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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Re:costs and benefits
SC ( 10/21/2003, 09:44:39 )There are plenty of people rich and powerful enough to try having themselves cloned if they want to. If cloning lives up to its potential, some of them will do it, no matter what. They will be able to bribe or buy whoever and whatever they need to make it happen. Banning cloning will only make it a little more expensive for rich people. It will place the benefits of cloning out of reach of everyone else.On the other hand, keeping people young and healthy is the ultimate form of wealth. Healthy people need less money, and anyone can be rich, given enough time. At present, most people have very few truly productive and healthy years. We can spend up to 30 years of our lives getting ready to enter the work force, and another 30 years in retirement and decline, costing the health system more and more as we get older. How's that for waste? Think of all the money that could be saved in health care and education costs if people didn't age! We'd eliminate most taxes too, because health care and education are where governments spend most of their money. Today, someone who stays healthy is less of a financial burden on other people. Most people don't cost the health system a lot until they are chronically ill, usually in the last few years of their lives. If people died only in accidents and so on, all those costs would never be incurred.Being young and healthy provides a better quality of life, not just quantity. Even today, most people die in quite preventable ways; they don't live long enough to die of old age. If no one had the certainty of dying of old age, I think people would live life to the fullest, not just because they had the physical capacity to do so, but because they would know that any means of death that remained to them would be sudden and unexpected.Redwood trees don't get up in the morning and go to work, and they essentially don't age. They can live for thousands of years, and die only when they get so big that they topple over. Do we consider their lives wasted? No, generally, when we look at something so old, we think of all the things it might have witnessed. The memories of a 3000 year old person would be priceless to most people. Looking at a mummy would pale in comparison to talking with someone who had actually lived in ancient Egypt.So why not live life in such a way that you have something to look forward to? If you don't know to enjoy your life now, how is getting older and sicker going to help? I've heard the "playing God" thing so many times now, and I'm starting to see a pattern. It's a phrase used by people who like being miserable, or can't face up to the possibility that their fate is in their own hands. Playing God? What do you mean by that, anyway? If you mean interfering with other peoples' business, denying them the right to live, that's what the anti-cloning people are doing. If you mean emulating God, trying to live up to religious ideals, including eternal life, people always have done that and always will, with or without cloning. Whose image are we made in, anyway?
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Disclaimer: Information provided on this web site is for educatonal purposes only. It is not a substitute for, nor can it replace advice from your own physician.
HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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