"Mad" Mike Hughes plans to ascend to 1800 feet in a $20,000 steam-powered rocket.
He has flown in rockets before, mostly successfully, but was injured by the acceleration.
Despite that he claims "science is science fiction", he used documented engineering formulas because they are known to work, despite that the science behind them is bogus.
It will be live-streamed on Hughes' YouTube channel, possibly also on Pay-Per-View.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:47PM (2 children)
There are a few people out there with cells from a twin (or failed twin) of the opposite gender. Natural genetics is a weird thing [wikipedia.org]. And of course, organ transplants are often intersex. Thus, genetic code is not gender.
Biology is not genetics. The latter is only a part. We also need to consider that any human genetics contains the blueprints for both genders (aside from the small amount of stuff on the Y chromosome which isn't part of female DNA) and hence, everyone has those biological pathways not just people with the right chromosome combination.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 24 2017, @06:03PM (1 child)
It will be interesting to see if the advanced gene therapy of 50-100 years from now can completely replace the entire genome in every cell of the human body, including swapping in new sex chromosomes. This would probably illustrate your "biology is not (merely) genetics" point even further. In this scenario, you could walk around with the genetic code of any person in the world (or a new genome constructed by humans/computers) in 99.99% of your cells, but your body has already been built. Hormone replacement therapy results in gradual changes to the body. Perhaps a complete genome replacement would lead to more changes, but probably not that much more. The only way to truly get the results you are looking for would be to grow a replacement body and perform a brain/body transplant. Growing a clone for 20-something years takes too long and you have to deal with their brain (ethics!). Maybe there will be a way to grow large, adult-sized portions of the human body, sans brain, like we are doing with organs [smithsonianmag.com]. Including the skeleton, nerves, and vascular system (one reason why lab grown organs are currently puny). If DNA can't be programmed [livescience.com] to aggressively construct fully grown skin, limbs, bones, breasts, etc. in the correct proportions (allowing you to make a perfect doppelganger in the case of known persons), then the second best way could be to use a computer to simulate the resulting body shape from a genome and print large scaffolds that act as templates for cells. Whichever method works, you take all the pieces and put them together, preventing ugly scarring using salamander-style macrophages or another method. Then you simply have to remove the person's brain and connect it to the spinal cord of the new body (I assume that mind uploading does not work in this scenario). Piece of cake!
All of that sounds rather expensive. You'll either need to be in the rich transgendered elite or have a utopia of unprecedented per-capita wealth to participate.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 24 2017, @07:26PM
Not if they don't have a brain which isn't needed to grow the clone. That neatly sidesteps the problem.