Left: Aella, 2023.
Right: noemamag, 2025.

Science

genetically modified organism. synbio PhD. friend of bacteria. I make /synbio vids 🧬, co-host /science 👩🏽‍🔬, building /teaparty ☕️ 

“It’s hard to imagine that human engineers could be any messier or clumsier than that old spatters Dame Nature. The normal processes of evolution are wasteful and cruel in stupefying degree. Dame Nature considers every species and every individual expendable, and has indeed expended them in horrifying numbers […]

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Even an occasional calamitous error in planned development could scarcely match the slaughter, millenium in, millenium out, of fumble-fingered Nature.”

— Bob Ettinger in Ed Regis’ “The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, a book I still remember fondly 25 years later.

Reminds me of this linked quote below from Bob Ettinger.

https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0xb0ba6b1a
https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0xd9215248

It was daring enough in the early transhumanist days to confront the religious dogma by suggesting that humans take control of their own destiny and plan their species' development (aging reversal, eugenics, gene therapy, etc.) instead of letting random mutations brutally select the fittest specimen.

Seeing it applied to Mother Nature is even wilder. Not that we don't have de facto stewardship of other species on this planet, whether we want it or not.

But if there's anything that economic history has taught us in the 20th century, it's that it's incredibly audacious to believe that we can substitute nature's laissez-faire, free-market approach to evolution with centralized planning, and expect superior results at a planetary scale.

The downsides of a failed experiment in that regard are asymmetrically large (e.g., food chain / ecosystem collapses)

Perhaps this is all subconsciously motivated by our guilt for failing to stop climate change, habitat encroachment, and industrial farming — as if we could somehow make up for the artificial suffering we impose onto other animals by alleviating their natural suffering.