For me “How long could I get away with driving like an ABSOLUTE ASSHOLE all the time before I lost my licence or had an accident.” Speed limits, red lights, stop signs… forget them all. Every day I have to drive sensibly and obey the law because without my licence I dont have a job, and every day I see at least one person driving like an absolute moron and I wonder…
I’d like to experiment with other non-capitalist based systems in various points of infra-structure of my country.
I don’t think this “only make money in all things, all the time” shit is a smart way to manage numerous complex systems.
I don’t have all the answers on how that shakes out, but I think the first move would be to only allow professionals experienced in respective fields to set up these experiments. Existing profitable systems and overseeing corporations be damned.
Remember: Infinite growth is not sustainable in any natural system!
I’d like an extensive dietary breakdown of the potential benefits or harms of eating the flesh and organs of humans with net worths of over 10 million, 100 million, 1 billion, 10 billion, 100 billion dollars.
That would need to be a wide ranging study with a very large sample size, just to be sure we get the most robust dataset we can. Better to use all of them than just a small sample.
Tons of drug tests on children to know the exact effect they have on development. Also anti-aging research to see how much you can potentially slow down aging and how the self repair mechanism of children works with respect to aging. The results could really give us a great insight into aging well and being healthy later in life.
To clarify, I don’t want to see them done, performed, do them myself or anything adjacent because they’re deeply wrong and dangerous.
Isn’t the main issue in aging the limit of cell division? Cells can only divide a certain number of times.
Maybe find some crazy ass backwards way to produce more stem cells in a person that the body delivers to key areas?
That theory is very outdated. People found out that telemeres are important but not the main driver of aging. A lot of research is Nov going on with senescent cells and epigenetics which looks more promising.
Oh wow. That’s neat.
I want to see how far you can push performance of the human body, and make the results compete against each other. All the bonkers whacky surgeries you can think of: limb lengthening, bone strengthening, replace their organs with bigger, stronger versions.
All the drugs: hgh, steroids, any performance enhancing substance you can pump into an athlete.
Have sports scientists raise children so that they’re born into a dedicated training regime for running or swimming.
Then make them compete against each other in the trans-human olympics. I want to see someone do the 100m in 3 seconds, I want to see someone not have to come up for air during the freestyle, I want someone to throw a javelin 2 miles, I want bioengineered mutants doing gymnastics routines
You’ve got some close competition, but I think you win the most Mengele response of the thread.
So basically unit 731 stuff
Unit 731 was garbage science. About the only thing worthwhile that came from that was learning how better to treat hypothermia. Most of their experiments boiled down to “If we do terrible things to people, how much will they suffer?” with the answer being “A lot.”
It doesn’t take live experiments to learn things like surgery without anesthesia is less effective, or that not treating people infected with horrible diseases causes them to die in agony.
This sounds like something in the dystopian future where they take volunteers from “the poors” so thier families can survive if they win…
Eugenics. Not the racist BS that was done in the past, but really pushing the limit to see if we can breed super humans. Genetic editing to make humans immune to cancer or disease. Increased lifespan. Resistance to radiation. Smarter. Stronger. Better.
Arguably, this kind of thing is actually somewhat of a necessity if we ever want to explore the stars. We are far too fragile in our current bodies to survive the difficulties and vastness of space.
Honestly, I’d be super stoked if we could just get rid of all the actual serious defects, just, whack a few moles that really super suck for anyone who gets the short end of the genealogical stick.
And by that I mean like
- Huntington’s Disease
- Early onset and regular non early onset Arthritis
- My entire family bloodline is prone to heart issues/cancer type beat
- Crohn’s
Testing a ton of medication for pregnant/breastfeeding women. So much medication I couldn’t take, simply because it’s not considered ethical to have the studies done, since it could affect the baby in all sorts of ways. Which we can’t clear up without the studies. So annoying.
Eugenics taken to their logical conclusion.
As the parent of a child on the spectrum that is very aware of what such practices would mean for him, I would never agree with it in real life. But I do have a fascination with what we could do if we just said the hell with ethics and started trying to breed “perfect” people.
The movie gattaca does this well. No murder or cleansing. But you can have a natural birth or IVF with the Impurities stripped out. “The best of you.”
“Dirty” people were limited to shit like janitors and all high paying jobs would sneak a test in to filter out anyone “un-pure”
Nice, thanks for the movie recommendation. Gonna have to check that one out.
Like, ok, let’s try to breed the perfect person–fine. But do we have to kill everyone else? Why is genocide seemingly always on the agenda? Lol
Eugenics doesn’t mean killing anyone, just improve the genetic qualities of humans.
You could do selective breeding, incentivized breeding (entice the right candidates with whatever) ,gene manipulations, etc…
But I understand that proponents of eugenics usually have extreme right wing views, and why you would come to that conclusion.
Nice try Elon
How many clowns can you fit inside an unmodified VW Bug if survivability is no longer a concern.
Cloning is the first one that comes to mind for me. If you could somehow avoid the horrors of the process of learning a reliable methodology the result wouldn’t necessarily be unethical.
We can do sheep. And thus pretty much know how that would go for humans.
All natural eugenics. No drugs or engineering, just good old fashioned artificial selection driven by fully consenting paid volunteers.
Probably seeing what amount of pain each asshole driver can suffer before they die. Hope you’re at least a 9, OP!
Isolate a bunch of babies together, with food etc, and see how they develop their own language and society.
Not exactly the same, but suggests probably it would not turn out well. https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/histoire_bleu06.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments
I already knew about Psamtik’s experiment but I thought I had a bigger memory of it than what I was able to find quickly. There’s a good starting place if you want to look deeper but I’m not that interested
I silently lament that this experiment cannot be done at least once every couple weeks. I think it would be the most fascinating experiment to observe. Watching a new language develop naturally in real time!
Really interesting idea.
It may not be possible, but I want to gradually replace a person’s brain piece-by-piece with the same areas from other brains and see if they retain their sense of self when none of the original brain remains.
The brain of Theseus!
We can satisfy this curiosity with a fair amount of scientific evidence.
Of course, most regions of the brain are so densely and variably interconnected that the technical difficulty of “replacing parts” precedes the ethical consideration by many, many years. But we do have a great deal of evidence for how our subjective sense of self is affected by “losing/removing parts” of the brain. Patients are often unaware of change unless evidence for it is overwhelming, and even then are adept at healing/reconciling instinctively. It appears that this is just something brains have evolved to do.
So while the technology (and sheer artistry) required to match and “stitch” these networks is quite staggering, basically magic, it is theoretically possible that a patient could have every part replaced without recognizing any continuity errors in the chimeric stages, until one day they wake up as a completely different person.
And keep the old pieces, in the end assemble them back together and see what the differences are
How would you know if your sense of self is changing? Surely you always feel like yourself else you wouldn’t be you…?
Surely you always feel like yourself
This is disproven by considering dysphoria exists
Raise a kid in a sensory deprivation chamber, with one exception: a monitor that only shows gen alpha brainrot videos. When they’re like 14 drop them off in a populated area and see what happens
Realistically would just end up a developmentally stunted invalid. There was an example from some book, I don’t remember which, where there was a SE Asian woman who lived with her family and had a baby.
The family was ashamed, so they forced the girl to keep the baby by itself in the attic. She would go to work most of the day, and come back to take care of it when home. That was the total extent of interaction and stimulation the baby got. It ended up being severely stunted and never learned to talk.
Essentially young children need human interaction which includes warmth and constant validation, caring for, etc
If you interrupt that in any way, you end up with a feral child who is permanently stunted.
They wouldn’t be able to walk at all because of floating in water for their entire life.
