As is the third m.

> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.

Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.

If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...

I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).

Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)

On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either.

> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.

Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.

Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.

> I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:

It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem".

That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle.

It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting.

One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online.

Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be.

> If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor

I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something.

Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences.

Have you found that other adoptees feel similarly about or at least are more sympathetic to your ideas?

Given that you've spent some time thinking about this, perhaps you should spend time thinking about the ethics of it, and write a full report AGAINST your idea from the ethics point of view, and then see if you can address all those concerns in a second report.

Some key ethics concerns to consider:

* creating brainless clones is almost like creating a sub-species of humans that we're going to farm like cattle.

* given that many people consider embryos & fetuses have certain rights, can we find a way to create brain-less clones without killing viable embryos?

In reality, most of the work done in this area is going to be focused on growing organs, rather than entire bodies. This lets us sidestep most of the ethical concerns.

Terry?