Artificially Gestated Humans and STL Colony Ships

[Angel Tarragon]

Let them really dig deep into the whole shared psyche.

This comment gets me thinking. What if, because they are all the same person, albeit with different personalities, that they shared some sort of latent empathy? Only when as a group can they share thoughts with each other that are on the top of their minds. Certainly is interesting to ponder.

 

[WayneLigon]

...The story is about a Slower-Than-Light colony effort where the colonists were frozen spermatozoa and egg that were combined in an artificial uterus and birthed/decanted should a suitable world be found by the ship.

Now, is this idea even feasible? It is certainly possible, but is it feasible in that after a few hundred years a computer controlled machine could combine thawed sperm and ova, then grow that into a fetus and then a human child?

Sure, I see no problem with it being able to do that. Once you get to the point where you can do such things and have been doing them for a sufficient amount of time to work out the kinks it shouldn't be any more difficult than some of the more automated car assembly lines we have now. The birthing process itself probably shouldn't have any effect at all on the babies producced from it, even if they are handled by robots afterwards. It's what happens after birth that will screw them up.

If they just want to find a planet to continue the human race, then they just grow a few hundred thousand people and seed them on a terra-compatable world and hope things work out. A few hundred thousand years later, they'll have a civilization and humanity will go on.

Now, for a viable colony afterwards... it depends on how good they are with computer-aided learning, how intelligent the ship AI is (and they would almost have to have a true artificial intelligence to pull this off), and a few other factors. A person raised by machines probably won't be very 'human' but they will be functional to a degree. Enough to create a colony and the basic infrastructures. Human psychology will take care of things later, perhaps, though it might take several, several generations. And they'll probably still be very alien to the people of Earth.

If they are sending just eggs and sperm I guess they haven't discovered a way for an adult to travel in suspended animation. Maybe it only works for, say, a few years. A STL ship will usually take decades to cross the gulf of space, so shipping adults isn't viable. If you want to get really far out, I've read stories involving memory transfer using RNA. I don't know if that's been discredited or not now, though. You could pump a few of your early babies with that, effectively destroying their base personality and replacing it with the person who donated the RNA. Whether or not memories and knowledge could be transmitted that way, who know?

If they have brain-taping, where they can make a computer copy of a person's memories and mind and personality, then you're golden. You just download copies into the first two dozen babies or so, quick-grow them to adulthood and let them raise the rest of the kids as they are decanted. That way you have a ready-made human colony.

 

[WayneLigon]

A funny alternative would be ALL the character's accidentally recieving the same personality. Then half of the opening campaign would just be the clones trying to diferentiate themselves. But I'm just spitballing ideas now.

I'm wracking my brain trying to remember where I saw a story like this. I don't think it was The Man Who Folded Himself, since that was a guy meeting alternate timeline versions of himself, but it was similar. The only line I really remember was one of the researchers comments that went 'Well, you know, we didn't really count on the entire incestuous homosexuality thing, but it's worked out better than we thought'.

 

[Falkus]

Now, is this idea even feasible? It is certainly possible, but is it feasible in that after a few hundred years a computer controlled machine could combine thawed sperm and ova, then grow that into a fetus and then a human child?

The only problem I see with it is that humans and our governments are a bit too self-centered for this sort of thing. There'd be no payoff for the government involved.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

This comment gets me thinking. What if, because they are all the same person, albeit with different personalities, that they shared some sort of latent empathy? Only when as a group can they share thoughts with each other that are on the top of their minds. Certainly is interesting to ponder.

Hmm. I like this.

I don't know how to really represent it right in play, but I like the dramatic effect of having this "empathy" be pretty hefty when the campaign starts-- very strong, very interconnected-- but having it slowly dwindle as the characters start asserting their own, seperate identities. This would be pretty slow, since they're already pretty well-formed personalities and they're sticking to common situations... but it'll occur.

Of course, you'd have to engineer situations where this ability was really important, so that the players realy feel its loss as it starts fading-- until, in some dramatically appropriate situation where they're counting on it, it's gone.

 

[Chaldfont]

Some great ideas in this thread!

For inspiration, check out the episodes of Farscape where John Crichton gets copied. I think its in the 3rd or 4th season. The two copies go off on entirely different adventures--but they are the same man! In one scene, they sit playing rock-paper-scissors. Each guy make the same play as the other--for something like 100 games!

 

[KaosDevice]

Some great ideas in this thread!

For inspiration, check out the episodes of Farscape where John Crichton gets copied. I think its in the 3rd or 4th season. The two copies go off on entirely different adventures--but they are the same man! In one scene, they sit playing rock-paper-scissors. Each guy make the same play as the other--for something like 100 games!

That's a great episode. I love that silly show.

One other wierd spin I was thinking of was, you could have identical colonies on multiple worlds. If you sent the same memories braintaped to different worlds you would have, at the start at least, identical populations. John X of Proxima and John X of Altair, etc, etc.

It could get kind of confusing if FTL travel shows up and connects all these colonies.