Ask Lemmy

How many billionaires need to be publicly executed to fix the usa political system.

Making a lot of clones of myself, raising them all differently, and seeing how many of them turn out in the same way as me.

Allow all kinds of drugs and other enhancements in sports and see where the limits of the body are

Worldwide, making all coffee decaf, and not telling anyone.

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Take ten or twenty thousand children, take over a fairly large portion of a midwestern state, build a large and complete environment for them to live in including towns, museums, theme parks etc. and raise them as normal Americans but absolutely 100% avoid introducing them to the concept of religion until they're 25.

Actually just stop allowing anyone with "defective" genes to reproduce.

I am fully I wouldnt exist in this hypothetical world (-11 vision in both eyes), but I would be curious what would happen if we only ever let perfectly healthy people with no genetic defects have kids.

Like would it eventually just become a perfect world where nobody needs glasses or asthma inhalers? Or would we die off because not enough genetically "perfect" people exist to make this plan work?

Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.

Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.

Currently these kinds of things can't be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.

Just wipe out ALL mosquitoes, and then measure what the actual influence is on the food-web for other animals and plants.

I really want someone to just really start messing around with the human genome, see the limits of gene expression. Let's add horns, let's add tusks, let's add tails, and wings, and carapaces, and antennae, and claws, let's just see what happens. Human evolution has gotten so tired and trite; let's add some spice.

Here's a very unethical linguistics experiment that I think would be interesting:

Raising a group of children completely isolated from any language, spoken or otherwise. They would not be fully isolated from people, but those people would not be able to communicate with each other in the vicinity of the children (no speaking, no gestures, etc.) Of course, to isolate them from language would mean strictly controlling their lives (very unethical). Could they communicate with each other, and maybe even develop a language?

I'd be really curious about the Tarzan experiment, having a human infant raised by apes.

I'd like to see if we can build hybrid computer systems using cultured animal tissue (like Cephalopod or maybe GMO human / Cephalopod), basically grown onto an array of tiny wires. Push sensory information through the tiny wires and see if the lump of cells can learn. If it does, put it in a Eva. Or a butler robot. Or a robot vaccuum.

Idk. Its an idea for a scifi novel I've had. Some company does this and what people don't realize is the supposedly autonomous systems making their lives easier are fully conscious but live tortured existences. It would get more and more lovecraftian as the cephalopod hybrids some how take over (I was thinking maybe cancer? or networked mind) and start chopping everyone to bits. Maybe they try and eat them but they have no mouth, like how an octopus arm when detach will hunt and try to feed a non-existent mouth.

Try to find out at which temperature Musk begins to melt.

Take the people expressing their violent political fantasies in threads like this and make them live in the worlds they're advocating for.

Lobotomize all conservatives to see if their IQ increases.

We've exhausted all other options.

Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.

What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?

At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.

The mouse utopia experiment but on humans. Ive always seen a subset of people who bemoan having to work or develop specialized skills to contribute to society. They want everything provided for them so their whole life can be leasure and comfort. A lot of socialism and communism selling points tend to be about having social services and things provided to you.

I'm interested to see the long term affects of people in a society where EVERYTHING is provided for you all the time. Every survival concern, sexual pleasure, every base urge, every whim and desire. For decades and decades and decades. Would it be a genuine good for society or would it be a monkeys paw situation?

Ive always hypothesized that any human society that attempts this will quickly erode into something similar to the mouse utopia.

Without any environmental pressures or meaningful challenges to overcome a large portion of the population without strong internal drives will become lethally/suicidally lazy, apathetic, and narcicistic

I suspect theres a large amount of people who simply have zero internal drives to apply themselves to doing a thing unlesd they have to. without the pressure of survival in either a physical or economic way they would simply sit on their ass, jerk off, play games, and maybe groom themselves, for decades until they die. Merit and overcoming challenge are important aspects of drive and dopamine generation. You deprive a person of those things they become lethargic. If that sentiment proves itself true it will be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of ideologies.

Unethical questions:

Statistically speaking, how many people would escelate their wants to socially taboo depravities? How quickly?

How long on average would it take for pleasure to become less meaningful in the face of instant gratification? Is there a logarithmic function that charts this?

How many people on average decide to begin self harm out to seek novel sensations? How long until onset?

How many people choose to live out a full life vs taking the placebo cyanide capsule and being removed from experiment? What would their reasonings be?

Making chimeras sounds cool as shit. What's even unethical about it? Why can't I have an army of beavermen to dam the world's waterways unless my ransom demands are met?

Ok, I think I see where the unethical part lies...

Lock someone is a room-wide 24h fMRI or some other imaging technique to get a full recording of a human body working.

I heard there's a guy called Luigi with a cool idea.

Seems pretty tame compared to various other answers, but keeping people under anesthesia longer than expected during surgery and seeing how it affects things like memory or personality.

Supposedly after an open heart surgery I had gone through over a decade ago, my mother swears my personality changed. Though I can't remember if that's true because my memory has felt, in a sense, kinda foggy since then. So I wanna know if it was because I was under for longer than expected or because the surgery itself.

Who from the US government will last the longest in a bonfire. Although it might be questionable if this experiment is really unethical.

I love the story of the father who raised his son on Klingon until it became too awkward for modern usage.

Thought that would be a fun experiment on my child. Don’t know much Klingon though.

I always found the stories of human/chimp hybrids fascinating.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee

https://bigthink.com/the-past/soviet-human-ape-super-warriors-humanzee-ivanov/

Unproven, but theoretically as possible as horse/donkey, zebra/horse, or lion/tiger.

I find those rats with the NOVA1 gene fascinating. I wonder what would happen if we downright tried to give rats human-level intelligence? They are more empathetic than humans I hear, they would make the perfect replacement for our species!

And another thing I would like to try, is to find a really big person, and see how far they can swallow me feet-first, before they run into problems, or one of us is injured.

The metal gear solid thing where you clone someone into two separate people but one gets all the recessive genes and the other gets all the dominant ones

Put a hundred toddlers on an island. Leave a few older children that will disappear a few years later that are taught to fish/hunt/gather. See what kind of language develops, or what kind of civilization. How many survive?

It is VERY unethical. Add variables to other islands, such as the amount of children, and what you teach them.