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Comment by KorematsuFredt

5 years ago

Yes. That would be the day. I would love to have many children but I hate the notion of pregnancy. Once we can also grow them in labs I think it would be really great day for humanity. You could ship only embroyos to Mars and then let them grow into babies. (You will still need people to take care of them but we can ship only few hundred people with few million embroyos to colonize a distant planet.

Totally agree. The current state of gestation is untenable. The child-bearer is sick for nine months and pretty much incapacitated for a good portion of that towards the end. Their lifestyle choices can cause harm to the fetus. At the end of it all, they face a significant risk of death.

In-vitro gestation is probably not that far off technologically - we’re already very close with sheep (there was a very successful artificial womb experiment there) and the age of viability keeps getting lower. I hope that regulators are willing to take the leap to human trials so we can finally do away with pregnancy for those who want to avoid it but still want children.

  • The current state of gestation was the same state as of 10,000 years ago. I don't know how you can term it as untenable.

    I wouldn't be so optimistic for lab-grown humans. If we are going to be selecting for the best physiological characteristics, we will inevitably end up with a far more homogeneous species. That, apart from all the genetic restrictions the powers that be will create in such an environment.

    • I’m not suggesting we select for physiological characteristics- I think eugenics is a very bad idea.

      I googled the word untenable and I misused it. I just meant bad. Pregnancy is sucks and has always sucked. Most of the world was shitting in its own drinking water supplies until recently - pretty bad. But we invented plumbing and fixed it. I think humanity should do the same thing but for pregnancy.

300 adults to take care of 3,000,000 million kids and maintain the colony. Talk about overworked parents.

  • 300 adults have to take care of may be 600, those 600 can then take care of 1200 and so on. Thought this forum was for folks with basic intelligence.

    • that solves the genetic bottleneck, but how do you solve the cultural bottleneck? you can send tons of media very compactly but that's a shadow of what you get living in another active culture.

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