Sheep have been domesticated for about 12,000 years. Sheep have also been cloned since 1996 – Dolly was the first mammal to undergo this procedure. But this news appeared in the March 2023 issue of Business Insider: A Montana rancher paid $4,200 to clone a dead sheep and started a farm with super hybrids worth half a million dollars.
Some people – not only Montana residents, but also Texans and possibly others – pay to engage in “trophy hunting of captive wildlife” and the large sheep make excellent targets. Neither cloning, nor selling, nor hunting would be illegal per se, except for the fact that the “Frankenstein sheep” are endemic to Kyrgyzstan and are covered by the U.S. law for endangered species. The businessman in question, 80-year-old Arthur Jack Schubarth, has been indicted, has pleaded guilty, and will be sentenced in July. He could face ten years, but most likely will not end up in prison.
Humans have crossed various species, but the most ambitious such endeavor is pursued by the company Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to “de-extinct” the dodo and the woolly mammoth. The scientific mind behind this controversial effort is Harvard professor George Church, who denies that he is “playing God,” but boasts that he is “playing the engineer.” At some point he made conjectures that he could, though he does not advocate it, proceed to recreate Neanderthals with a “human female” surrogate. Colossal managed to reprogram elephant cells to create induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). This remarkable, albeit very problematic, achievement is only a small step toward the goal—which by itself, as CRISPR specialist John van der Oost points out, is questionable: “I am against it. It is essentially a designed elephant. If we do not consider it ethically responsible to create designed babies, then I don’t find this a good idea either.”
Meanwhile, some wealthy individuals choose to experiment on themselves, pursuing immortality rather than resurrection. Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who sold his company for around $400 million in his thirties, is the most active apostle of this movement. He is now 46 years old and spends $2 million annually on his healthcare regimen. Time magazine featured him extensively last September, describing his obsession with reducing his “biological age.” His therapeutic routine includes “taking 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that emits red light onto his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and using a microscopic jetpack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections while he sleeps.” He was once married, but he jokes about “10 reasons why [women] will literally hate me,” including: eating at 11:30 a.m., no vacations in sunny places, going to sleep by 8:30 p.m., no casual conversations, always sleeping alone, and, of course, “you’re not my number one priority.”
Another technophreak trying to overcome aging is Ray Kurzweil, a successful veteran of the effort to convince the world that transhumanism is the path that must be followed. In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, he predicted that humans will merge with intelligent machines by 2045, making humans functionally immortal. This merger is the Singularity. His 2013 explanation is available on YouTube: “We will become increasingly non-biological, to the point where the biological part will no longer be that important. Even if the biological part disappears, it won’t make any difference.”
Like Johnson, Kurzweil has been taking a huge number of pills every day for years now, to ensure that he himself, born in 1948, will live to participate in this blessed event. He has revised his estimate several times – a decade ago, he predicted that machines would think on their own by 2040. Now he believes that artificial intelligence will reach human level by 2029, and assures that he had said it in 1999 at a Stanford conference. Many experts have never been convinced by Kurzweil’s trick: the singularity is not coming to save us, but this does not prevent the worst people in the world from trying to make it happen.
Just this month, author Erik Larson, in a Mind Matters podcast, summarized the whole idea as a scam. Artificial intelligence won’t bring us utopia, he said. On the contrary, “the worst possible actors will use very powerful machines to screw everything up.”