Stem Cells

The difference between "God" and a scientist is that God can do things instantaneously if she/he/it wished. A scientist would probably take a several million years or centuries or decades to do the same. It is all a matter of time. If history is any indication "Scientific" progress takes a really long time to happen. A look at Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Roman civilizations and to where we are today, progress has been steady. The question is how long before we have God like powers when it comes to a human body, the ability to rebuild limbs, clone life, create a replica of a human and how quick?

If research of stem cells are any indication, conservatively maybe 50-75 yrs we should be able rebuild the human body. I doubt if the brain can be replicated as is with the same memories and personality. On second thoughts may be it would be possible in a century. I have no scientific basis for such a prediction, just a wild ass guess. :D

The pace at which the research is progressing is amazing, check out this news. If soon it becomes possible to build limbs quickly and recovery period is not long enough, how long would it before soldiers in the field are the first people who are gonna get abused for this kind of thing. They will probably become a being just with a brain with rest of the body fixable in terms of damage. I would of course want all of the technologies be available to common people and not so much for military purpose (yeah then wars will be on forever) so that they are able get a decent life again by regrowing the limbs they need.

Would then mankind become more irresponsible if reattaching a limb was an affair that is a walk in the park? If history is any indication probably yes. Lets not forget robots, they are becoming better, check this news about real time facial expressions. It is not far away before a robot like in the movie Bicentennial Man or A.I is a possibility. Now combine the robots with the human limbs that can be grown, you have an android. The progress on near human like skin tones is amazing. A search on youtube gives you a ton load of videos.

The intersection of stem cells and robotics and knowledge banks of people's memories is should be become possible rebuild a person's replica in real time. Then you have assistants who can represent you. ;)

The dark side to this is resource contention. Will human population be regulated across the world or will nature take care of human population to deal with the storage of resources?