You would need parents, but that would defeat the purpose of the artificial womb in the first place.
you don't need parents. the ship could simulate parents, or BE the parent. all of this could create interesting psychological situations, which would be great for writing a story. how does the first crew-member cope with narcissm? perhaps for that reason, several humans must be raised in the first place, as a skeleton crew? what if something goes wrong? etc.etc.
in Clarke's
Songs of a Distant Earth, humans scatter colony ships throughout the galaxy because an unspecified defect in the sun leads to its early death. the story takes up when a newer model ship stops off on a successful colony, though this colony had lost contact with the others. in Clarke's story, the human population of this (and presumably other) colonys were 'grown' in much this way, and the first generation are socialized by their ship's AI. the world is in some ways idealic, free of the widespread hate we have, and incidentally free of religion (except for a single Buddhist artifact which plays no significant role: like me and many intellectuals in general, Clarke had a soft spot for Buddhism, which itself is highly intellectual).
it certainly would be the cheapest way to do it.
i think cost is something hard to predict at this point. it's not just raw materials we're talking here. i think it's hard to imagine how expensive the equipment you describe might be. and how expensive would the necessary AI programming be? what if there's a radical breakthrough in the production of particle accelerators? lots and lots of what ifs.
i try to keep in mind what money represents: work
(well, at least in marxian economic theory, and despite the failure of his thoery of communism, contemporary economists still make use of his theories on the fuctioning of capitalism).
of course, that doesn't tell any of us which engine and ship design method would be employed, and i think the most likely answer is: many of them. our various space probes and rockets rely on different designs that vary based on a number of factors; why would it be different in the future?
of course, under a different governmental model, it might not be so much an issue of cost as one of, "do it or we'll kill you."
Very true. One must remember one thing about Maternal Effects Genes, though. So far, all the info I've found indicates that the MEG work more like a general blueprint or instructions for bike or something. They tell the embryo where all the parts physically go (head here, arm here, heart in this orientation). It's still up to the embryo to be able (genetically speaking) to undertand that signal and build those parts. While we could alter the Mother's MEG to say give us another set of arms, it will be the embryo's DNA that determines the length, strength, etc.
my mind is teeming with the possibilities.
I couldn't agree more with preserving biological diversity. Here's why. The enzymes we wrok with can really be found anywhere. DNA Polymerase, the protein that copies DNA is found in all living things. It has the same function in all living things. Now while I did say that our genes were essentially the same across individuals, as we move across species barriers, we start to find subtle differences in the genes. Thermus Aquatus has DNA Polymerase just like us; does all the same functions. But its different. TAQ, as its called, evolved in hot springs. All of its proteins are remarkably heat resistant where ours will denature (fall apart) at the same temperature. I use TAQ DNA Polyermase in my reactions when I worked in the Lab. I couldn't use human DNA Polymerase (or many; if not most others) as those proteins couldn't handle the temperatures I was running my reactions at. So while, we all have pretty much the same basic enzymes functionally, there are a lot of sublte differences that can be very important.
sweet! of course, just because it's a good reason to preserve biological diversity doesn't the powers that be actually will
low caloric/ high vitamin intake ("caloric restriction") will increase the lifespan of a mouse by 50%. while at this time, it doesn't look like it will be the same in humans,
there clearly are genetically controlled aging mechanisms. synergistic effects for gene manipulation/caloric restriction are thinkable.
i'd started looking into research on ageing (senescence), but hadn't wanted to bring it up in here. there's also a researcher out there who has this sort of cash reward for contributions that might help us delay, halt, or even somewhat reverse ageing. interesting stuff, for sure. i want to return to this later (in this or another post, that is; i'm not trying to ask anyone to wait before you discuss it).
denyasis, please allow me to elaborate...
i assume you mean to elaborate for my and others' sake - denyasis worked in a genetics lab at one point
he's been filling in a lot of the conceptual gaps i can't do on my own on wikipedia
All this gene stuff is interesting too, but while we may have the capacity to perform such radical mutations/alterations to our bodies within the next 50 years, I doubt that many people would be willing to accept these things (but then again, maybe the only people who would want to live in a space colony would love this sort of thing too. Like sci-fi nerds ). But most people would probably think that they weren't as "human", and refuse to have leaves implanted in their heads or whatever.
In my mind, the question we have to answer much before we can even think of space colonization is:
"what does it mean to be human?"
ah... this is the question underlying my desire to write these books, and i might well have a very different perspective and background in terms of answering it. as i mentioned briefly in my OP, i trained as a sociologist: more specifically, i trained as a linguistic-cultural sociologist in the
symbolic interactionist tradition. but i would describe myself equally as a philologist (i double minored in creative writing and Indian religious literature).
but moving on, the primary questions among sociologists concern society, but there are deeper rooted questions regarding the nature of the human condition that underscore all the social scientific and humanitarian disciplines.
