An extinction level impact will occur in 25 years, what options does life on Earth have?

Or even Gattacca

 

can’t see what this had to do with artificial womb technology: it’s a totally different thing from gene editing.

 

Get 'em while they're young and vulnerable. Much easier to tinker with a single fertilised cell, a blastula, or a developing embryo in an artificial womb than inside a fully differentiated organism consisting of trillions of cells.

Gattaca - should have been named Gauaca as each codon is a nucleotide triplet and uracil substitutes for thymine in messenger RNA? But, yes, I believe transhumanism is going to be a major ethical issue sooner than we are prepared for.

 

Sure. And an artificial womb has nothing to do with it.

 

Well, if you say so. I can't be arsed to argue with you.

 

Since you can’t explain how the two things would be connected...

 

I did but apparently it wasn't enough for you. An artificial womb is not a necessity but it's a helpful enabler for practising gene manipulation. Doing gene manipulation of an embryo inside a human being is much more difficult. Of course, manipulation in vitro is also a possibility prior to implantation.

 

Ok, that makes sense, thanks. Not a necessity, as you say, but can be useful, sure.

 

Yes, I was merely extrapolating how artificial womb technology might be an enabler for transhuman modification. Most women might not be too keen on serving as vessels to bring such experiments into the world. Sourcing human egg and sperm cells is probably relatively easy - obtaining sperm cells being much easier, of course. Creating gametes by inducing interphase and two-stage meiosis in stem cells is another possibility and there's always somatic cell cloning - although at present I think it still suffers from the problem of retaining accumulated defects and telomere degradation as seen, for example, in Dolly the sheep and her sisters.

 

Hey we can have borg babies if we have artificial wombs, we'd also have to have nanotech take a giant leap but heck why not while we are all imagining stuff.

 

Biochemistry and life are indeed nanotechnology as that is simply a measure of the distance scale at which it happens -- 10^-9 m, the size of molecules.

 

Funny old thread this because I was reading this an ad on another browser tab came on for the Amazon production of Greenland about an ELE event

 

The Wiki page on artificial wombs is an interesting starting point for those interested in the technology, particularly its philosophical implications.

Artificial womb - Wikipedia

It does appear that there is ongoing research into the technology, although I suspect it's many years off for humans. It would require legal changes in countries such as the UK to extend the 14-day limit for the development of human embryos outside the body.

 

Fascinating.

 

We have got a bit side-tracked from what to do in case of an ELE. There is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen but that seems like a potential single point of failure (SPOF) to me. Wipe that out and we have nothing to fall back on. If artificial womb technology were available, we could potentially preserve animal gametes and embryos as well to allow mammal lines to be repopulated but I'm not sure how long these would remain viable in cryonic storage. Using suitable brood hosts from related species is another possibility. We're quite a way from reconstructing DNA and any necessary ancillary epigenetic proteins or other molecules directly from information stored as binary code, of course.