Man shall be a laughing stock, a thing of shame

My opening statement from the Substack Utopia Debate in SF

Ladies and gentlemen and they/thems of this gathering, great minds, curious spirits, and a few whose reputations rest on their thirst traps going viral among the tech-incels of Twitter, I greet you all the same.

We assemble here to debate the future of our species, but I will tell you plainly, the future has already arrived with the impatience of an ICE agent who just saw somebody purchase cilantro at the store.

The question before us, should we create super-babies? is not a question of fancy, nor a dalliance of philosophers. It is the greatest pressing matter of our age.

Humans are the last great evolutionary dynasty. For billions of years, life clawed its way upward, single cells to spines, fins to feet, cloacas to being able to piss and shit out of different holes. But out of this emerged us. A creature capable of sapience, one of nature’s strangest and most magnificent miracles. With that gift, we split atoms, made sand think, and sent our vessels into the great celestial beyond.

But in all our triumphs, we have also done something unnoticed, unintended, yet so profoundly consequential that it threatens the future of our species, we have stopped evolution itself.

For most of history, the unyielding pressure of nature shaped us. Disease, hardship, and scarcity carved the edges of our genome generation after generation. But modern medicine, one of our proudest achievements has shielded us from that ancient struggle. It has allowed countless conditions, afflictions, and genetic burdens to persist where nature would have culled them. The same compassion that has kept us alive has suspended the very engine that made us who we are.

Our genomes now bear the scars of this, centuries of errors, mutations, mismatches, vulnerabilities, layered atop one another deeper than a quad stacked Anduril SPV. And unless we intervene, they will only accumulate further. We may be a species of great intelligence, but we have also become one of inherited fragility. We must do something.

What shall become of humanity when we scatter among the stars, yet remain shackled by ailments we should have cast aside? Shall we be a multiplanetary civilization whose bravest explorers are still felled by chicken pox? Shall the pioneers of Mars pause their surveys to update their glasses prescriptions because their eyes, after millennia of drift, no longer see straight? Is this the destiny worthy of a species that once dared to reach for fire, that crossed oceans out of curiosity?

The future of humanity demands more of us. It demands courage not only in the exploration of new worlds, but in the cultivation of ourselves.

This is the first time in the history of life on this planet that we possess tools like CRISPR for DNA engineering, we now have the ability to rewrite life itself. But these are not instruments of vanity; they are instruments of stewardship. They allow us to resume the work that evolution began but can no longer carry forward. And so I stand before you to say what many fear to utter, we must take control of human evolution. Not recklessly, not whimsically, but boldly and wisely.

I want to live in a world where when people get drunk instead of getting tattoos they CRISPR themselves.

See, gene editing super babies is not a fantasy of eugenic tyrants nor the plaything of futurist billionaires. They are the next rightful chapter in the long story of life. Imagine children born free from hereditary disease. Imagine a humanity whose cognition is sharper, whose bodies are stronger, whose diversity and resilience is great enough to explore the cosmic frontier we seek to inhabit. Imagine generations unburdened by the genetic mistakes of the past, equipped instead with the best we can offer.

Our ancestors shaped stone and steel, we must now shape the genome.

Let us not tremble before this responsibility. Let us instead embrace the solemn truth: either we guide our evolution, or our evolution ends. Stagnation is not neutrality, it is decay or more colloquially referred to as E5 at Meta. And evolutionary decay is how civilizations disappear, its what happened to the dinosaurs I think. Either that or they became a spacefaring species.

I ask you, citizens, will you consign humanity to genetic destruction and gradual unraveling? Or will you dare, truly dare, to build children worthy of the worlds we are striving to reach? If we do nothing, our future narrows. But if we embrace the tools our own brilliance has forged, then the dynasty of humanity does not end, it ascends.

The question is not should we create super-babies.

The question is, how long can we afford not to?

And I will leave you all with this, a quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Frederich Neitzsche

“All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and want to go back to the beast rather than surpass man?W hat is the ape to man? A laughing stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the superman a laughing stock a thing of shame.”