Clifford Geertz, one of the most important anthropologists ever, might likely say that to be human is to be entangled in webs of meaning we ourselves have spun. more recent work tries to examine some of the ways that this is biologically rooted, for example, in
Homo Aestheticus, Ellen Dissanayake writes:
At first glance, the fact that the arts and related aesthetic attitudes vary so widely from one soceity to another would seem to suggest that they are wholly learned or "cultural" in origin rather than, as I will show, also biological or "natural". One can make an analogy with language: learning to speak is a universal, innate predisposition for all children even though individual children learn the particular language of the people among whom they are nurtured. Similarly, art can be regarded as a natural, general proclivity that manifests itself in culturally learned specifics such as dances, songs, performances, visual display, and poetic speech.
in
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson describes humans as the first and only known (to itself) species that can be characterized by "gene-culture co-evolution," and further claims that we are on the brink of yet another level: violitional evolution. he concludes by saying that the direction of such evolution is ultimately an ethical question, and reflects on the nature of ethics.
he questions the extent to which ethics are cultural and therefore mallable, or biologically rooted. some are biological to be sure. incest taboos, for example, are a universal: individuals are almost invariably repulsed by the idea of sexual interaction with someone they were very close to during formative years, which is typically only family members.
as a sociolgist-philologist, i can't help but attend to the diversity of culture. language and symbolic communication isn't just a mechanism of description, it's
the mechanism of imagination and therefore action. anyone who's multi-lingual can confirm for you that some ideas simply don't translate. words are rooted in a whole web of culture, associated with unique events that constitute what can be called collective memory.
this writing project of mine is very much a thought experiment. my interest in the hard science of it is strongly associated with making the setting more believable, though it's also a great excuse to learn lots of intersting things (as several people have pointed out, one great thing about being a writer is that everything you do and learn can be substance for your writing).
establishing human socities in entirely separate star systems seems like the perfect fictional method to facilitate the kinds of genetic (and cultural) drift that pique my interest and imagination. i certainly see that there must be limits to our culture that are established by our biology. and there are certainly ethical-cultural limits to how we'll evolve ourselves. if history provides much of a clue, there can't be too much divergence within a single human biome. when one subgroup of humans develops and advantage, the rest either follow suit or die out (are killed off). but if you separate groups of people by light years, such that they can't physically interact with each other without expending great resources, and you've got a recipe for divergent evolution.
and as millertime pointed out, this is also a basis for conflict. however much ideology and propoganda go into wars, i believe they're ultimately economic in nature. i think what we'd see most is a lot of superstition and hatred, and a "natural" kind of segregation. should, however, the resources of one solar system nearly die out, it seems to me it'd be exceedingly easy to justify an interstellar war.
incidentally, though, i don't think there's a reason to believe humans wouldn't want to give up their humanness rooted in current biology. well, let me back up. there are plenty of reasons to believe it, but they don't necessarily mean it won't happen.
first, there are already many examples of ways in which humans want to engineer their own biologies, so to speak. costmetic surgery, body building, etc., can probably be called 'minor' without much dissent. they're more like exagerations of the biology we have. transgender surgery is a greyer area. greyer still is 'body modification' (aka body art, though artistry isn't always a primary motivation).
the subject of my 80-page ethnographic honors thesis was body modification and self-identity. long story short, one of the things i found was that body modifiers felt more natural after altering their bodies (as measured by their sense of mental well-being and integration of their identities). i'm not just talking tattoos and piercings, either. some of the more extreme forms of body modification include amputation (from digits to limbs to... other body parts).
another major part of my work was to disprove the notion that these people have some kind of mental illness, and i hope i don't need to go down that road again here -- especially because it's not central to my point. my point is that, while the majority of people might seem content in the bodies they grow into, all people typically invest a great deal of effort into managing their bodies, more than we usually recognize anyway. i mean, brushing our teeth and getting vaccinations of forms of 'biological intervention' as it were, and my work goes to show that culture bears greatly on the level that to which intervention can be taken.
so, that's sort of my pre-preview, or enough of it anyway. i didn't intend to frame it this way originally, but this is how it ended up. i hope you find all this social science an interesting contribution, even if a lengthy one (i certainly find it interesting, that's why i majored in it!)
...and yea, i'll probably have at least one planet peopled by tattoo enthusiasts
