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posted by martyb on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the Newest-Entrée-at-Milliways?-Long-Pig-Bacon? dept.

'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves

What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?"
- @RichardDawkins - 6:15 AM - 3 Mar 2018

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/969939225180364805
https://archive.fo/kSmgi

"Lab-grown 'clean' meat could be on sale by end of 2018, says producer"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/clean-meat-lab-grown-available-restaurants-2018-global-warming-greenhouse-emissions-a8236676.html

"'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves"
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/6/richard-dawkins-mulls-taboo-against-cannibalism-en/

and:

https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/corner/richard-dawkins-eating-human-meat-cannibalism-taboo/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:55PM (1 child)

    by meustrus (4961) on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:55PM (#650538)

    Eventually, societies that lack external threats inevitably collapse upon themselves

    Except that what killed the Roman Empire once it was weak was a threat from outside, not inner collapse. Granted, it was external threats that could normally have been dealt with easily. But what threat like that are we likely to face in the world today? North Korea? What a joke. Iran? Please. Russia? Well...maybe.

    But with nukes and globalism, international politics have changed fundamentally. There's a reason the big guys don't go to war against each other anymore. And even though it only takes a small nuclear arsenal to deter large threats, America maintains the largest military force in the world anyway.

    Now I'm not saying that we aren't facing a collapse-worthy situation. But unlike the Romans, there isn't a large unknown out there waiting to destroy us. We know what all the potential threats are, and we have taken steps to ensure our safety from them. Barring alien invasion, there isn't really any external threat that could rake us the way of the Roman Empire.

    Speaking of aliens, what if this is actually inevitable? That once there is no big unknown, once a civilization can anticipate all external threats, there is no check against decadence? That once there is no group of barbarians waiting in the wings to burn it down, saying "try again", whatever society remains turns inward and stops making itself greater? Would we still have reached for the stars without the Soviets trying to beat us there? Or is globalism the Great Filter that keeps all civilizations from reaching beyond their home planets?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Saturday March 10 2018, @05:59PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Saturday March 10 2018, @05:59PM (#650571)

    Or is globalism the Great Filter that keeps all civilizations from reaching beyond their home planets?

    I suspect "interstellar space travel is difficult (yet to be proven possible) and expensive, with few short-term economic paybacks" is the problem there. Hard to do, harder to ship out any significant fraction of your population, even harder to bring the resulting "riches" back to the homeland.

    If your technology can build a self-sustaining, closed-environment generation ship, and your social science can maintain a stable population of crew without them procreating uncontrollably, fighting for resources, descending to savagery and worshipping the engines (or whatever) then you've pretty much sorted out all the shit that made you want to leave in the first place, and can stay at home, build space habitats and sustainably exploit the vast resources of your solar system. Move to the Kuiper belt when the sun starts to swell up.

    To quote Greg Egan, the Fermi-paradox-style exponential colonisation "Is what bacteria with spaceships would do".

    ...and if you're arrogant enough to want to spread your genome to the far reaches of space, stick it into some bacteria and give them a (tiny) space ship - yay! panspermia.