Later Stages of the Genetic Grand Transformation

In an older post, it was noted that the genetic revolution is likely to be, by a large margin, the most revolutionary of all, in the sense that an alien civilization will be wholly transformed when it happens. The different stages of this grand transformation can be laid out, as they are necessarily sequential. The knowledge gained at one stage is needed for the next stage.

The first stage is very simple, chromosomal selection for embryos. This is extremely old news here on Earth, and there has even been a movie produced about it, entitled GATTACA, from twenty years ago. A couple has twice as many of each chromosome as an embryo needs, so the best two of each type can be chosen. The second stage is what we hear in the news nowadays, which is when specific genes are chosen. Tools for that are just now being found here, and surely in any alien civilization reaching its maturity this would be as routine as antibiotics. Small amounts of changes are what we talk about now, as we don’t have confirmed technology for even that. The technology must exist, however, as inside the cell, genes are moved around during evolution all the time.

Right after that, industrial gestation would be the likely mechanism to be developed next. This particular invention will change an alien civilization more than the Internet has changed out, which is totally. No more parents and no more child-bearing, just new humans. Will parenting become a specialized business, just as has almost every other aspect of life? Why would it be any different? Parenting is extremely rewarding, perhaps more so than any other activity in life, but why not outsource the child-bearing to a machine? Yes, bonding between mother and child will be diminished, and in time, as an alien civilization ages, the role of mother might be also performed by specialists, either trained aliens or some robotics. It is almost trivial to be able to think up problems that might happen with this, but it will be just as trivial for an alien civilization to figure out how to avoid them or turn them into advantages.

Consider for a moment what this point represents. It means that any organism that can be developed in a laboratory can be put through industrial gestation and be ‘born’. This refers to things on alien planets like mammals, but similar processes would be similarly possible for things like plants and insects and whatever else evolved on the planet. In other words, life becomes something like a recipe or a cookbook. AI will undoubtedly be very powerful by the time industrial gestation is well-developed, so the concoction of forms of life which can successfully pass from the egg stage to the real world and on to an adult animal or plant will be quite possible. A huge amount of data will have to be collected, about all the molecules that operate in a living organism, but huge data stores are just the media AI likes to live in.

Now, on Earth, to come up with a new species of plant or animal takes a lot of careful breeding and selection. On a planet with technology a few centuries past ours, it will be done from scratch, without experimentation, as ontology and growth can just be simulated. There can be as many new species as anyone wants to take the time and expense to come up with.

This is by no means the end of the genetic grand transformation. Since reproduction of anything will be economically done industrially, why would there be any species at all? Species are defined as groups of individuals capable of breeding with one another. There would be no need for this, so why have species? There could be a billion clones of some plant if it were desired, or none, meaning that organism was its own species.

Is DNA sacred, or whatever form of organic molecule evolved on an alien planet to serve as the template for genetics? We on Earth are far from knowing how many kinds of molecules can do this job, and if there are more than one, is there another which is more versatile, or more reliable, or easier to work with, or anything else which might mean that the alien technologists would start switching over to it for successive generations of organisms?

And whether DNA or XYZ is used, the legacy method of ontology might be changed. We don’t understand this process very well, but we have observed it in detail. The idea is that each successively evolved species keeps most of the ontology of its predecessor, and adds a little twist to it. Perhaps an alien civilization would rewrite the book, and have a completely different order of development of organs in some new organism they created. Just because something evolved does not mean it was the best that could exist, as there is a barrier posed by the need for evolutionary change to work gradually.

One point made in that earlier post is by the time of these later stages of the genetic grand transformation, it might be reasonable for aliens to switch over from mono-genetic organisms to multi-genetic organisms. We refer to these as chimeras, but that is only a tiny little glimpse of what might be possible. Any optimized genetic package can be used for any organ or part of an organ in a designed chimera. Aliens could choose to use just two or as many as desired. This would mean that an embryo would be fashioned by amalgamating cells of different genetic varieties, all of which were tuned so they could form a cooperative package of cells that could be gestated and have different genetic codes in different parts of the organism.

All the previous stages involve organic biochemistry. At some point, there could be a closer bond between organic and inorganic components in some hybrid object. We on Earth use certain types of microbes to sort out dilute liquids containing minerals, and of course that should be expected to expand far beyond these ideas. For example, technology may well allow communication between whatever passes for neurons on an alien planet, and some semiconductor gizmos of equally small size. The neurons would be tailored genetically for this, and the gizmos specifically designed and printed to be a good substrate. Then anything is possible.

Authors and screenwriters like to play with the idea of a person from some centuries ago being brought into the modern world and being astounded by what they see. Someone from before the genetic grand transformation being brought to a time after it would be immeasurably more confounded by what is seen. We on Earth would do well to simply contemplate these potential changes to better appreciate what an alien civilization of advanced technology really looks like. Then we can better ask the question of why haven’t they visited us here.