with a full blown thermo nuclear war on a global scale.
Which would probably not be the best thing for the environment.
I don't know... environmentalists do well when they talk about reducing pollution or protecting animals. But when they start talking about limiting children or forcing people to live differently or this genetic engineering idea... they're going to lose all support.
So short of some James Bond villian's master plan... they really might as well give up on these aggressive strategies.
All of that said, a better idea might be to find a way for humans to be selectively warm blooded. We use up a huge portion of our calories regulating our own body temperature. Lizards can eat less then some people eat in a day by body mass and survive on it for more then a month without starving. If humans could turn their heat regulating abilities on and off then humans especially in warm areas or who just lived in warm homes could radically reduce their food intake without reducing activity.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why not engineer the taste of plants to taste better?
Didn't they ever read Brave New World where they talk about all the unintended consequences? When they engineered people to patch and mend their clothes so they would consume less, the fashion industry cratered. Actually, that's not such a bad idea. The averted textile pollution might be enough to not need engineered humans in the first place ...
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I think top priority should go to bioengineering Matthew Liao to ensure that he doesn't reproduce at all.
Second, make sure he never again has the opportunity to interact with people, or really any life form.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Less humans.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There will be billions who refuse to subject themselves or their children to such bioengineering. Then the totalitarian governments would PURPOSELY POLLUTE MUCH, MUCH MORE so that only the engineered humans could easily survive.
Also, are you going to bioengineer all the OTHER plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals, too?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Unless we develop a source of energy that has all the convienances of fossil fuels and costs less we should operate under the assumption that all fossil fuels will be burned eventually. It doesn't matter how many political drawbacks you attach to fossil fuels. If burning oil is the cheapest option then someone, somewhere will continue to do so. Any resources we tie up in trying to slow down the consumption of fossil fuels will ultimately have been wasted.
We have two options when it comes to dealing with climate change. We can invest in developing a carbon neutral fuel source that costs less than fossil fuels without subsidies, or we can invest in adapting to a change that we cannot stop. Everything else is pointless politics that can only hurt us in the long run.
We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
-- Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Dynamics of Mind
Why not make people super strong so we can run/walk/bike more and reduce the need for vehicles and trucks? Perhaps instead of engineering us to hate meat, engineer us to better handle large quantities of sugar, so we can eat cake and cookies all the time. Improve our eyesight so we can see without nearly as much electric lighting. Strengthen our ability to sweat so we're comfortable with less air conditioning. If you're going to do this, there are a lot of ways you could go. Making people have a distaste for beef seems like a really odd way to about it.
You may notice that many of the replies so far advocate population control* as the solution to climate change, aka anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
* Forced sterilization, mandated use of birth control and so forth.
A quick question for AGW proponents: do you want to give control over who can and cannot have children to the same people who gave you the TSA?
You have said everything correctly. I just hope more ears will listen...
What you wrote reminds me why we have freedom of speech " I might not like what you said, but I will defend your right to say it"
I would hope that others see why I link your words to it...
I think the actual quote is:
"I might not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to die in a fire of suspicious origin."
-- Terry
This ignores the fact that many areas the only useful use for the land is for raising animals for slaughter and that using it to grow crops or vegetables would cause more damage to the environment. This is just PETA searching for a way to shove their agenda down everyone's throats, literally.
the problem isn't too much consumption, it's too many people. We're getting better, but you can't support an infinite amount of people indefinitely with a finite amount of resources. So someone, someday is going to have to start trying to figure out how to control the population. Controlling individual's consumption ain't the answer....
introduce latex condoms to Africa and India.
This guy trolled everyone good and hard. The bad thing is that the denialist nutjobs will absorb this into their conspiracy theories. Or maybe it's a good thing, at least they'll be more entertaining.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Utter lack of scientific merit in his argument tells me that he's probably being sarcastic. Being a Bioethics prof, he probably understands why such blatant violations of individual rights cannot proceed in any form or shape imaginable. What I find amusing is he couldn't even lay out a scientifically sound, as totalitarian as it might be, proposal that could really pit efficiency against human dignity. His solutions are so ineffective no one would even advocate them. If he really wanted to have some fun arguing with people just for pure intellectual joy, he should have come up with better solutions that could really intrigue the smartest minds in science and engineering. Instead, what he proposes are half-assed pseudo-science that intrigues no one but uneducated mass in a very ineffective way.
