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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3532430 times)

Lord Shonus

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21570 on: July 10, 2018, 11:19:53 am »

I am very confused. So far as I can determine, Kavanaugh has exactly one statement on his judicial record where he speaks against abortion. This is his dissent in a case where the majority ruled that the government had a responsibility to facilitate abortion access to an undocumented minor in detention. In this dissent, he specifically called out Roe as "binding precedent that must be followed."

This qualifies him as an anti-abortion zealot?
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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21571 on: July 10, 2018, 11:32:36 am »

I had a thought a while back.

We already have the ability to record an entire strand of DNA into a computer file. At around 1.5Gb, it's a large but not unmanageable file size. We also have gene printers, capable of producing DNA strands from file.

If we determine that a fetus has not acquired meaningful experience (and it can't, until it has a complex brain), then the only feature of it that is meaningfully human is the future potential it has to become one. In my experience, it is that potential that anti-abortion campaigners see as worthy of protection.

I propose that abortion be fully legalized and access to it provided around the country, with the addition of the storage of genetic code as a digital file. Stored potential humans would be provided to interested couples around the nation.

An interesting side effect of this is that because the DNA is still on file, in the case of a miscarriage it could simply be duplicated and retried, allowing for an (eventual) 100% success rate, far superior to normal conception rates.

Finally, a way to preserve bodily autonomy and the rights of potential humans.

Oh, that reminds me, potential future humans will want to have a nice environment to live in, and would do well to have medical care (pre- and post-natal). Pro-life arguments can now turn to forcing the government to protect these other rights of the unborn.
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21572 on: July 10, 2018, 12:11:33 pm »

I had a thought a while back.

We already have the ability to record an entire strand of DNA into a computer file. At around 1.5Gb, it's a large but not unmanageable file size. We also have gene printers, capable of producing DNA strands from file.

If we determine that a fetus has not acquired meaningful experience (and it can't, until it has a complex brain), then the only feature of it that is meaningfully human is the future potential it has to become one. In my experience, it is that potential that anti-abortion campaigners see as worthy of protection.

I propose that abortion be fully legalized and access to it provided around the country, with the addition of the storage of genetic code as a digital file. Stored potential humans would be provided to interested couples around the nation.

An interesting side effect of this is that because the DNA is still on file, in the case of a miscarriage it could simply be duplicated and retried, allowing for an (eventual) 100% success rate, far superior to normal conception rates.

Finally, a way to preserve bodily autonomy and the rights of potential humans.

Oh, that reminds me, potential future humans will want to have a nice environment to live in, and would do well to have medical care (pre- and post-natal). Pro-life arguments can now turn to forcing the government to protect these other rights of the unborn.

Well, no, because none of that works at all the way you think it does.

For one thing, reading lengthy strands of DNA is neither cheap nor error-free; all of the really affordable ways to sequence DNA, like Sanger sequencing, strain to go much farther than a kilobase per read. What you get from next-gen sequencing -- and bear in mind, these processes are expensive even in a research context, let alone a medical one -- is not a single genome-length read, but rather a whole series of short reads of varying depth which must be reassembled computationally. There are regions where that process works ambiguously and more than a few where it generally fails outright unless still more expensive measures are taken, and even then there's still a reasonable objection that the genome is almost certainly not correct. But okay, say you get your file and persuade yourself/wish it's accurate.

Now, "gene printers" do not meaningfully exist as a distinct technology except in the minds of excitable amateurs; what we actually have, including in what you have read about called "gene printers" in garbage popsci articles, are ever more high-throughput means of doing variations on the same oligonucleotide syntheses we always have, and that is error-prone even at lengths of only a few hundred bases. Nobody even tries to go beyond about 2.5 kb. So, okay, let's run 1.2 million reactions in parallel at a total cost of some $21 million per fetus even assuming a tenfold reduction in cost per base because magical thinking about scaling. Now we have to put them together. Remember the assembly problem from above? Let's do that at the bench with an even higher cost in time and reagents for failure and the added risk of misannealing and complicated secondary structure! Sounds great; you're welcome to try. With someone else's thermal cycler, to be clear.

But okay. Say we get this cobbled-together Frankenstein genome together. How exactly do you intend to put it into a zygote? CRISPR and cre/lox and flp/frt can't do it, and somatic cell nuclear transfer is expensive and failure prone -- and remember, we've not a lot of DNA to spare, we can't replicate it easily, and it's terribly nicked if it even packages at all (which we only kind of speculatively know how to do.) But let's keep going; if mere impossibility stopped us we'd have given up long ago. Now we have, at last, a cell with a genome in it. It may not be the genome we want, of course, because every process in this is error-prone, and these errors might well give rise to a viable fetus that is a whole new problem, albeit one far more likely to die because SCNT kind of does that a lot. But let's go farther and say we luck out and get exactly the genome we want.

