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[Akura]

Yeah, I get that, but they never go into why exactly a species of sea slugs are producing human compatible pluripotent cells. Or why they were only found by Rapture.

Spoiler: I'm going with more ass-pulls here but (click to show/hide)

Rapture is literally on the bottom of the ocean - one map in-game looked like it was built on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and is likely accurate since it's powered by geothermal energy. In the 1950s there was very little knowledge of bottom-ocean biology. Heck, there still isn't today, not really. I think the slug was discovered by accident, not 100% sure but I think a construction worker was bitten by one and they noticed the bite healing unnaturally fast.

As for why a sea slug produces such cells, I think the slug might have evolved as a form of symbiote, which enters a host body like a parasite, except unlike a parasite, its presence is beneficial to the host; in this case, the ADAM slug regenerates tissue damage for the host while being fed and protected by it. I'm not biologist enough to guess why it works on humans though... then again seeing what it does to Little Sister(note: only prepubescent girls can survive a slug being implanted), it's possible to say that it doesn't work.

[Egan_BW]

W   h   i   c   h       i   s       t   h   e    f   a   u   l   t       o   f       i   n   v   e   n   t   i   o   n,       a   n   d       f   l   a   w   s       i   n       t   h   e       l   e   g   a   l       s   y   s   t   e   m.
N   o   w       S   C   I   E   N   C   E       i   s       s   o   l   v   i   n   g       t   h   e       s   o   r   r   y       m   e   s   s       t   h   a   t       i   n   v   e   n   t   i   o   n       m   a   d   e,
a   n   d       t   h   e       l   e   g   a   l       s   y   s   t   e   m       w   i   l   l       t   o   t   a   l   l   y       i   g   n   o   r   e       s   c   i   e   n   c    e,
a   n   d       k   e   e   p       o   n       d   o   i   n   g       w   h   a   t       i   t'   s       b   e   e   n       d   o   i   n   g.

CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS

[Loud Whispers]

Which is the fault of invention, and flaws in the legal system. Now SCIENCE is solving the sorry mess that invention made, and the legal system will totally ignore science and keep on doing what it's been doing.

Make that argument again, but in slow motion

[GiglameshDespair]

Which is the fault of invention, and flaws in the legal system. Now SCIENCE is solving the sorry mess that invention made, and the legal system will totally ignore science and keep on doing what it's been doing.

Make that argument again, but in slow motion

Guilty!

[Orange Wizard]

Case dismissed

[Dorsidwarf]

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I maintain that the vampire glitch should have been left in. Besides, poetry crashing worldgen is way more funny.

[Orange Wizard]

Spingfield Cafe

[SirQuiamus]

Peter Thiel is a blood-sucking parasite. Literally.

[Akura]

Anyone seeking to practice parabiosis privately would quickly encounter the question of where to obtain sufficient quantities of young people's blood.

Assuming this even works(I'm not), this will likely lead to a horrible dystopia where the world is ruled by a small circle of really old, wealthy vampires that have thugs going around kidnapping young people to drain their blood so they can live forever.

[SirQuiamus]

Anyone seeking to practice parabiosis privately would quickly encounter the question of where to obtain sufficient quantities of young people's blood.

Assuming this even works(I'm not), this will likely lead to a horrible dystopia where the world is ruled by a small circle of really old, wealthy vampires that have thugs going around kidnapping young people to drain their blood so they can live forever.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality."
-- James Dean, quoted in James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton

The colonel beams at the crowd . . . pomaded, manicured, he wears the satisfied expression of one who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. "Folks, we're here to sell the only thing worth selling or worth buying and that's immortality. Now here is the simplest solution and well on the way. Just replace the worn - out parts and keep the old heap on the road indefinitely.

"As transplant techniques are perfected and refined, the age-old dream of immortality is now within the grasp of mankind. But who is to decide out of a million applicants for the same heart? There simply aren't enough parts to go around. You need the job lot once a year to save 20 percent, folks. Big executives use a heart a month just as regular as clockwork. Warlords, paying off their soldiers in livers and kidneys and genitals, depopulate whole areas. Vast hospital cities cover the land; the air-conditioned hospital palaces of the rich radiate out to field hospitals and open-air operating booths.