Engineer people to hate meat? Really! Awesome! So while everyone is hating meat... more meat for me! Fire up the grill baby!
why don't we just genetically engineer people to like the taste of human meat? Nature will take its course and within a few decades we'll have a nice balance between the number of people who eat people and those who don't. The population will drop along with demands on resources. It's a win-win situation.
Better solution. Why don't we bio-engineer away liberals.
Yet the 1991 Honda CRX/HF still gets 72 MPG
You know, if you don't run it on crappy California reformulated gas. If you run crappy California gas, it only gets 64 MPG. Which puts it in the same ballpark as the 1991 Geo Metro convertible, which gets 64 MPG on non-crappy California reformulated gas.
Gotta keep that Chevron refinery monopoly going, they did so well by us with MTBE. Never mind that all vehicles since 1981 have Oxygen sensors, so Oxygenation of fuels does squat for pollution, unless you are driving a 1969 Ford Thunderbird or some other vehicle more than 31 years old.
PS: the US auto industry specifically came up with transverse crash testing to disallow the CRX/HF being imported into the US. Basically, they had to figure out a crash test they could pass that CRX/HF couldn't in order to kill it. Never mind that being simultaneously T-boned from two directions is unlikely as hell.
-- Terry
You and your family first.
How does 50 cm total height sound? If your goal is to minimize the resources a person needs, why not go all the way?
http://www.the-incredible-shrinking-man.net/?p=2585
Meat is good for you. Meat is a good use of resources. You can't grow much in the way of food on our steep mountains with their thin acidic soils and short warm season. Grass grows. Animals eat grass. We can't. We can eat animals. Hunting and ranching is the best use, the best way of getting food, meat, from our land. This anti-meat hysteria is the result of nutty city people disconnected from nature. It has nothing to do with reality. Eat meat and thrive.
... pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people
Pharmacological behavior modification isn't necessary. Just post a ton of slaughterhouse videos online, let them go viral, and get the likes of Michael Moore to make more movies about the meat industry (above the admirable efforts that have already been made by others). Pressure groups could campaign to have graphic imagery from the meat industry made more visible through advertising campaigns. If people (in the USA in particular*) knew how their meat was made and how much cruelty was involved there'd be a whole lot more vegetarians.
*The USA has very slack food safety standards compared to the EU.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Instead of modifying our genes, why don't modify our culture? Is already being controlled or at least pushed by a lot of corporations (media companies, coke&pepsi, tobacco, banks, politics, church and others), so why don't push it in a somewhat better direction just for once? It should be easier and faster than modifying the genes of enoguh humans in next generations,
VOLUNTARY HUMAN EXTINCTION
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Why have I not seen this mentioned?
What we need is the ability to limit the rate of breeding. A combine-type suppression field would do wonders for the planet.
Turn it on for a few decades, let the earth heal, and turn it off.
We only have so many resources. Bioengineering to 'hate the taste of meat', will mean more competition for plants.
We always have competition for finite resources. We can't increase the amount of resources, but we can do our part to reduce the amount of people who want access to those resources.
the only problem is the religious nuts who oppose their use. Maybe we should use genetic engineering to remove religious traits.
:)
Or failing that, engineer traps.
I wonder what a trap for the religious would look like.
Anyone?
So...you are saying that the Peak Oil scenario will eventually lead to a decline of the use of so called "climate changing hydrocarbons"?
Doesn't that solution work itself out, well before the degree or two of temperature increase over the span of 50 to 100 years has any noticeable impact?
By the way, I am old enough to remember scientists in the 1970's forecasting a coming ice age based on what they thought to be incontrovertible science. That was a whole lot scarier than a longer Spring in upstate New York.
I just finished reading, "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith. She makes some good arguments for plant agriculture being more environmentally destructive than raising meat for food. There are counter arguments. I'm not sure it's settled yet.
