Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares: The Promise and Peril of Genetic Engineering

Epilogue

Epilogue Jews from Eastern Europe have difficulty tracing their families back very far. Unlike Gentiles, we have no family bibles in which to engrave the names of our forbearers, and whatever records the synagogues kept were burned by the Nazis. I spent part of my childhood summers at my grandmother’s on my mother’s side, but my father’s parents died when I was a baby, and I never learned the identity or fate of my maternal grandfather. So sometimes I play a little mind game and invent a notional set of ancestors. I go back in time from one to the other, each one getting a third of a century and a brief moment of my imagination. I spend a few seconds giving them faces, clothing, and a bit of a narrative, and then I jump to the preceding one. If you have never done this yourself, you should give it a try. See how far back you can get. I am not able to keep two lineages in mind at the same time, so I only follow my father’s family. Even so, it is an awesome journey. Only sixty people stand between me and the ancestor who lived at the time of Christ. Go back another 780 and there’s the first one to grow crops. Thirty thousand or so farther is the first one to make fire, another 270,000, the last one to swing through trees. I am the living embodiment of every one of those beings, and I feel a responsibility to them all. Each of us stands not only at the end of such a long line of life but at the beginning of another, one that vanishes into a distant, potentially infinite future. We owe a responsibility to the members of that line too. We are their ancestors. Our descendants will encounter many great challenges. They will have to skirt global catastrophe, perhaps frequently. By the time the sun dies, they will have to have colonized space, where they no doubt will meet their first intelligent aliens. Yet humanity faces a great test now as well. Rather than just passing genes on to our offspring the way those before us did, we are acquiring the technological wherewithal to reconstruct those genes. If we botch it, children will suffer, the lineage may die out, 229 230 transhumanist dreams and dystopian nightmares and that will be that. If we succeed, we will earn the gratitude of our descendants . It seems to me that we owe it to all those ancestors and to all those potential descendants to get it right. We also owe it to each other. After all, many evolutionary biologists happen to agree with creationists that, at some point in the past, all of our ancestors were the same person. ...