“Well now you’re playing cockey, Other. Cockey!!!”

Too funny!!! I love Smodcast so much!

A clone is not a you that was pressed out of a 3-D printer. A clone is, as another poster indicates, an identical twin. Same main DNA, same mitochondrial DNA. You take the genetic material of something, put it into a fertilized egg, replacing the genes there, and it grows like any other baby. Plants have been cloned for thousands of years, and cows and such for decades now. They aren’t soulless automatons. They’re just new individuals. They grow up like anything else, and have their own thoughts, their own lives, just like any identical twin or triplet or quad. I think we get mixed up with 1) bad “science fiction” with no science in it 2) ideas of soul and spirit and mind that have a lot to say about us rather than reality. Listen, if I cloned you, Kevin, today, and put that zygote into your wife to grow, in nine months you have a baby. It’s your twin, but it AIN’T YOU. There are no laws that make it property, you can’t “harvest” it, you can’t do anything to it that you couldn’t do to a baby, ’cause it’s a baby. It’s gonna grow up, and while weird to see occasionally, you’d get used to it. Twins always do. It’d just be 37 years younger than you. The idea that it would have your thoughts or desires is a magical one; societies have always believed that twins are really the same person.They ain’t.
Also, if we force-grew a clone to adulthood – which no one possibly can do — the process that would grow a functioning mind would be bypassed. Brains grow by connecting neural nets. A force-grown clone would be a lump of hamburger, an autistic nothing that would never be able to sit up, probably, much less give you a hand job…

But it was fun to listen to.

I heard you talking about the pillow babies and although it does sound pretty heinous, it would have been helpful for one of my family members.

This young man was born severely disabled and was never able to verbally communicate, walk or perform the most basic mental or physical tasks. For his entire life (40 plus years) he was the equivalent of a 4 to 6 month old baby, but his body grew to full size and he did go through puberty. He did have some awareness of the people around him, could feel pain and love, but was not able to do much else.

If this technology were available to him, caring for him may have been easier as he matured and the atrophy that set in later in life may have been better avoided since his muscles would not have required the adult level of exercise.

I don’t think the procedure should be done on anyone with a lessor disability.

Love Smodcast = take care.

Big C

Then I realize that there are way too many mouths to feed, and the fantasy grows to allow the clones to merge back into one when we wanted. Now we’re in magic land, I guess…lol. But we could all subsist on one job, or all work different jobs, then recombine so one person gets all the combined cash. hahaha!

But after *muffle***muffle* years . . . BINGO. There’s me, in the midst of a hot and sticky game of naked Twister.

AHHHHH . . . JA, DAS IST GUT.

And the conversation about clones got almost creepy for me. I went to a small Christian college w/ two twin sisters who not only looked the same (let’s say, a bit homely), but also lived in the same dorm room together, went everywhere together, talked privately w/ one another and wrote weird scifi stories in writing classes I was in. I swear to God. They once walked into class w/ matching George W. Bush t-shirts. They would also practice flag-signaling to each other: one would stand at the dorm and the other at the cafeteria over 100 yards away and send flag signals to each other.

That’s what we’re in for if Walt’s dream comes true. Sweet.