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Preserve unmodified lifeforms and genetic material (including ourselves) before it’s too late |
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Score
55%
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2 votes,
Feasibility
75%
Originality
50%
Humour
0% |
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The Problem:
We have a tragic history of destroying major parts of our natural or cultural heritage before realizing that we are losing something irreplaceable or realizing what we are doing – from driving species to extinction to using up eons worth of the planet’s oil or a continent’s fresh water in a few centuries. It’s a little like destroying a library of irreplaceable documents (which has also happened in history – think of the torching the Library at Alexandria, or more recently the Serbian firebombing of the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo). Looking ahead, we may be entering a period of the same sort of danger with the lifeforms of this planet, as yet mostly unmodified by deliberate chromosomal manipulation. Already there are instances of genetically modified lifeforms escaping their supposedly controlled environments and altering the genetics of nearby crops. If this gets much worse, before we know what we have done, natural spontaneity and the non-“engineered” products of billions of years of evolution may be corrupted past recovery – and in the end we will likely even corrupt ourselves, the human genome too. (Of course genetic change and modification are going on all the time anyway, quite apart from human mucking-about, though generally on a vastly slower timescale and with evolutionary checks. Our premise is that we are entering a period when all the old natural controls will be circumvented and we will not yet understand the need for new kinds of self-imposed controls.)
The Social Invention:
Therefore, we need to begin NOW to preserve not just the genomic information of unengineered life-forms but also the life-forms themselves. We need to preserve living tissue and even plants and animals as far as possible in something like a full-scale biosphere. (In fact we need several, for redundancy.) Not just a seed bank (these are now being established) but a world unto itself, a kind of Biosphere III. Biological/ genetic backup is crucial, especially for the next several centuries, when we may be most likely to go in for heedless experimentation.
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These ideas were brainstormed by students at Elon University in North Carolina, USA, studying (and practicing!) “Millennial Imagination” with Professor Anthony Weston.
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