More realistically, because the technology could turn eggs into a manufactured resource, it could supercharge the path to designer children. If doctors can make a thousand eggs for a patient, they’ll also be able to fertilize all of them and test to find the best resulting embryos, scoring their genes for future health or intelligence.
Better still you can do it iteratively. Take cells from one person and turn them into a few hundred eggs. Take cells from a second person and turn them into sperm (or conceivably the same person.) Fertilize the eggs with the sperm, grow them out to blastocysts, biopsy, and sequence. Pick the embryo with the most desirable genotype score, turn the rest of the blastocyst’s cells into sperm and eggs. Rinse and repeat. You’ll end up converging towards the highest genotype score possible given the parental material.
Edit: you probably want to use two embryos in each round to avoid a local maxima. I’m sure someone will work out the math when the time comes.
Yes. That would be the day. I would love to have many children but I hate the notion of pregnancy. Once we can also grow them in labs I think it would be really great day for humanity. You could ship only embroyos to Mars and then let them grow into babies. (You will still need people to take care of them but we can ship only few hundred people with few million embroyos to colonize a distant planet.
Totally agree. The current state of gestation is untenable. The child-bearer is sick for nine months and pretty much incapacitated for a good portion of that towards the end. Their lifestyle choices can cause harm to the fetus. At the end of it all, they face a significant risk of death.
In-vitro gestation is probably not that far off technologically - we’re already very close with sheep (there was a very successful artificial womb experiment there) and the age of viability keeps getting lower. I hope that regulators are willing to take the leap to human trials so we can finally do away with pregnancy for those who want to avoid it but still want children.
The current state of gestation was the same state as of 10,000 years ago. I don't know how you can term it as untenable.
I wouldn't be so optimistic for lab-grown humans. If we are going to be selecting for the best physiological characteristics, we will inevitably end up with a far more homogeneous species. That, apart from all the genetic restrictions the powers that be will create in such an environment.
I’m not suggesting we select for physiological characteristics- I think eugenics is a very bad idea.
I googled the word untenable and I misused it. I just meant bad. Pregnancy is sucks and has always sucked. Most of the world was shitting in its own drinking water supplies until recently - pretty bad. But we invented plumbing and fixed it. I think humanity should do the same thing but for pregnancy.
that solves the genetic bottleneck, but how do you solve the cultural bottleneck? you can send tons of media very compactly but that's a shadow of what you get living in another active culture.
Colonizing mars would be pretty much like Colonization of USA minus the genocide of natives.
The poorest and hated folks would be the first to go to mars, (think of illegal immigrants in USA, both democrats and republicans might agree to give citizenship of their relatives if they volunteer to go to Mars) these people would eventually build their own civilization would be envy of earth.
Better still you can do it iteratively. Take cells from one person and turn them into a few hundred eggs. Take cells from a second person and turn them into sperm (or conceivably the same person.) Fertilize the eggs with the sperm, grow them out to blastocysts, biopsy, and sequence. Pick the embryo with the most desirable genotype score, turn the rest of the blastocyst’s cells into sperm and eggs. Rinse and repeat. You’ll end up converging towards the highest genotype score possible given the parental material.
Edit: you probably want to use two embryos in each round to avoid a local maxima. I’m sure someone will work out the math when the time comes.