TFA seems to describe someone who presupposes that vegetarianism is more environmentally friendly than the alternatives.
This sounds like a good premise for a novel about eco-terrorists imposing their will on the human population....
everyone dies at 40.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A cow is a way to turn inedible plants into food. We'll consider options when you have several stomachs and are not farting in our general direction.
"The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works."
I believe this is not an original thought. They got it from reading "The Domination" by S.M. Stirling
http://www.amazon.com/Domination-S-M-Stirling/dp/0671577948/ref=pd_sim_b_2
Because, the Draka are in fact the good guys. Any good Democrat knows that.
I think it's important to provide solutions rather than just criticize the ideas of others. So... may I humbly suggest we solve these problems by simply eating those people who are not productive members of society? That would reduce the population... encourage people to work and be productive.. and provide a source of meat that doesn't depend on cows. That's at least as good an idea of trying to bio-engineer the human race for some nebulous politically correct social agenda.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
when they are tried and tested methods available for reducing the human population to sustainable levels?
This would be the ultimate in violating basic human rights and taking away freedom of choice from entire populations. It would dwarf the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and every other dictator despot and warlord throughout history, and the ultimate irony of it is that it would ultimately fail, leaving humanity in a gigantic mess of completely botched genetic engineering that we'd probably never recover from; it would likely end up as an extinction-level event in our history, more effective than all the nuclear bombs currently in existence.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Malthus will have the last laugh, no matter what, because he was right. Guilt causing people not to have kids (or as many) as actually a species survival mechanism. For those of you who don't know, Prof. Thomas Malthus came up with the idea (or at least popularized it) that a species, ANY species reproduces to fill its niche to its carrying capacity, meaning the maximum number of individuals it can support. We were already AT the carrying capacity of Earth tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. We can know this because life has been around for a gazillion years, and we only just arrived like, last week. The reason our population exploded as it has, is two fold. One, we crowd competing species out, and two, we have effectively altered the carrying capacity of the planet through domestication of crops, initially, bioengineering corn (according to one history book I read, the earliest instance of genetic modification through selective breeding in history), and eventually modern advances in science that have allowed us to improve the efficiency of every acre of farmland.
HOWEVER: there is a hard limit to the carrying capacity of the Earth, (I don't know what it is off the top of my head) but it is fundamentally limited by the number of watts of sunlight that fall on the entire surface of the Earth. I don't think we've even close to reached that, but we approach it a little every day. The more people there are, the less food there is for other species, or at least, the smaller the proportion of sunlight falling upon the area of the planet facing the sun, that can be used to sustain other living things, including the immense biomass of plant matter needed to provide the oxygen we all need. We must either find a way to limit our own numbers, (i.e., voluntarily,) or we must find new planets to live on, because if things keep going this way, we will eventually hit the limit, no matter what we do, (unless someone knows how to make the sun brighter, or the Earth take up a larger section of the solar sphere at 1 AU, i.e., making Earth bigger or bringing it closer to the sun, or putting up a really big magnifying glass in front of the Earth...)
Engineering humans to use less power is an absurd solution. Why not, if you're going to start modifying other people against their will, why not modify their status from alive, to dead. Problem solved. Oh, don't like that solution? Neither do other people. Of course, you could always just kill yourself. If enough people do this, there will be more resources left for those who don't. So shall we do that? Oh.. no, after YOU. No, I INSIST. I'll be right behind you. Promise.
The good news is, if you like the idea of punishing people for reproducing, that that will happen anyway, without intervention. Without natural enemies, predators, disease, etc., the same thing will happen to us that happen to ANY population that experiences lack of disease and predation, while reproducing without limit, until the carrying capacity is reached.
We'll (some of us) start starving to death. That will help disease along, though inasmuch as there are places that are wealthy and places that are poor, those places that are poor will die off first...
SPOILER ALERT...
