The team presenting on the designer babies started off the presentation with a short skit. A story of a mother-to-be trying to decide what's best for her kid. How each area of experts depict what is good and bad for the future of designer babies.
Similar to every technology available out there, over human progress entails a trade off that we cannot forgo. Each individial has a stake in how we progress and all humans are rational when it comes to decision making. The future of designer babies is restricted by the question of ethics. The playing of human genome to create the perfect human. Makes me wonder why society cannot accept the future of designer babies when we are already advocating Darwinism. Obtaining the best genes so that our future generation be better than before.
Surprisingly, I saw parallels between ethical issues of designers and the storyline of a famous Japanese Anime: Gundam Seed.
In this anime, mankind is divided over human genetic engineering, with normal humans known as 'Naturals' and the genetically altered humans known as Coordinators. The animation included the issues of racism, a vision of the future in a world fraught with talk of GM food and cloning providing food for thought on social issues surrounding the future of designer babies.
Indeed a creative and thoughtful piece by the Japanese. Would be fun to see the presentation done on Designer Babies to draw parallels between this sci-fi fiction and what is available in reality.
The next presentation that caught my attention, was the presentation on space tourism. First thing I told myself, why would anyone in the right mind want to travel out to space for a long period of time. Apart from anti gravity. I think, we pretty much have nothing to enjoy about. I raised the issue of muscle deterioration if one would to travel out to space for a long period of time. Now, that's the beauty of gravity. Guys, if you want to look built and ripped.
You need gravity. For the people who first travelled out to moon, the lack of gravity during the space travel caused them to be terribly weakened upon landing back on land. For space travel to be sustainable in the future. The space shift that we build must provide the means of maintaining gravity, perhaps through the use of centripetal force.
Travelling out to space has always been seen as throwing resources into space at achieving nothing. Space toursim can be the next "in" thing, but I feel that the team missed out on the opportunities on the progress that we can aim for if we start to colonise space. Then again, human progress is no different from an epidemic outbreak of disease. Earth will be destroyed soon enough, a spread of our population to other planets will probably destroy the whole solar system.
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