March 16,09
Can you imagine a future where parents can pick the eye color, hair color, skin color and height of their new baby? Does that sound like some wild dream of the future? Well, the future is now. One Los Angeles fertility clinic is now offering to design babies to the exact specifications of the parents.
The Fertility Institute is calling this new technology “cosmetic medicine”. Do you want your daughter to look like Barbie? Done. Just order up a tall, light-skinned, green-eyed, daughter with blonde hair and the clinic will do the rest.
This technology is based on something called “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis”, or PGD, which doctors have been using the last few years to identify potentially deadly diseases in embryos. The technology has become so advanced that now doctors can not just spot potential diseases, but they can actually get enough information from an embryonic cell that they can identify thousands of characteristics of a single embryo.
Well, this day has finally arrived. Genetically engineered human beings and designer children born to parents who can afford to pay the fees.
And make no bones about it, this will happen.
The next question is; “Will this new technology be made available to the masses?”
What do you think?
New L.A. clinic lets parents genetically design their new baby
________________________
In a related note, Technological Singularity advocate Michael Anissimov’s blog Accelerating Future has a recent post in which a commentor mentions ectogenesis; The growing of a fetus in an artificial womb outside of a biological body.
This poses an ethical question that if the technology becomes economically viable, will abortions due to unwanted children become illegal again?
And if the reasons for abortion become moot, who, or what will raise these children if the parent(s) refuse to raise them?
Who pays the cost of growing the fetus to maturation, the State/taxpayers, or the unwilling parent(s)?
These issues, like the designer children, are already here.
Witness the Octo-Mom media spectacle/circus/carnival and the results so far.
Response to Wesley J. Smith on the IEET Conference
_________________________
One of the main reasons I started this blog originally was to discuss Transhumanism and the ramifications for society.
I have strayed from that over the past 22 months because I found other subjects that seemed more important at the time. And issues of the NWO, esoteric symbolism, UFOs and alternate history will continue to draw my attention.
But needless to say, I still consider myself a transhumanist in an offhand kind of way because I’m still living and breathing due to technologies that were once considered impossible 30 short years ago. There were no ghosts, evil spirits, grey aliens, tricksters, possessions, priests, ministers or exorcisms involved in keeping me alive.
Just good old fashioned human research and tech.
And maybe a little luck.
Now according to the Multiverse Theory, we inhabit many parallel Universes at once, in fact, infinite.
Many possibilities exist at the same time, all it takes is for an event to be witnessed/measured in order to make it “real.” And just that very act alone causes an infinite number of “branches/possibilities” to come about.
Could there be an untold amount of parallel “Universes” in which I didn’t survive the operation?
According to many quantum theorists, yes.
Is this “woo-woo” mysticism writ large? A secular religion? Impossible?
Or just plain bullshit to calm the sheeple who couldn’t understand it anyway?
Many other theorists say yes to that.
If there really is such a thing as Transhumanism, perhaps these fundemental questions of existence can be answered.
_______________________________
Comments»
1. wordgeezer - March 7, 2009
“What do you think?”
Yeegads harumph! It’s like always, when I think of the absolute worst scenario it turns out to be just a watered down version of reality. Transhumans running around the planet that would put Dr. Seuss’s creations to shame. Like the survivalist’s version might have the legs of an ostrich, the fur of a llama, and the brain of Tesla. Mother nature isn’t going to condone this meddling with evolution at all…
2. opit - March 7, 2009
There’s a scenario that goes like : Give a Chimp a Loaded shotgun.
Or, look around at the world : do you think the beings that created our current situation are adequate to perceive the qualities necessary for enhanced viability ?
3. Carl Nemo - March 8, 2009
Onward to Utopia or Dystopia that is the question…?!
Seemingly the emergent globalist paradigm is experiencing stormy weather due to inherent flaws in the monetary system. Deregulation, Reaganomics, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of the 30’s and the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which released the dogs of avarice and greed upon the world have managed to set back the controllers agenda in a big way or has it…?
