Should we bioengineer environmentally friendlier humans?

WTF?

C.H.U.D or It's Alive

Within a year of this coming out we would see bioengineered supersoldiers being mass produced by somebody.

will they all have Belgian accents?

Let's just bioengineer people to carry out photosynthesis - solve many problems at the same time, including global warming. Now that would really involve people going green.

But I thought I was already bio-degradable !

I think I'll join gonjavy in the WTF.

This was actually an academic paper? Come on.

Wasn't there a sci-fi story about an alien race that made themselves smaller so they could fit on their planet? Seriously, stealing ideas from pulp-era sci-fi stories is fodder for an academic paper? Moer importantly, where can I get this guy's job, because I could write papers like that all day long.

And if you had a drug that made people more considerate, you'd make libertarians an endangered speecies.

Reminds me of a Genesis song... Get 'Em Out by Friday.

Another professor who has to come out with a crackpot idea in order to get attention because no one has given a rat's ass about anything else they've come up with in their useless lives.

I remember a story called Starship, where the humans had been engineered to be smaller because they were on generation ship and it was hoped that this would help conserve resources. Over many generations they became even smaller, somewhere along the way they had an accident and society fell apart and history was lost. The voyage was supposed to have originally been 10 generations but they ended up being on the ship for almost 100.

It is already possible to screen fertilized ova for hundreds of genetic faults and to make changes to the "outcomes." Talk of creating super intelligence and of doubling the length of life this way has not aroused much opposition. How is it different in considering making people a bit nicer?

Is this just one more step?

I'd like it we began engineering less stupid ones first. The same thing could be accomplished though by just banning teevee, the National Enquirer, techno/dance/club music, and about 90% of the internet. Force everyone to read at least one book a month that doesn't have pictures in it. Those who fail to accomplish even this smallest task are immediately sterilized and get sent off to the onion fields somewhere.

...to compost.