![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
journey to the end of time
Jul. 26th, 2013 11:36 amThis week's Stupid Comic is about a plan to freeze human DNA and shoot it millions of light years across space and when a suitable solar system is found with Earthlike planets, the DNA will be uncorked and robots and computers will raise children to become space explorers with really great 1970s Farrah Fawcett-Majors hair.
It's a bad comic; almost nothing happens, the art is all over the map, and as I point out the Japanese SF comic 2001 Nights did the same thing, only five hundred million times better. The scary part is that the idea of shooting embryonic humans across the vastness of space to be raised by robots, that's a real plan that real scientists came up with in an attempt to figure out how to colonize space in spite of the vast distances between stars. Freezing grown humans we can't do, but freezing eggs and sperm? We do THAT all the time.
The obvious question, obvious to normal people at least, is, would you want to be raised by computers and robots millions of years away from any other humans? Would you want your children to be raised like that? Do you think these people would turn out in any way normal or functioning? I personally don't think so, and neither did anybody else in my illustration class when the professor showed up one day. He was a friend of our illustration instructor and this was going to be our assignment, illustrations based on the idea of shooting frozen DNA into outer space, growing children in Skinner boxes, and colonizing planets.
this is the piece I came up with, a watercolor of a future farmer doing futuristic farming on an alien planet. My early sketches didn't include nearly so much high-tech equipment, as I reasoned that these poor bastards were millions of years away from factories or repair shops so they'd be using as low a level of technology as they could, but no, the instructor wanted to see gleaming high-tech equipment. Damn clients. Anyway, I can't say the piece wasn't fun to do.
Edited to add: yeah, he's wearing a space suit. He's growing food that humans are supposed to eat, which apparently is grown in an environment that is DEADLY TO HUMANS. Not sure how that works, but the instructor wanted space suits, and by golly, space suits is what he got.
It's a bad comic; almost nothing happens, the art is all over the map, and as I point out the Japanese SF comic 2001 Nights did the same thing, only five hundred million times better. The scary part is that the idea of shooting embryonic humans across the vastness of space to be raised by robots, that's a real plan that real scientists came up with in an attempt to figure out how to colonize space in spite of the vast distances between stars. Freezing grown humans we can't do, but freezing eggs and sperm? We do THAT all the time.
The obvious question, obvious to normal people at least, is, would you want to be raised by computers and robots millions of years away from any other humans? Would you want your children to be raised like that? Do you think these people would turn out in any way normal or functioning? I personally don't think so, and neither did anybody else in my illustration class when the professor showed up one day. He was a friend of our illustration instructor and this was going to be our assignment, illustrations based on the idea of shooting frozen DNA into outer space, growing children in Skinner boxes, and colonizing planets.
this is the piece I came up with, a watercolor of a future farmer doing futuristic farming on an alien planet. My early sketches didn't include nearly so much high-tech equipment, as I reasoned that these poor bastards were millions of years away from factories or repair shops so they'd be using as low a level of technology as they could, but no, the instructor wanted to see gleaming high-tech equipment. Damn clients. Anyway, I can't say the piece wasn't fun to do.
Edited to add: yeah, he's wearing a space suit. He's growing food that humans are supposed to eat, which apparently is grown in an environment that is DEADLY TO HUMANS. Not sure how that works, but the instructor wanted space suits, and by golly, space suits is what he got.