Aldous Huxley (deceased) wrote a book “Brave New World” written and published in the early thirties that lays out a societal paradigm around a transhumanist society. Surely most of dad’s readers have read this work, but if not, then I recommend you do so. It was themed around a time in the 26th century, an era that they refer to as A.F. (after Ford) in the novel.
At one time transhumanism would have seemed over the top, but with recent advances in gestational engineering it’s not farfetched at all and will surely come to pass if the shadowy planetary controllers can dispense with an “untidy”personal monetary system where individuals have direct access to specie (now fiat currency) which gives them a medium to assert their individuality.
It is imperative to their agenda to dispense with the concept of the individual relative to their global, statist goals for transhumanism and an engineered society to function with any measure of efficiency. I suspect the current international monetary crisis did not simply occur happenstance and they may try to sell governments of the world with the idea of dispensing with currency as we know of it and force people to use their new digital money system which would give them total and absolute control over outcomes from a nationalal down to the individual level. Accounts, both credits and debits could be both plumped and erased with simply a keystroke leaving people at the mercy of the system for their very sustenance and ability to operate unless they obey the rules. This possibly all to come from their engineered wreckage of the current “barbaric” system of specie, now simply fiat currency. Opposition to massive societal changes would become mute due to the fact that troublemakers could be ciphered out of the sytem to become simply renegades to be either exiled or systematically purged.
With this type of control, all outcomes are possible since the cost of anything from individual to government level outlays will simply become an abstraction; ie., digital monetary units. Inflation and recessions will be be a thing of the past because each individual and even governments will be rewarded or punished as a function of the world central banking cabal. The individual, as well former nation states will be mean nothing to them as they force their one world government and totally engineered transhumanist society upon the planet’s burgeoning population through their ultimate control of the monetary system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
There will be a rigid class system with each individual rewarded as a function of the same. The engineered human spawn will be reared in such a way that they will not question such a system or will they be dissatisfied because their needs will be met as a function of their engineered abilities.
Carl Nemo **==
Can you imagine a future where parents can pick the eye color, hair color, skin color and height of their new baby? Does that sound like some wild dream of the future? Well, the future is now. One Los Angeles fertility clinic is now offering to design babies to the exact specifications of the parents.
The Fertility Institute is calling this new technology “cosmetic medicine”. Do you want your daughter to look like Barbie? Done. Just order up a tall, light-skinned, green-eyed, daughter with blonde hair and the clinic will do the rest.
This technology is based on something called “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis”, or PGD, which doctors have been using the last few years to identify potentially deadly diseases in embryos. The technology has become so advanced that now doctors can not just spot potential diseases, but they can actually get enough information from an embryonic cell that they can identify thousands of characteristics of a single embryo.
Well, this day has finally arrived. Genetically engineered human beings and designer children born to parents who can afford to pay the fees.
And make no bones about it, this will happen.
The next question is; “Will this new technology be made available to the masses?”
What do you think?
New L.A. clinic lets parents genetically design their new baby
________________________
In a related note, Technological Singularity advocate Michael Anissimov’s blog Accelerating Future has a recent post in which a commentor mentions ectogenesis; The growing of a fetus in an artificial womb outside of a biological body.
This poses an ethical question that if the technology becomes economically viable, will abortions due to unwanted children become illegal again?
And if the reasons for abortion become moot, who, or what will raise these children if the parent(s) refuse to raise them?
Who pays the cost of growing the fetus to maturation, the State/taxpayers, or the unwilling parent(s)?
These issues, like the designer children, are already here.
Witness the Octo-Mom media spectacle/circus/carnival and the results so far.
Response to Wesley J. Smith on the IEET Conference
_________________________
One of the main reasons I started this blog originally was to discuss Transhumanism and the ramifications for society.
I have strayed from that over the past 22 months because I found other subjects that seemed more important at the time. And issues of the NWO, esoteric symbolism, UFOs and alternate history will continue to draw my attention.
