re: #269 Obdicut

Er— I’m not quite sure what you mean.

We are a long way from being able to splice useful genes into ourselves at all, we are even farther away from being able to do so without terrible side effects. So if we ever got so good at genetic engineering we could modify our genes to make different traits exist— like, better eyesight than human normal, etc— then yeah, that’d kind of make evolution ‘out of the equation’. But that is incredibly, incredibly sci-fi. Very far off in the distance; we don’t actually even understood how our genetic information really works, yet, what most of our genes actually code for, not to mention the specifics of how the communication inside our cells goes on.

I was being extremely speculative, as I agree, this is a long ways off, but what are the potential consequences of being able to modify genetic mutations at will? Would make a very good sci-fi story, wouldn’t it, exploring those questions?

I’ve always wondered, what would science fiction look like in a Star Trek universe?