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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: 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.

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