But needless to say, I still consider myself a transhumanist in an offhand kind of way because I’m still living and breathing due to technologies that were once considered impossible 30 short years ago. There were no ghosts, evil spirits, grey aliens, tricksters, possessions, priests, ministers or exorcisms involved in keeping me alive.
Just good old fashioned human research and tech.
And maybe a little luck.
Now according to the Multiverse Theory, we inhabit many parallel Universes at once, in fact, infinite.
Many possibilities exist at the same time, all it takes is for an event to be witnessed/measured in order to make it “real.” And just that very act alone causes an infinite number of “branches/possibilities” to come about.
Could there be an untold amount of parallel “Universes” in which I didn’t survive the operation?
According to many quantum theorists, yes.
Is this “woo-woo” mysticism writ large? A secular religion? Impossible?
Or just plain bullshit to calm the sheeple who couldn’t understand it anyway?
Many other theorists say yes to that.
If there really is such a thing as Transhumanism, perhaps these fundemental questions of existence can be answered.
_______________________________
Comments»
1. wordgeezer - March 7, 2009
“What do you think?”
Yeegads harumph! It’s like always, when I think of the absolute worst scenario it turns out to be just a watered down version of reality. Transhumans running around the planet that would put Dr. Seuss’s creations to shame. Like the survivalist’s version might have the legs of an ostrich, the fur of a llama, and the brain of Tesla. Mother nature isn’t going to condone this meddling with evolution at all…
2. opit - March 7, 2009
There’s a scenario that goes like : Give a Chimp a Loaded shotgun.
Or, look around at the world : do you think the beings that created our current situation are adequate to perceive the qualities necessary for enhanced viability ?
3. Carl Nemo - March 8, 2009
Onward to Utopia or Dystopia that is the question…?!
Seemingly the emergent globalist paradigm is experiencing stormy weather due to inherent flaws in the monetary system. Deregulation, Reaganomics, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of the 30’s and the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which released the dogs of avarice and greed upon the world have managed to set back the controllers agenda in a big way or has it…?
Aldous Huxley (deceased) wrote a book “Brave New World” written and published in the early thirties that lays out a societal paradigm around a transhumanist society. Surely most of dad’s readers have read this work, but if not, then I recommend you do so. It was themed around a time in the 26th century, an era that they refer to as A.F. (after Ford) in the novel.
At one time transhumanism would have seemed over the top, but with recent advances in gestational engineering it’s not farfetched at all and will surely come to pass if the shadowy planetary controllers can dispense with an “untidy”personal monetary system where individuals have direct access to specie (now fiat currency) which gives them a medium to assert their individuality.
It is imperative to their agenda to dispense with the concept of the individual relative to their global, statist goals for transhumanism and an engineered society to function with any measure of efficiency. I suspect the current international monetary crisis did not simply occur happenstance and they may try to sell governments of the world with the idea of dispensing with currency as we know of it and force people to use their new digital money system which would give them total and absolute control over outcomes from a nationalal down to the individual level. Accounts, both credits and debits could be both plumped and erased with simply a keystroke leaving people at the mercy of the system for their very sustenance and ability to operate unless they obey the rules. This possibly all to come from their engineered wreckage of the current “barbaric” system of specie, now simply fiat currency. Opposition to massive societal changes would become mute due to the fact that troublemakers could be ciphered out of the sytem to become simply renegades to be either exiled or systematically purged.
With this type of control, all outcomes are possible since the cost of anything from individual to government level outlays will simply become an abstraction; ie., digital monetary units. Inflation and recessions will be be a thing of the past because each individual and even governments will be rewarded or punished as a function of the world central banking cabal. The individual, as well former nation states will be mean nothing to them as they force their one world government and totally engineered transhumanist society upon the planet’s burgeoning population through their ultimate control of the monetary system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
There will be a rigid class system with each individual rewarded as a function of the same. The engineered human spawn will be reared in such a way that they will not question such a system or will they be dissatisfied because their needs will be met as a function of their engineered abilities.
Carl Nemo **==