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[Guardian G.I.]

I'm not sure if this has been posted already but:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_91_nARa0E&feature=related

I remember finding it a few months ago and getting that fuzzy warm feeling that humanity still has some hope.

It's very likely that such medical advancements will only be available to the superrich.
Everybody else will keep on dying as usual.

[olemars]

I wonder if we'd allow some domestic species (cows, sheep, etc) to just go extinct if we learned how to grow their tissues independently.  There'd be little reason to question the ethics of it.  I imagine it could be made much more efficient than factory farming.  It would reduce a ton of strain on the environment.

Anyway, I've dreamed since like age 10 of designing my own genetically engineered pet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/19/test-tube-burger-meat-eating

[SalmonGod]

Yup.  I know it's something being worked on.  It's also essential to avoiding catastrophe.  Livestock produce many times more greenhouse gasses than transportation.  Significant cuts to livestock farming would go a very long way towards saving us from self-destruction.

[GlyphGryph]

I wonder if we'd allow some domestic species (cows, sheep, etc) to just go extinct if we learned how to grow their tissues independently. 

I doubt it. Hobbyists would keep them going, much like they do horses nowadays in developed countries. And of course there will be many areas that this technology will take a long time to penetrate, even if it ends up high quality and cheap.

Use-wise, I think straight-up full-body cloning (rather than partial cloning for body parts) is only currently used for species revival projects, and even then not terribly often.

[10ebbor10]

We're working on that one btw. Currently restructuring mammoth DNA.

Problem with full body cloning is that a cloning vat is a dificult thing to design.

[DJ]

You can ride a horse for fun. What are you going to do with a pet cow?

[i2amroy]

You can ride a horse for fun. What are you going to do with a pet cow?

What are you going to do with a pet turtle? Or a pet parakeet? There are plenty of pets out there that people keep that you can't really do anything with, but people keep them anyways.

[10ebbor10]

You can ride a horse for fun. What are you going to do with a pet cow?

Get your own milk. Not that chemical stuff the governement produces, who knows what they put in it.

See, paranoia is good for biodiversity.

[DJ]

Taking care of a cow is a lot more work than taking care of a turtle or a parakeet. Manure shovelling alone should turn off vast majority of pet owners.

The anti-government paranoia is a good point, though.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You don't need to shovel manure if you have a field for your cow. You know, the way we raised them before factory farming?

[DJ]

You'd make your poor pet cow sleep outdoors in winter?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Minimal shoveling, then.

[DJ]

Ain't nothing minimal about it. Where I live lots of people have cows, and they're all pastured when there isn't too much snow, and I can tell you that these people manage to fertilize some damn big gardens with the manure from their barns.

[10ebbor10]

You will always have people wanting to do such a thing. Or people rich enough to hire people to do such things for them.

[Kogan Loloklam]

And you can keep your pet mammoth and pet Triceratops there too!