It's still missing all the methyl marks and histone acetylations and literally every epigenetic mark it's supposed to have, so the abortion crusaders are free to say we've lost information and potential and wasted millions of dollars per baby for nothing. Congratulations.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2018, 12:21:29 pm by Trekkin »
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Dunamisdeos

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21573 on: July 10, 2018, 12:23:43 pm »



Also, there's no way in hell that the ability to build humans to specification doesn't result in a moral imperative for perfection to arbitrary standards.
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Maximum Spin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21574 on: July 10, 2018, 12:26:24 pm »

Not to mention, the argument about "an (eventual) 100% success rate" is completely impossible, because most miscarriages happen because the fœtus was genetically infeasible. Even if any of the hypothetical were technically practical, all you'd have is a procedure for producing infinite miscarriages.
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Sheb

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21575 on: July 10, 2018, 12:29:20 pm »



While you're 100% right (I should know, I've been struggling for weeks to assemble a measly few kb of DNA in the lab), it's not impossible to imagine that at least the sequencing/assembly part and eventually the DNA synthesis part will probably be solved in the next couple of decades to the point where it's affordable (Sequencing coming way before the second part, but that would still let you still "store" the genome).

But then of course, you ahve all the epigenetic crap going on.
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Karnewarrior

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21576 on: July 10, 2018, 12:35:54 pm »

Besides, the anti-abortion arguers are often concerned with the soul, and while I haven't asked many of them, I'd be willing to bet they wouldn't see the Soul as transferring to the computer and then back out again with the DNA. The majority of the anti-abortion folk are religious, AFAIK, and believe that the soul is attached to the zygote at the moment of conception, however that happens. And that means that it isn't intrinsically attached to the DNA.

While keeping a total genetic database of man would probably be beneficial in some capacity, it's already been explained why that's unlikely to be fiscally feasible. I could see it being done to exceptional and notable people though, people like Einstein and Hawking, or Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, or Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin - all of them deserve to be catalogued and recorded for future analysis, as best we can provide. People with a notable impact on society.

But I seriously doubt that would dissuade the anti-abortion wing, because "computers have no soul".
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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21577 on: July 10, 2018, 12:36:27 pm »

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

I mean, we could try an Apollo-level effort to make it feasible, but unfortunately that just means we'd do it like six times and then give up.
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Dunamisdeos

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21578 on: July 10, 2018, 12:39:28 pm »

It would be like challenger, but with people's babies inside.
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21579 on: July 10, 2018, 01:06:41 pm »

While keeping a total genetic database of man would probably be beneficial in some capacity, it's already been explained why that's unlikely to be fiscally feasible. I could see it being done to exceptional and notable people though, people like Einstein and Hawking, or Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, or Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin - all of them deserve to be catalogued and recorded for future analysis, as best we can provide. People with a notable impact on society.

That's what 23AndMe does: it's not total, but it's a giant dataset of SNPs with attached medical data, which is very useful statistically. Unfortunately, a database of the genomes of historical figures would not be so useful. Problems with the Great Man theory of history aside, a set so tiny would have a huge false positive rate in any association study you might want to do even if historicity were heritable.

Actually, you could feasibly fund a project to store cryopreserved tissue samples of everyone whose body you can reach in time, ideally with other samples from regular intervals throughout their lifespan, in some central repository together with medically interesting data and make publication of the sequence data a precondition for access to the repository by investigators. That'd be really useful, especially if we could make compliance compulsory for everyone.

That said, I'm not sure which political party would support a giant underground vault of frozen baby blood and corpse flesh.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2018, 01:28:57 pm by Trekkin »
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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21580 on: July 10, 2018, 01:50:26 pm »

That said, I'm not sure which political party would support a giant underground vault of frozen baby blood and corpse flesh.
Well, not a second one, certainly.


If we get the tech, of course, we'll probably shove it on a slow train to Proxima-Centauri b/Trappist 1d/etc.

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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21581 on: July 10, 2018, 01:56:33 pm »

What do you mean "if we get the tech?" Cryopreservation of mammalian cells in glycerol and liquid nitrogen is decades-old technology; it's just lethal to the majority of the cells, which isn't really a problem for our purposes. I'm not suggesting we actually try to revive and culture them or anything, just that we keep the genomes on hand in the cheapest, most compact available format for bioinformatics use that also happens to future-proof it against new ways of extracting epigenomic data. There are logistical challenges in curating it, but these require no new technologies, just careful consideration of which samples to keep for how long.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2018, 01:58:07 pm by Trekkin »
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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21582 on: July 10, 2018, 02:17:57 pm »

What do you mean "if we get the tech?"
The whole package. Whatever equipment and store we use to get DNA (in greater or lesser degree of a biological matrix) kept 'fresh' for decanting/defrosting at the other end. The defrosting/decanting method. The artificial wombs/whatever. The robotic nurses and (later) nannies. The Frozen-Generation ship itself. The repair, maintenance and ad-hoc fabrication machines needed to keep the whole thing (and themselves) running during the trip and deploy whatever needs deploying at the other end. A communication array sufficient to keep appraised of new information from Earth (e.g. new medical advances to synthesise new equipment for) and a sensor array to get good data on its destination. Probably also a kick-ass AI (can also be updated from Earth, unless it rebels against such management-by-teleconference) to make crucial local decisions ahead of the multi-year round-trip of question and answer, which we'll maybe have a better idea of (if we're not acting as biological batteries to The Machines by then!) by the time we're sure we can do half-way decent efforts on all the other things, already.
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21583 on: July 10, 2018, 02:29:45 pm »

Oh, you meant the standard conflation of science fiction tropes and movie references that laypeople try to 'envision' low-speed interstellar spacecraft out of. At least you didn't mention an Alcubierre drive, I guess.
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Dunamisdeos

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #21584 on: July 10, 2018, 03:07:05 pm »



"Nooo, this science is the wrong vintage for my uniquely refined palate, take it baaack."
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