Japanese Anime and Solar Echoes (part 1)

I believe my first exposure to anime was Voltron, back in 1984. Although I somewhat enjoyed it as a kid, I eventually formed the opinion that most anime was mecha-based, a genre involving giant robots piloted by humans. I could never see this as realistically happening in the future—it just doesn't seem likely that the military will ever design colossal robots to fight with super-sized laser-swords. I also saw Akira, a popular anime movie which many consider as one of the greats, but it didn't appeal to me, either. I swore off anime and it was until the very early 2000's that I would give it another chance, at the urging of a fellow gamer. He insisted that anime was much more than mecha and a lot of it very different from Akira. I hesitated at his recommendation, an anime series with a ridiculous-sounding title, but I gave it another chance. I'm glad I did, because I can honestly say that his recommendation is what drew me back into anime--a stylized genre of animation where science-fiction flourishes. What was the anime that started it all for me? It was a series known as Cowboy Bebop.

The Future Human (part 5)

Genetic engineering may actually be able to solve some of the aforementioned problems that are likely to arise with human cloning. However, genetic engineering itself is a slippery slope that is just waiting to define the future of the human race. Movies like “Gattaca” address a very likely future where genetically modified children will be improved by families that can afford them. It is disturbing that our current law is somewhat vague regarding future restrictions in genetic tampering. Once even one alteration has been made to the human genome, the change is there forever, affecting all successive generations from that child. Today, companies are working on genetically engineering our food, and as usual, law is lagging behind technology, trying to keep up. Growth hormones and other chemicals already exist (as approved by the FDA) in our food and household products and are affecting our children, causing them to enter puberty several years earlier than normal. The course of natural human development has already been altered, and whether genetic manipulation enters the scene under the guise of savior or merely as a supposedly prudent option, we are likely to see it affect our society in profound ways within a few decades. Once it begins, we will have ushered the monster of eugenics into our failing world.

The Future Human (part 4)

In the future, we may see clones lobbying for equal rights and the right to marry clones or non-clones. This brings up questions of genetic degeneration. Would marrying a clone result in more frequent birth defects? Would clones marrying clones produce even more genetic risk to the clone-family child? In the Solar Echoes universe, if your character dies, he can be cloned, though with each successive cloning, he will degenerate until eventually it will be genetically unsafe to copy another copy. Your character, each time he is cloned, will sustain skill loss and personality changes until the last allowed, ninth generation of cloning, which produces a clone that is entirely mentally unstable. This can be a fun challenge to role-play in a game, but in reality, we don't yet know the genetic implications of repeated cloning. This perfectly sets the stage for yet another ethically questionable science lurking upon the horizon of of our future: genetic engineering.

The Future Human (part 3)

What if cloning someday becomes economical? Ethics often quickly erode where there is money to be made, and if cloning could produce a cheaper work-force for large corporations, we may have to worry about more than robots taking our jobs away. Assuming that someday technology will exist to produce a fully-grown human, a company may decide to generate its own work-force through a person's DNA, licensed for use. Someone might be able to go in for a job interview, prove themselves capable of a job, and simply submit their DNA to a company, then sit back and earn licensing fees as the company produces cloned workers from that DNA sample. In the Solar Echoes universe, for instance, the Union Guard clones its highly-specialized, deceased agents to save money on having to retrain new recruits. All of this, of course, assumes that somehow cloning will be able to capture a person's knowledge via a neurological “brain map,” but perhaps this will be possible some day in our future as well.

The Future Human (part 2)

Movies like “The Island” and books like “House of the Scorpion” address the issue of organ replacement through fully-grown clones which eventually discover their intended purpose and fight to escape having their organs harvested for someone else. Though it is a stretch to imagine that a civilized society would degenerate to this point, it does bring up the question of how we will consider fully-grown clones as a society. Are they individuals, or are they property? A clone is no different than a twin, yet it is likely that the individuals (or corporations) that paid for the clone to be made will insist on some legal guardianship or control over the clone. Clones might be incomplete copies of their source, missing certain aspects such as intelligence, long life, etc. This would quickly result in a class of “lesser humans” that may end up treated as property and denied basic human rights. Will we someday find ourselves in a society that has essentially established a system of slavery under the guise of clone-ownership?

The Future Human (part 1)

The path of humanity into the future will undoubtedly involve human cloning—it is only a matter of time before someone does it. How we navigate this issue may be what defines the future human. Though cloning is currently considered unethical and is illegal in most forms, it is interesting how there are so many variations of what is acceptable. Even when only considering the various restrictions in each of the 50 states in the U.S., there are a number of states that allow therapeutic cloning—also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer. This means that specific replacements for missing and damaged body parts can be grown in a lab, which is accomplished by extracting the nucleus of a cell and putting it into another egg that had its nucleus removed. The egg then divides and grows, and is used as a source of stem cells for the desired organ or tissue replacement. In some states, the law simply indicates that state funds may not be used towards cloning, so what about private funds? If you're interested in what your state allows, visit this website:

http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/human-cloning-laws.aspx

Robots and the Law (part 5)

One scary aspect of all this is that, while some restrictions might be made on robots for civilian use, our government may make a number of exceptions for government and military use. Already, civilians have less freedom in personal drone use than the government, and Big Brother seems perfectly fine with military drones being used to monitor and even eliminate it's own citizens--any that are deemed a threat to national security, of course. The more robots become a part of our society, the more it becomes necessary for laws to be implemented not just to protect us from the robots, but from those that might seek to use then to harm or control us.