Do you think we're at the stage of making designer beings?

I was just watching some of the Resident Evil CG movies and got me thinking, the movies seem close to our present time period but their science is like super science. Every man and his dog seems able to conjure up walking weapons with little effort.

OK here in the real world how far would genetic science have to be to create some of the stuff we see in those movies like the absurdly huge giants and walking monsters?

 

Might be possible using DNA editing techniques. Scaling would have to take into account that a giant's horizontal cross sectional area of weight bearing structures such as the spine and legs would have to increase as the power 1.5 of linear dimension to cope with the increased mass, which increases as the cubic power of linear dimension.

 

Yeah but how far in our present future would we have to get before we can create BOW's ...... Bio Organic Weapons such as in Resident Evil, if at all even possible mind you.

 

Not familiar with Resident Evil but the creation of some form of zombies seems increasingly and frightening possible by the use of tailored viruses. Some might say we've already seeing zombies created by tailored Internet memes.

 

Allow me to introduce you.......



Beings like that....

He's like 7 ft tall or something.

 

I used to work with two people who were seven feet tall. Thankfully, they didn't tote big-ass guns around or wear intimidating masks. However, unlike everyone else, the company paid for them to fly first class rather than coach because of their size. The seat pitch in coach is bad enough on an 11-hour flight even if you're average height.

 

Yeah but in this instance that isn't a normal person.

Here's another image



Unfortunately you don't get a sense of scale with the characters here. Two normal sized people and something that should be 7 or more feet tall but you get the idea.

 

Yeah, creating such a being by DNA editing doesn't seem unfeasible nor does the creation of super soldiers. We'd need to work out which DNA sequences give chimpanzees their strength advantage over humans. I suspect that the loss of strength and increase in cerebral function might have been associated with the fusing of two chromosomes to form chromosome 2 that occurred in humans (the great apes all have an extra pair of chromosomes - 24 pairs compared to our 23 pairs).

 

Well in a way I am very glad we do not have BOW's one can imagine the chaos and carnage they could do.

 

The nearest we have are doped Russian athletes.

 

hmmmmmm

 

In Real Life, testing is being perfected where I can make my intended take a blood test which determines the likelihood of her, oh ... say ... ending up catching Alzheimer's by, or before, the age of 60. Knowing that, well in advance, would save me so much money. So much heartache. And allow me to then find the caliber of woman I want bearing my fruit. Between this and my own, personal preferences, otherwise ... I'm assured of having beautiful children, healthy & strong, who are more likely to be the hammer than the nail, in this thing we call Life. And that's not a bad bit of custom designing, I must say. I'm just so glad that such screening is becoming accessible, you know? This is Natural Selection, at its finest ...

 

Nietzsche would be proud of all this....

Hey we could make real life Nietzscheans.

OK how do I DNA bone blades?

 

Create a clone without a central nervous system and perform a transplant? I suspect trying to create a master race would be unsuccessful due to significant non-linearity in the genetics. You might well enhance one aspect of a genotype only to impact another negatively.

I read that vertebrate evolution has been effectively playing with shuffling basically the same genetic material for a couple of hundred million years in a sort of dynamic equilibrium. The human race might well be as good as it gets when it comes to developing intelligence with the genes that are available. The only way "up" the ladder now might be machine augmentation and we'd need to be smart enough to figure that out.

 

So no modifications to grow bone blades..... Damn Mind you if we did have those on our arms it would make life complicated for some people.

 

I assume some reference is being made to the Kevin Sorbo series Andromeda, which I have never been able to stomach. I guess bone blades would require purely localised genetic manipulation of protein synthesis, which is beyond what we currently envisage. It would also allow for regeneration of limbs, organs and so on. Such capabilities exist in nature so there is hope of breakthroughs in the future that exploit existing mechanisms.

 

Yes that's what I was thinking of hehe..... Mind you those were the most piss easy props ever to make for a TV show. Just a leather band around the arm with the blades attached.

 

Probably easier to increase muscle and skeletal strength and just wear the weaponry as and when required. Otherwise, it might just get in the way.

 

True that. A couple of things stood out in my memory.

One was talk about a minimal human
http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633.

To take high g forces and collision---ugh...
https://www.boredpanda.com/graham-b...fety-victorian-government-patricia-piccinini/

 

I've met people who look a bit like Graham. They're not monsters, just genetic outliers and they were nicer than some more "ordinary" looking people that I've met. Reminds me of the tinkering with the human genome described by Dougal Dixon in Man after Man: an Anthropology of the Future.