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nullbear

u/nullbear

r/transhumanism•

Humanity is rapidly approaching a point where person-hood will need redefinition, and there is no obvious 'good' definition. As the ability to make human-like and derived organisms becomes increasingly accessible, anywhere we draw the line between human and non-human becomes arbitrary and contested.

I was working on a concept for another setting, and it developed into a bit of a thought experiment.

# Background

The setting was a pretty typical interstellar colony ship type scenario: a ship carrying colonists to another planet/star system, and a cargo containing a bunch of human embryos.

A radioactive event occurred at some point, and the long-term viability of the embryos came into question. Essentially, they might live, but their genetic makeup was damaged in a way that, across several generations, the colony probably would face extinction.

So the solution was to develop a "virus" that effectively functions as a broad brute-search algorithm (if that terminology makes sense to y

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