In the previous post, A New Global Empire Dominated by Artificial Intelligence, we covered three main points :
- A standard definition of an empire (an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority)
- The interconnectedness of the ~200 global nation states (I.e a economic crisis or pandemic such as COVID-19 will affect the other nation states)
- An introduction to bioengineering and artificial intelligence’s potential impact towards weapons, vehicles, and humans.
Consequently, this post will delve deeper into what bioengineering is in order to give context on its potential impact towards humans.
Bioengineering is the biological alteration of an organism’s capabilities, shape, or makeup in order to create a modified version of an organism.
A common example of bioengineering is castration. Humans have castrated bulls to create oxen, a less aggressive and easier to train specimen to pull ploughs, for thousands of years.
In the 21st century, humans can now bioengineer a biologically defined male through surgical and hormonal treatments to effectively change a males’ gender to female. More miraculous is what scientists can do now to organisms — consider this 1996 photograph of a mouse that appeared in newspapers and on television:
Many associate the Ice Age with the Wooly Mammoth. These mammals roamed the cold tundra of Europe, Asia, and North America from about 300,000 years ago up until about 10,000 years ago.
Due to the advancements in bioengineering, this extinct species may come back to life. A team of scientists and entrepreneurs have recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths found frozen in Siberian Ice. Their plan is to take a fertilized egg-cell of a present-day elephant. Replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA, and implant the egg in the womb of an elephant. After about twenty-two months, they expect the first mammoth in 5,000 years to be born (Harari 402) (A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth).
The Neanderthal Genome Project began in 2006 with the intention to sequence the neanderthal genome. George Church, Professor of Harvard University, recently suggested with the completion of the Neanderthal Genome Project, scientists can now implant reconstructed Neanderthal DNA into a Sapiens ovum, thus producing the first Neanderthal child in over 30,000 years (Harari 402). However, the question that conjures is why stop at Neanderthals? Why not design better Sapiens (humans) ?
According to Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, the abilities, needs and desires of Homo Sapiens have a genetic basis, and the Sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice (Harari 402).
In the short term, perhaps in a few decades, genetic engineering and other forms of biological engineering could enable us to make significant changes not only to our physiology, immune system, and life expectancy, but also to our intellectual and emotional capacities.
Ultimately, these ever increasing advancements in biology, technology, and engineering again conjure questions around when we will start to see the first genius bio-engineered human.
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