Quote:
Originally Posted by uh-oh
we have some misconceptions here but i'll answer your points by the numbers
1. it isn't about changing us over night, or even in 1000 years, its just about making the best us moving forward. it takes thousands of years to make a chihuahuh (spelling lol) from a wolf, even with them getting into breeding age early. it isnt about that as much as mating lebron james and serena williams NOW. their kid is gonna be a beast. undoubtedly. we can even make her more fertile and she can have a litter like the octomom lol. but realistically itd probably be best one baby at a time letting it get the most womb nutrients or whatever. but yea i'm not looking for instant results as much as just putting the wheels in motion.
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I'm going to address these things one at a time to save endless walls of text no one will read in the hope people may read one or two and have some input.
What you're suggesting is then already happening, via natural selection or related means. But you're not happy with that, you're the big Spartan emperor with a wicked ideology who doesn't give a fuck if it's politically or socially possible. As long as it's physically possible, Emperor Uh-Oh wants it done. So...
The people you breed will have to be slaves, otherwise you cannot exercise control over their reproduction. Small problem, slavery is illegal. No big whoop, you're the emperor, you just reinstate slavery, done and done. So you happily proceed with your breeding program. You select specimens (LeBron James and Serena Williams) that have the physical characteristics you want, you breed them to each other, the resulting generation expresses those traits even more strongly, you breed those that exhibit the traits most strongly to each other again, and so on. Standard stockbreeding technique, it will work on humans just like on any other animal if you can control their reproduction.
OK, but the problem is that human generation times are what we scientists call 'very long'. You've got a 15 year minimum generation time, and each breeding is likely to produce only one offspring. Since you will try to breed your prize specimens more than once, average generation time is going to be more than 15 years. So, realistically, you're only going to have 4 or 5 generations of breeding before you die. And die you will, you're the emperor, but you're not immortal. You with me so far? Good. No problem, your successor will continue your breeding program. Right? ...Or not. Wait, actually they probably won't, once you're dead the breeding program will likely be abandoned. In this eventual happening, be it over one generation or 1000 years, that will be the end of the program.
And that's the rub. There doesn't seem to be any way to perpetuate a multi-generational breeding scheme, because the people who start the breeding scheme won't be around more than one generation themselves. With livestock, that's not a problem, because livestock generations are shorter, but also because the desired traits are likely to be desired by subsequent generations. All dairy farmers want cows that produce more milk, all poultry farmers want chickens that produce more eggs, all pig farmers want pigs that gain weight more quickly. And so formal breeding programs that span multiple human generations ARE possible. Of course, for most of human history selective breeding hasn't been so formal... but farmers have always culled and eaten undesirable animals and bred the most desirable animals. Keep this up for a few thousand years and you're going to get somewhere.
But how is that going to work for humans? The only way it will work is if there were a multi-generational consensus on what human traits were desirable, AND a conscious decision to preserve those traits. (I NOTED THE WORD CONSCIENCE-NESS IN THE THREAD TITLE, DONT WORRY!). And it seems that smart, healthy, beautiful people are more likely to be selected as breeding partners than stupid, sickly ugly dirtpeople. So there you go, human breeding programs.
In theory it could work, but in all honesty the chances are your dream will die with you bruh.