The poor are rising in mobs. They are attacking government warehouses where the precious parts are stored. Everyone who can afford it has dogs and guards to protect himself from roving bands of parts hunters, like the dreaded Wild Doctors, who operate on each other after the battle, cutting the warm quivering parts from the dead and dying. Cut-and-grab men dart out of doorways and hack out a kidney with a few expert strokes of their four-inch scalpels. People have lost all shame. Here's a man who sold his daughter's last kidney to buy himself a new groin -- appears on TV to appeal for funds to buy little Sally an artificial kidney and give her this last Christmas. On his arm is a curvaceous blond known apparently as Bubbles. She calls him Long John; now isn't that cute?

A flourishing black market in parts grows up i n the gutted cities devastated by parts riots. In terrible slums, scenes from Brueghel and Bosch are reenacted; misshapen masses of rotten scar tissue crawling with maggots supported on crutches and cans, in wheel-chairs and carts. Brutal-as-butchers practitioners operate without anesthetic in open-air booths surrounded by their bloody knives and saws.

The poor wait in parts lines for diseased genitals, a cancerous lung, a cirrhotic liver. They crawl towards the operating booths holding forth nameless things in bottles that they think are usable parts. Shameless swindlers who buy up operating garbage in job lots prey on the unwary.

And here is Mr. Rich Parts. He is three hundred years old. He is still subject to accidental death, and the mere thought of it throws him into paroxysms of idiot terror. For days he cowers in his bunker, two hundred feet down in solid rock, food for fifty years. A trip from one city to another requires months of sifting and checking computerized plans and alternate routes to avoid the possibility of an accident. His idiotic cowardice knows no bounds. There he sits, looking like a Chimu vase with a thick layer of smooth purple scar tissue. Encased as he is in this armor, his movements are slow and hydraulic. It takes him ten minutes to sit down. This layer gets thicker and thicker right down to the bone -- the doctors have to operate with power tools. So we leave Mr. Rich Parts and the picturesque parts people their monument, a mountain of scar tissue.

As L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology, said: "The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely wrong." I wrote "wrong" for "long" and the slip is significant -- for the means by which immortality is realized in science fiction, which will soon be science fact, are indeed infinitely wrong, the wrongest wrong a man can be, vampiric or worse.

Improved transplant techniques open the question whether the ego itself could be transplanted from one body to another, and the further question as to exactly where this entity resides. Here is Mr. Hart, a trillionaire dedicated to his personal immortality. Where is this thing called Mr. Hart? Precisely where, in the human nervous system, does this ugly death-sucking, death-dealing, death-fearing thing reside? Science gives only a tentative answer: the "ego" seems to be located in the midbrain at the top of the head. "Well," he thinks, "couldn't we just scoop it out of a healthy youth, throw his in the garbage where it belongs, and slide in MEEEEEEEE?" So h e starts looking for a brain surgeon, a "scrambled egg" man, and he wants the best. When it comes to a short - order job old Doc Zeit is tops. He can switch eggs in an alley.

Mr. Hart embodies the competitive, acquisitive, success-minded spirit that formulated American capitalism. The logical extension of this ugly spirit is criminal. Success is its own justification. He who succeeds deserves to succeed; he is RIGHT. The operation is a success. The doctors have discreetly withdrawn. When a man wakes up in a beautiful new body, he can flip out. It wouldn't pay to be a witness. Mr. Hart stands up and stretches luxuriously in his new body. He runs his hands over the lean young muscle where his potbelly used to be. All that remains of the donor is a blob of gray matter in a dish. Mr. Hart puts his hands on his hips and leans over the blob.

"And how wrong can you be? DEAD."

He spits on it and he spits ugly.

[Orange Wizard]

Anyone seeking to practice parabiosis privately would quickly encounter the question of where to obtain sufficient quantities of young people's blood.

Assuming this even works(I'm not), this will likely lead to a horrible dystopia where the world is ruled by a small circle of really old, wealthy vampires that have thugs going around kidnapping young people to drain their blood so they can live forever.

We could probably organise some kind of blood redistribution system, but that would also require incentives for people to have children, and something to do with old people with shit blood so they're not a perpetual drain on everyone

[TD1]

Ooooor... and I'm just putting this out there .... human farms.

[AzyWng]

Akiyama gets upset over some very important... tissues?

[Spehss _]

Anyone seeking to practice parabiosis privately would quickly encounter the question of where to obtain sufficient quantities of young people's blood.

Assuming this even works(I'm not), this will likely lead to a horrible dystopia where the world is ruled by a small circle of really old, wealthy vampires that have thugs going around kidnapping young people to drain their blood so they can live forever.

I bet there's a conspiracy theory somewhere on the internet with this exact premise.