Never. Humans are incapable of being super. We might soon live for centuries, breath underwater and bench 2 Gs but in the end we are human and humanity is stupid by nature.

The super-machines will take over before the super-humans even get to choose their eye color.

---

---

"100% of the people who confuse correlation and causation end up dying."

And I will praise our new robot overlords and rat everyone out.

I'll just say this -- Almost all of the people I've met with Downs Syndrome are superior people to almost all of the non-challenged people I know. You can change the genes, but you can't genetically modify out the human tendency to be assholes and measure "good" and "successful" in terms of appearance, finances, popularity, etc.

Now that's an interesting observation. But I can't help but wonder how many parents would chose abortions over having Down Syndrome children given the choice when the choice is commonly acceptable? Choice is what this new technology is all about. You will eventually get what you order in a physical specimen. That doesn't say anything about intellect or morals as you allude too.

---

"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Theoretically, why not?

As you say the disposition of people with Down's Syndrome are famous for not being assholes, then there's Williams' Syndrome which seems to be even further from the asshole end of the spectrum.

We know the answer to that, it's lots. With amniocentesis, genetic testing and abortion, people have been selectively getting rid of babies with Down Syndrome for awhile now. I want to say the incidence of kids being born with Down Syndrome has dropped something like 30 or 40%.

Can we edit in a common sense gene? That one seems to be completely absent in a large segment of the population.

---

---

---

Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

I would argue that when it goes beyond minimizing detrimental health conditions that can cause unnecessary death and is instead used to select genetic preferences based on want, it then has everything to do with morals and our intellectual ability to make choices that would be moral with or without the option. The bioethics of these technologies are being outpaced by the rate of technology and it's interesting to think of how it will be used or could be. We're creatures with a bend toward community but also competition and ruthlessness within our species as well, not to mention herd mentalities of what's "right". Anecdotally, look at how we measure "success" in the West in terms of superior financial accumulation, athletic prowess, looks/beauty, or being famous. Where do we go with that when the specimens are the same? What do we do if we've selectively narrowed the gene pool down to less genetic diversity and are faced with an unknown or unexpected consequence of not having enough genetic diversity? What do we do if classes are sorted by genetic trait as they are with wealth today, despite genetics not being individually controllable in adulthood in the same manner that pursuing wealth is?

There's a lot to ponder. I don't know that I trust our species to get it right in our sort of fad & marketing-driven culture.

A super volcano will take care of the super humans...

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/...one_sub_page_49.html

---

Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Dumbass, global warming is going to kill us all first.

Right. I forgot that we got out of the Paris Accord. Now the planet is going to warm by 3 degrees over the next 150 years. We're doomed.

---

Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

All the doom and gloom is lost on me as far as the danger to us goes. I can't see how the temps in Maine becoming more like they are in Delaware where I grew up means the end of humanity. Sucks if you like to hunt moose but hardly the end of the world.

Its funny, till u realize that 1.5B people are at risk of death.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/south-asia-heat-waves-temperature-rise-global-warming-climate-change/

---

Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

Do you read that as 1.5 billion people are going to die due to climate change?

And the sad part about it is that at least a portion of those abortions are for fetuses that wouldn't even have D.S. at birth. We know a family that was told their baby was almost certain to be born with D.S. It wouldn't have made a difference to them; they weren't going to abort. The baby is 100% healthy, no D.S. Not that D.S. isn't healthy, but to a lot of people it's not desirable, which I find beyond sad because, as I said before, damn near everyone I've ever met with D.S. is a much better, brighter personality than most everyone else I've met. Not that everyone is equipped to raise a child with D.S., not that it makes anyone superior to have it or not, but it's sad to me that so many people think of D.S. as a defect and even sadder that people make irreversible decisions based on that belief.

What I read, and pasted here verbatim, is "climate change may expose 1.5 billion people in South Asia to potentially lethal heat and humidity in the near future."
Do you interpret this differently?

---

Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

As soon as we can use gene mods to make superior kids, we will. We will find ways to blow right thru all the ethics arguments.

#1 son needed an orthodontic retainer. #2 son is about to get one. We, our culture, does this because we want our kids to have a pretty smile, humans being fickle vain creatures, will ultimately help them succeed in whatever they pursue.

Is there a substantive ethical difference between getting your kids braces, and doing gene mods in the womb? Seems to me that they are just different places on the same spectrum. Not until folks start talking about supermen, does a person have an ethics argument. The problem is that the spectrum of braces to supermen is, I dunno, "continuous". So how do you make those two issues, those two points on the same spectrum, no longer on a single continuous ethical line? What argument does one employ to try to make the two ideas rest on discontinuous(*) lines?

(*) What do you call a line or a curve that has an abrupt break in it?

---

Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Spot on. I see the day where many jobs, good and bad, will be based on DNA. I can't remember the movie name but I know one was made with a similar premise. If I was a parent when gene mods were common I'd want to give my children all the advantages I could afford, and that is going to be key. Some mods will be a lot more expensive than other mods... and those children with the expensive mods will have an advantage in life.

---

"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Right so I was engage in joking hyperbole because you can find articles and people who do believe that climate change threatens the humans species akin to the the threat of nuclear war back in the cold war (which was also inflated hyperbole). Yes climate change is going to make certain things worse off in certain places and better in others depending on what you're looking at.