This is of course all assuming we don't kill ourselves first, collectively, over something really fucking stupid, like who owns Jerusalem. What a fucking retarded reason to die... some hallucinating camel herder's imaginary friend promised him this piece of land... NO, it was OUR guy he promised it to... We should put that on our collective tombstone. Put it on the moon, I think. Have someone go up there and neatly flatten a few square miles of moon soil, coat it with something to protect it, and make a monument to the stupidity of the people of Earth, a tombstone for a dead planet. Because it isn't famine that will wipe out humanity, it'll be war. We're too damned stupid, as a species, to die from famine.
In this nation we obey the second law of thermodynamics.
Now get off my lawn - (i'm getting cold standing here yelling at you)
Yes, Stop eating meat and our population can keep doing whatever else it likes.
How ?
Show young children a slaughterhouse AND a slaughter. Let them pet the cow first, then watch it murdered and dismembered
JOB DONE
Why not engineer humans to no sex and produce no children? Problem solved. Planet saved for apes to take over. Next.
Here's my take on the finished product of such a program, written a year ago...
giants of the past
© t swell - 110303
Jo'eb climbed to the top of the rusting hulk and did a double somersault in the air to express his joy. One almost never saw one of these automobiles outside a museum, and there you weren't allowed to touch. Jo'eb finished with a dance, then rolled down the glass and metal back to the wheat field. Through the open door he could see the foot controls and far above the steering device and a number of instruments and buttons.
He beamed the experience to his friends back home. They had never been outside the city. He knew that they would be jealous as the flow of data reached them. All the nerves in their bodies would light up with the experience of touching the coarse metal and bouncing on the springs of a chair made for giants. Much better than the bland recordings you sense in a museum!
It was easy to forget that the ancestors were six feet tall; easy until confronted with this hard evidence. But fortunately for us that they had the sense to engineer the elimination of wasteful bulk. Imagine having to carry 200 pounds everywhere you go! Imagine the quantities of food you would need. Imagine the steaming mountains of waste you would produce. Even a bodyweight of two pounds was considered excessive for a modern human.
Jo'eb was getting feedback from his friends. Of course Abel wanted him to show the power unit of the automobile. He imagined it the size of his house. Jo'eb tried to comply but he was unable to lift the cover. Instead he climbed up from underneath and scrambled around the dusty motor compartment. Hard to see in the poor light and then only a few parts at a time but Abel was impressed and seemed to understand the function of some of the parts.
Elise wasn't interested in the vehicle itself, but she shared an imaginary scene with two ancestors encased in these tons of iron, propelled recklessly down a vast pathway at high speed, oblivious to anything around them smaller than a tree or mountain. Abel added sounds to the vision including wind, rubbery tire sounds and what he imagined the power plant sounded like. Together they generated a compelling scene that was probably altogether wrong, yet satisfying.
All this reminded Jo'eb that he hadn't actually seen Elise in weeks. Sharing through the net was nice, but no psynet could substitute for proximity and the physical intimacy that might ensue. Jo'eb did not share his thoughts that immediately followed.
...omphaloskepsis often...
One or two degrees C of temperature increase doesn't sound like much but it only took 1 degree C of temperature decrease to produce the Little Ice Age.
But, we should engineer superior humans; larger, faster, stronger, smarter and more adaptable than the run-of-the-mill homo sapien. The resulting homo superior, in sufficient numbers, could exterminate defeatist scum like Mr. Liao.
will rather eat artificial meat created on laboratory conveyor belts than undergo this procedure.
let the novelist make his own children like this who cannot taste reality.
It doesn't matter if you "use less" as an individual. People will simply procreate more, and there will be 10 billion people on the planet. The worst thing anyone can do for the environment is to have a child (or a dozen, if you're in Utah). That child will produce a huge mountain of waste in their lifetime and is likely to also produce offspring. This will consume all available resources no matter what you do. This is why "fighting hunger in Africa" or "fighting poverty in India" doesn't work. China is the only country that is rational about the whole "breeding vs available resources" thing.
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By the way, I am old enough to remember scientists in the 1970's forecasting a coming ice age based on what they thought to be incontrovertible science.
