Pluripotent Stem Cells as a Model for Human Embryogenesis – Read this and thought it’s the manifestation of the Sci-Fi no male future societies, e.g. The Outer Limits remake (I think) or Futurama. The conceit that some miracle of miracles happens at conception to create a new life is pretty seriously questioned here, when we can invoke that miracle in a process that doesn’t require any new information to “spark”. Ultimately, the only difference between asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction in animals is the specialization coding.
That inspired me to walk the reference tree and came across this explainer article for one of the references: Synthetic mouse embryos created from stem cells — without sperm, eggs, or a uterus – Where the guy admits he’s researching this in order to setup a “The Island“.
And it makes me wonder what’s next for us after we master the entropy of the genome and start creating versions of ourselves which are no longer recognizably the same as us. Will we be drawn toward creating amalgamations of extreme traits, and completely abandon the more mundane ones? What would you with four lungs look like, or you without a brainstem?
Is the spark of life the entire person, and every piece of them representing a cumulative spark? Or does it solely exist somewhere in the brain or heart depending on where you live, and all other parts are superfluous to the spark itself. What if we create a new spark from the same spark, is that spark ever a separate entity?
I feel like that’s a rehash of the abortion debate though, at what point do you become a different entity than yourself? For males, that’s a pretty easy question, once the blastocyte does it’s thing. For women, not so easy.
Is it the big gate in Fermi’s paradox, where any “life” which is actively interstellar always seem to find a way to overspecialize themselves to extinction. The folly of oversubscribing to the illusion of control imparted by their machine.
This period, whether we recognize it now as such or not is definitely a rubicon, and I’m not terribly enthusiastic about what lies on the other side.