Straight out of Brave New World, a futurist says the world is moving toward lab-grown babies – and sex may soon be obsolete for procreation.
Henry Greely, a futurist author and a Stanford University law professor, says future parents will pick their child from a catalog of “already artificially created embryos” using criteria such as intelligence, athleticism and perhaps even eye color.
“The majority of babies of people who have good health coverage will be conceived this way,” he says.
The process still takes work from both parents, however; the man still needs to donate sperm, and the woman must donate skin cells which are turned into eggs using a process tried on mice that shows promise.
The end result presents the parents with hundreds of embryos of various gene combinations so they can pick the one with their favorite “personal traits.”
But farther in the future, it’s plausible that parents will simply be able to buy off-the-shelf embryos out of a “baby catalog” that only requires ingredients from one of the parents – or perhaps neither of them at all.
It’s literally like the “Create-A-Character” screen of popular role-playing games – and it’s also literally a page out of the 1932 novel Brave New World, which author Aldous Huxley admitted he wrote to reveal the direction the world was heading, as steered by elite circles.
From the novel’s first chapter, with emphasis added:
“Bokanovsky’s Process,” repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
“Essentially,” the D.H.C. concluded, “bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding.”
Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.
It isn’t hard to see how the government could exploit “baby hatcheries:”
1) Parents could be limited to one or two children, just like in China, under the guise of combating “overpopulation.” This could lead to artificial world demographic shifts.
2) Hatchery officials could pressure parents to not pick genes that display so-called “toxic masculinity” or any other normal behaviors that go against the “social justice warrior” agenda.
3) Parents could also come under pressure to select embryos with “subservient” genes so their future children will never question authority. In other words, the meek will inherit the earth, with the meek being lab-grown beta males who will never rock the status quo.
“The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble,” Huxley wrote in his later essay Brave New World Revisited. “This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension.”
“In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.”
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