No, what you are old enough to remember is a media scare based on amplifying the predictions of a few scientific papers, and one that didn't even make sense given that most of the scientific papers coming out at that time predicted warming . The moral of this story is not that climate science is untrustworthy but that that you should not rely on the media for news about science.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
You took yourself out of the 'intelligent people" group when you called it natural climate change. The only credible explanation of the observed rapid warming over the last 120 or so years is human-caused increases in greenhouse gases. Only changes in human behavior could reduce the increase. Science provides a lot of options, with his ideas on the fringe. It's up to us to choose wisely.
=S
The answer as usual is to engineer everything. Synthesize meat that is as environmentally acceptable as plant based agriculture, in fact, introduce phytonutrients to the synMeat, so that its naturally seasoned and as nutritious as green leafy vegetables, complete with fiber and healthy fats. Move to a oil economy based on oil produced by algae. Sequester carbon and turn it into graphene. Use the graphene to engineer damn near everything including the next stage of opto-electronics.
Work like dogs to push genetics, epigenetics, genomics, proteomics, and every other "omic" to the point that we fully understand every twist and wiggle of our DNA including the fractal aspects and the importance of the content expressed in the introns. Model the hell out of engineering human beings. Improve the species. Eliminate aging and senescence. Eliminate cancer, systemic failure, disease and death. Extend prepubescence for several decades to improve our maturity and intellectual development. Add a half dozen new metabolic cycles to allow human beings to consume other materials in a pinch. Mix nanotechnology and brain structure to amplify human intelligence and give everyone access to profoundly enhanced perception.
Every solution creates new problems, demanding more advanced technology. Welcome to the singularity.
Seriously, it sounds like the beginning of a zombie movie.
As a philosopher, I don't understand that they are not called biomoralists. Seems to me their (undisclosed/unconscious?) Ethics are already established.
Further, this does not address the fundamental issues, but tries to find an easy shortcut (akin to jamming all the volcanoes in the world to slow the temp rise).
Defining Statistics and Social Research
...so, its has come to this!
80's lyrics follow....
If only people could shrink
Our world wouldn't be so overcrowded
Bring ourselves down to size
There'd be so much more food to go 'round
Why don't we build a machine
With all the know-how of the industries
We put a man on the moon
On earth we'll need more room
to breathe real soon
Oh
Drink your vaccine and let's shrink
And bring your poodle so it doesn't eat us
The roads will be so wide
No traffic jams when we're half a foot tall
Bring what you need down here
We'll shrink it all by microwave
Don't wanna die like dinosaurs
We'll have enough resources to go round
Oh
So now you've made the big shrink
Meanwhile we'll keep acting big
We well-bred beautiful people
Who says we have to go too?
Cops and Mason businessmen
Were exempted from the ovens
As if you weren't already.
The rest of you are all our termites now
Oh
You seem to be confusing two things going on, 1. eventually exhausting fossil fuels and 2. effects on the envoronment caused by burning fossil fuels. We will eventually have to deal with our energy needs when fossil fuels run out, but if we wait that long the climate may have been screwed up. Adding just shifts forward the inevitable, trying to avoid the environmental problems.
I, for one, welcome our new Bovine Overlords. Without their primary predator, cattle will take over the world.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Test tube meat available from October:
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-test-tube-meat-20120220,0,4661128.story
so, will go with this.
I think the most plausible solution to this issue (and all other issues, for that matter) was stated in this paper pretty well. "Pharmacological enhancement of altruism and empathy". If individuals stopped looking out for 'number one' and held themselves responsible for the problems they themselves are a piece in the puzzle of, the world would truly be a better place. Is this idea so repulsive? Is it really that unbelievable that human beings can reverse our constant decline towards our inevitable destruction and live a life of responsible, benevolent, mature productivity? In relation to this paper, we wouldn't need to physically make ourselves sick over red meat if we were empathetic for the cows themselves or even for our descendants that will no doubt live in a world destroyed by our own hands. Indeed we are greedy, ambitious and self-centered creatures that this idea is hardly taken seriously.
It's called education. Proven method across centuries.
