GodsendFollow

Yeah, impossible is a strong word and I shouldn't have used it. I just don't see it as very likely.



True. My bet is on the nanotech tho :P. Biased I guess.

Ultimately tho, you won't really care if the guy that's shrugging off bullet is doing it because he his a transgenic or because he has a nanotech exoskeleton...

For some reason tho, you can't post something about cloning without getting a rise out of people, but nobody seems to give a damn about nanotech. Funny like that.

God's, maybe. Pirahna have been around far longer than we've been dinking with genetics.

Maybe the natives had cows they needed skeletized in under five minutes?

Research on Pygocentrus goes back at least as far as 1844. I didn't see anything implying they were anything other than naturally occuring predatory fish.

On the failed crossbreeding gone awry front, you have your "killer bees"; the result of crossbreeding hardier, aggressive African bees with gentler though more fragile American/European honeybees in an attempt to make honeybees that could better survive the winter and pesticide use. Instead we just got a bunch of pissy bees that refuse to make honey, sting the crap out of people and force the weaker native* honeybees out of the area.

*Honeybees are actually native to Europe, not the Americas and were imported as an agricultural resource. Prior to their introduction, pollination in North America was done by other insects, wind, birds, etc. And now you know the rest of the story.

Awww, ol' Rexy isn't that bad. He makes a great lead minion, and I don't even have to pay to feed him. He's housebroken too!

Heh. This was the plotline for a really cheesy made for tv film IIRC. Not "real" at all.

The killer bees are a good example though. Although I'm not sure if that "proves" any point at all. They are the result of good old fashioned cross breeding, which nature has been doing all along whether we humans help it along or not. There was no cloning, or genetic modification involved.

You're aware that virtually all the species of dogs you know of are the result of the same kind of cross breeding, right? Same thing with horses, cows, and a zillion other "domestacated" animals. This is not new at all. We just now have a way to do it that may be more efficient then spending generations cross breeding and hoping we get a combination that works.


Um... But none of that's cloning really.


As to this:



Proven where? On shows like "Alien Autopsy", and the "Conspiracy Theorist weekly"? What is proven is that the military has as much difficulty getting budget for new technology as anyone else. And yes, that includes programs to feed the hungry.

Um... The only marked difference is that while the percentage of budget spent on feeding/clothing/whatever the needy has increased markedly in the last 50 years, we haven't managed to put a significant dent in the actual number of needy people (if you want to know why, I'll tell you). During that same period of time, while the relative budget percentage spent on military has *decreased* I don't think even the dimest individual would say that we haven't improved our military hardware by orders of magnitude in every area. We have destroyers today that could take out fleets of WW2 era ships. We have single tanks that could take out whole squads of WW2 era tanks. We have aircraft that could shoot down any WW2 aircraft, and precisely bomb a specific target without requiring that 20 square blocks around the target be destroyed in the process.


Yet we still have people lined up to recieve wellfare benefits every day. Governments make assessments on spending based on where they are actually going to be able to get something back for the money they spend. Also, I'd like to point out that if you want to get very literal, there are certain "classic" responsibilites that a government has to its people. Maintaining a military is one of them. Feeding the hungry, is not.

Erm... that was Copernicus.

I miss him.

Oh hey, Gie, no problem. Just never hijack my threads again and we'll get along just fine. I bite very rarely - promise, sweetcheekles!

Hehe.

Atta boy, now get mommy some of her "special" soda from the fridge.

Lol. Ok. That was funny. You could always "channel" him, if you wanted... ;)

Um... And technically, the statement was correct. Copernicus theorized that the earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around. Galileo made the first scientific observations of the movements of various bodys around eachother, and was the first to apply mathmatical equations to those movements. He did more or less "prove" what Copernicus had first theorized. Then Newton came along, and made the startling realization that those same equations could be applied to the movement of all objects (like a falling apple), not just big things out in the heavens, and came up with a "force" called gravity that accounted for all the above movements.


I think the significant point about Galileo isn't exactly what he was jailed for (and excommunicated for!), but *why*. He was jailed for attempting to apply science in an area that many felt only God should tread. After all, the heavens where God's domain and man had no business attempting to meddle in it.

That's the relevancy. The basic arguments against cloning and genetics are the exact same ones that got Galileo in trouble way back then. Anytime you say we're trying to "play God", you are using that same old argument.

You'd be hard pressed to find any modern piece of technology that would exist today if a whole list of scientists hadn't decided to buck "conventional wisdom" and "play god". I think it's an irrelevant argument really.

For the record i also happen to agree that was a stupid decision.

The best thing about cloning is that all the kids who want to look the same as each other will be able to!

Additionally, all the black Converse All-Star Hightop wearing non conformists can all look equaly diffrent!

I'm all for cloning for the purposes of organ transplants and the like. Could you clone skin for skin grafts for burn victims? If so, I would see this as a great boon.

I do not think they ever resolved the problem of "old" cells as experienced by Dolly the sheep. But I haven't seen any articles on her in quite a while, so there may be new information I don't know.

Regarding the topic of the movie as it relates to real science, when they clone someone, isn't the end result a fertalized egg? I mean it's not like they clone someone and they are created at the age of 6 or 10 or something, right (except in the movies, of course)?

Those horses bolted years ago. Every time we go into a third world country and administer vaccinations to local populations we are interfering with human race maintenance. Same goes for delivering food to areas hit by famine. After all, we are then having a direct and dramatic impact on mortality rates in those areas. It may be more in keeping with natural processes to allow those populations to their own devices, but is it right, according to our value systems, to allow people to starve or suffer diseases when we can aid them?

We are now seeing some of the consequences of our altruism. Increasing populations in areas that lack the natural resources to support them. In part because their method of compensating for high infant mortality rate is to have many, many children. This eventually becomes a cultural norm, which is infinately more difficult to alter than their need for food and medicine.

I'm not sure what my point is here except that these are issues that highlight our technology is sometimes outpacing our social development, which is creating some very complex ethical questions.