If All Humans Are Artificially Made

I make a point of reading Brave New World at least once every 5 to 10 years. Everytime there is something new from the book that has actually become reality.

I wonder if the book is going to run out in my lifetime.

 

There is also a book called Toys, written by James Patterson. It is about an agent who lives in a government, rule by genetic engineered super humans called Elites. They hate natural humans for some reason, and their leader wants to wipe them all out. When the main character discover he is a normal human, he goes on a run with his sister and helps the rebel humans fight against the Elites to survive. It is a dumb cliche' novel, written for cash grab. But it reminds me of the setting I am working on.

 

Yeah, and after the humans won, they enslave the Elites. I guess you can care about no one in that book.

 

You should read The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. It deals with a lot of concepts like time dilation and future society, but also covers this artificial human thing you're talking about.

The main character is a naturally 'birthed' human, but technology has advanced so much that he serves alongside artificially created humans, who are all bred and modified in a labs. The book shows a few debates between the 'birthed' and 'tanked', and shows some of the problems, and advantages, of a totally monoform humanity.

 

Sounds interesting.

 

I suspect the following things:

1 - No tabboos about sex. Not quite as far as Brave New World suggests, where it's considered rude not to shag anyone who asks, and giant drug fueled orgies are the norm, but I think that without the reproductive part of it there would be much less of a stigma towards everyone involved.
2 - Some form of stigma towards people who are (or are not) naturally born. The way you describe it I think there's a stigma towards natural born humans. I think that might manifest itself the same way being gay did in the past; seen as something unnatural and weird and icky; after all it makes you literally less of a person than being artificially born.
3 - Really really strict controls on who can have children. It stands to reason that since over-population is a major human problem that no we are letting science do the work we can control extremely carefully who can have children and we would do that, even though that's faintly monstrous.
4 - Human life devalued to a really significant degree. Humans become more homogeneous and more similar and don't see any particular value in human life. When you grow up knowing that you can easily be grown in a lab then that does something to your view of the value of life.
5 - Black market people growing people/clones/whatever for their own nefarious purposes.

 

Indeed if artificial humans become the domain species, then the natural borns will be treated lesser. They probably will go underground or try to start an uprising.

 

I know I already responded but I've been thinking about this for a while and I've come to some interesting conclusions.

I don't think we'd ever get to the point where we just grow most humans. you have to think about not only what would happen in this case, but how did you get there?

Here's how I see it happening. Some people simply can't have children. Sterile, sick, handicapped, and gay people all want to have children but can't. There is a GIGANTIC market around helping people in those situations now. We already have ways of combining eggs and sperm without a woman, we just need a surrogate to put them back into. Figuring out how to do that artificially will be a gold mine.

Once that technology exists, why go through pregnancy at all? We take babies out prematurely if they're are problems (sometimes it happens on its own too.). So we're already surcomventing the natural gestation period and premature babies can be just fine and as technology gets better, we'll be able to do it for longer and longer.

Pregnancy is tough on a woman's body and birth is painful, so doctors will start recommending that the frailer women of our species simply give birth earlier and earlier. This will happen over generations, the technology will seriously outpace this and it'll be engrained as as normal as an epidural is now.

After many generations of that, we'll have the social understanding and trust in the technology to take a fertilized egg out very early in and gestate it in a hospital like a premature room now.

Conception will still for the most part come naturally. We're not giving up sex as a species and I find it less likely that we'll voluntarily all be sterilized. So once a couple finds out they're pregnant, they go to the hospital. They extract it, place it in an artificial womb and the parents go through their normal prebaby routine to get ready for when it's time for it to come home. They'll do the equivalent of posting sonograms on Facebooks with literal picture of the growing fetus and have that generations equivalent of baby showers.

Truly artificial conception will be available for those who can't conceive naturally but still wants kids, but it wouldn't be the norm.



Of course, a brutal enough dictator could force it, but history has shown that those types of reigns last two, maybe three generations at the most. Even Caligula/Hueng/Stalin had to die.

 

What if the people born from tubes cannot have babies of their own because how they were designed to be perfect? It could be a side effect or a eugenic conspiracy to change the course of human evolution for the sake of perfection of the species. I also thought using this concept as a satire could be entertaining for the story.

 

A lot of these comments remind me of that movie Gattaca.

Realistically, it'd probably be a lot like that movie if we started creating humans artificially to make them perfect, where you make them based on the occupation you want them to have. Then eventually everyone will be artificial o:

Also, if two artificial humans do have sex and have a kid, wouldn't the kid not be exactly normal? I think so many genetic changes would give any natural kids bad effects.

 

I think it depends on how the artificial humans can develop their own kids if they can get pregnant. If they produce disfigure kids, then they probably would be forbidden from having sex without protection( unless they go underground and breed mutant freaks). It would be like Gattaca and maybe some natural born humans would try to adapt into the artificial society for the sake of achieving their own goals. Life would be tough for those who aren't born in test tubes.