No, seriously, we don't need to invent a new techno-priesthood to interpret the esoteric for us.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The biggest problem facing the reversal of climate change is that everyone needs to make do with less. less gas, less electricity, less energy, less driving, less carbon footprint... And nobody wants to be part of everyone. Figure out how to get everbody on board with less, and you'll lick it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Look, forgetting for a moment the fact that these ideas simply make life not worth living, it doesn't address the root of the problem.
In-fact none of the solutions on the table do. All proposed solutions just aim to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, so we can squeeze a few more million people in... What's the point?
The problem is that the population is growing without bound, and without a predator to keep our numbers in check no matter what we do to accommodate the ever growing population we're screwed.
On one hand you can argue that we should have more of a focus on birth control, have fewer children, and have them later in life. This is at least a step in the right direction. But evolution and adaptation, both of our biology and our ideas (bigotry, religion, greed), depends on death of the old and birth of the new.
No one wants to say it, so I'll say it, what we need is more death. I don't know what the solution is, I'm just pointing out the problem.
I say anyone who agree's with this moron agree's with the Nazi's in the "pure race" belief. I thefore will now propose a plan, funded by society, to build a colony ship that we can send to alpha centauri with all the "special" people on board.
Right, bio engineer the poor people.
No, how about this, instead, all the greedy corporation who refuse to use green alternative for their own profits get bio-engineered to be less greedy, spend more money on tech that reduces resource use, like greener power generation, hydrogen powered cars, and more costly but envrionmental and less waste producing manafacturing methods.
THAT'S THE PROBLEM.
Course people use products, it's your fault for using shitty ways to make them though.
I think the definition of ethics is being stretched way too far.
That's the point. Ethics, as an enterprise of rational speculative philosophy is compelled to seek out the corner cases. The task of theoretical medical ethics.is to follow where systems of ethics wherever they logically lead. It is related but distinguishable from that practical medical ethics which examines how difficult cases fall within accepted guidelines. Following the path of reason will throw up radical propositions which will upset GP, but really how many of these make their way into practical application? Do you really think that because ethicists question at what stage a human becomes a conscious and self-aware human being that we are about to legislate in favour of infanticide?
Shouldn't a journal on ethics at least know the definition of the word, and consider it before allowing such a paper to be published?
Yes. And clearly the editors of these journals have. OK, this one is a bit weird, but how could any thinking person possibly object to the Giubilini & Minerva (the After Birth Abortion paper) being published?! Disagree with the conclusions, sure (that's why these papers get published), but object to these issues even being discussed?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Please use the flag this post on every post, that way it will go away
/. staff to see. If it's spam or goatse it's removed, otherwise it's ignored completely.
You like spam and GNAA trolls? That's what the flag is for. There's nothing automatic about it, clicking the flag only flags it for
I wish they would have posted a story explaining the flag. Maybe they did and I missed it, but staff have explained it in many in-topic posts.
Free Martian Whores!
All of this because heterosexual people cannot keep their willies in their pants!
Just try to take away my bacon! It will be war!!!
I'm allergic to soy, and soy is one of the most important dietary staples of vegetarians and vegans. Of course, there are other things like quinoa, which is also high in protein. And if I weren't a strict vegan, I could eat whey protein and eggs. Maybe fish too, depending on the "rules."
Alternatively, if they could cure my soy allergy, then I'd be happy to eat less meat or none at all.
One of the problems with people who want to revolutionize our diet is that they're clueless about food sensitivities, just like every MD I've ever met. Hell, they generally don't know much about nutrition in general. It's like those people who keep trying to reinvent the calendar, who seem inexplicably ignorant of the reasons that all of the past calendar revamps failed.
What global warming? There has been a steady increase in CO2 for the past 15 years but no warming. All those models and modellers forgot the basic rule:
If your model and observations of reality disagree then your model is WRONG.
Live with it, fix it and maybe admit that CO2 is NOT the cause of the vast majority of climate change.
This falls firmly into the Orwell/Mad science category. He wants to genetically modify people {...}
When speaking about genetically engineered humans, I would tend to think more about Aldous Huxley.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Is there a pharmacological agent that would engineer aversion to morons and hacks like the esteemed Professor Matthew Liao? The grand irony is that he is a professor of bioethics. What he is proposing makes Nazis look like Dalai Lama.
Please. Let's be real here. The fact is we'd be doing what needs to be done - see the Princeton Wedges concept- but for American conservatives who have made it their mission to, once again, deny any scientific reality which challenges whatever it is they are irrationally attached to. Nothing's - not one thing- has changed with these people since the time of Galileo
The fact is that conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Whether you're talking about the Taliban in Afghanistan or the conservatives who voted this week to put Rick Santorum (www.santorum.com) in the office of the Presidency or the hard liners in Russia or the barbaric regimes in Africa who execute gays, to wherever extent conservatives get power, that's just how far back civilization gets set backwards.
We need to stop global warming as soon as humanly possible or everyone dies; it's really just that simple.
It's called civilization -and either you're with us or you're against us.
If you weren't born with a brain that can conceive of an egalitarian reality where everyone has an equal right to live and prosper, not just be given some vanishingly small chance to TRY to live and prosper, if you weren't born with a brain that can sort out that there's something called "reality" out there which is greater than the sum of your superstitions, projections, and fears, if you weren't born with a brain in which something other than your narcissistic preoccupation with other people's sexual behavior is the focus of your energy, if you were born greedy for power and "stuff" and the purpose of your life is to have as much stuff and power for yourself as you can while you reflexively rationalize every exploitative, domineering anti-egalitarian impulse your brain generates then basically you need to be engineered out of existence because yo're a clear and present danger to the rest of us.
This is what the third world war is- the war of science and rationalism against conservatives and irrationality and religious bigotry. The war of egalitarians against the greedheads. The war of the realists against the rationalizers. Global warming is just the first and perhaps the last battle ground.
Science the world over, in a world wide effort coordinated only by a shared understanding of what's at stake- all of human civilization- should find out what makes conservatives the way they are and engineer a antidote. Never mind asking permission; if talking about problems was going to influence conservatives to do the right thing for any problem, we'd have known about it by now.
We have a stark choice before us, we can either turn back global warming or we can all die. Some combination of technological fix and behaviour change is the solution. If we refuse to change our behavior at all, then we're rolling the dice on a technological fix which may not be forthcoming in time. The rational thing to do is to change our behavior while working towards new technologies.
It's the winners who write history- their way. Scientists the world over have to wake up and realize that they are thrown together -whether they like it or not- and constitute a defacto army and defender of humanity and civilization in a war against conservatives everywhere whether they like it or not and they can either come to terms with that reality and wage that war with a mind to winning it by any means at their disposal or they can die with the rest of us.
The fact that conservatives won't even admit that there is a problem (see Inhofe's book this week) and that they're causing through their resistance to change, their conservatism, the better part of it, that they are in fact threatening the continued existence of everyone else for all time proves one thing conclusively and forever and quite irrespective of how this all turns out and that one thing is this- conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible. Case closed.
Remember the planet Miranda? In the words of Malcolm Reynolds, "Ten years from now or a hundred, on some distant world or this very one swept clean, men will revisit the notion that they can make people 'better.' I do not hold to that."
We've already demonstrated man learns nothing from history, but will they learn NOTHING from good, provocative science fiction as well?
The Earth has enough fossil fuel to last hundreds more years. That is if the pointy-headed bureaucrats pull their heads out of "you know where" and let us drill, explore, build new refineries and pipelines.
If they are the future the Human Race is doomed.
I'm amazed that no one seems to have mentioned the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday", from the album Foxtrot (1972). It tells a story of real estate speculators' collusion with corrupt genetic engineers:
For humane reasons, using a commercial/ experienced/ trained/ equipped slaughter house is reasonable. So, you take your (say) cow to the slaughter house ; it's killed while you're cleaning out the transport trailer (rented, most likely) ; the carcass is deposited into your trailer, and you take it home.
No one is prevented from getting what they are used to. But they do regain the knowledge of the source of their meat that their grandparents had. At least freezers are common these days, so you won't need to learn how to smoke and salt meat.
This year, we eat cow ; we'll have pig next year. (The porker is eating the human-inedible bits of cow.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sounds like the first blue print for a Grey. Maybe this is how it all starts ?