<shrugs, looks at the sheepskin on the wall for the political science degree hangingnext to her lovely garand M1 that her daddy taught her to shoot with when she was but a young sprog, and wanders off to find a good empty machine shop too practice until she regains her original skill level, and wonders if her access badge still works at the nuke power station she once did a refit upon…} :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Nice.
I’ll throw in the ability to turn most farm animals into cutlets, without serving the infectious bits, Government infrastructure systems and aquaculture.
But then again, I live in a country that’s on its second female Prime Minister in succession and which once had the four top political positions all held by women. Life went on as normal.
Not true anymore. Recent reports with a new freezing protocol put the thawing success rate at 75% and fertilization rate at 60%. Healthy children have been born from frozen eggs.
The thing is, this is a kind of crazy scenario, so what difference does it make if you have a fairly low success rate anyway? All you need is a few successes and off you go with the human race again. Once you have a few human females, they can be implanted with multiple fetuses, and within a few decades you’ll have hundreds, if not thousands, of human females to repopulate the species.
I think you mistook the tone of that post. He was just saying that women are under represented in those fields.
… That was hardly the posters point, however. Regardless of what you or I think is right or wrong with the world, a huge number of engineers, political leaders, etc. are men. Even if half of the engineers in the world were women, then half of the engineers in the world suddenly dying is a very bad thing. The infrastructure we live in does not neatly scale back by half just because half of the population is gone – if you need ten engineers to run something, it’s going to be a huge challenge to run it with five, even if the expected output is less.
The other thing to keep in mind is that, assuming we still have plenty of boy babies around, we’ve got at least 80 years to solve whatever technical problems there are to getting one of the techniques to work-- whether it’s an artificial womb, a human male pregnancy, or a great ape surrogate. In fact, by then we might be able to have automated process that continued the effort after the last guy died.
There are so many technological advances that are going to take place in genetics and reproductive science in the next 80 years, that it’s hard to imagine the problem not being solvable. Hell, we might be able genetically engineer a chimp ovum to be a human ovum by then.
There is a book called “A Handmaid’s Tale” that has the premise that something extraordinary has happened and very few women are able to carry a viable baby to term. It’s pretty disturbing but probably a fairly likely scenario if such something was to happen.
We will see a bit of this in the coming decades as the number of chinese men outnumber the women. If it is instead of a total wipe out, a rather significant drop, I would assume the value of women would rise dramatically, even if the quality of their lives did not.
Pick up the book, it’s pretty disturbing and makes you consider aspects you would not have thought of. For instance, since it was fewer women able to conceive, the women that couldn’t had to have their “places” protected from those women that could. What safe-guards would YOU have in place if your only chance of being a parent involved someone else?
Have we done other species in wombs that aren’t of that species?
Pigs in cow wombs or whatnot?
As I said in my last post, yes. It’s old technology and we’ve done it for species that are far, far more distantly related than humans and chimps. Just put ‘surrogate embryo species’ or similar terms into Google for endless information on the dozens of species this has been done for.
Putting apig into a cow wombis of course simply ridiculous.
Perhaps the point would have been better made with the corresponding horror at the under representation in traditionally ‘female’ jobs?
Or wouldn’t the lack of experienced midwives affect the repopulation of the world? 
I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic novel titled Califia’s Daughters by Leigh Richards set in future California where about 90% of the men have died out and the male baby survival rate is about 12%. Women run everything including the military and security, and the few men of each community are considered too precious to risk their lives on anything dangerous, so they’re not allowed to become warriors or trouble their pretty little heads about important matters. They’ve also adjusted to a lower level of technology, but that’s partly because the infrastructure had been destroyed (by men’s wars) and the few remaining humans in agrarian communities are too occupied with basic survival and defense to rebuild it on its former scale. The gender role reversal is interesting because in this scenario men are relegated to the same limited procreative roles as women used to have.
Depends. Are we talking about the no-women scenario? In that case, midwifery’s not going to be a very useful skill since reproduction is not going to entail very much gynaecology.
As a WAG, civilization would be easier to rebuild without midwives than it would without people who knew how to run and maintain power stations, fuel refineries, sewerage, and pretty much anything to do with feeding, housing, warming and transporting very large numbers of people - all of which, I suggest, would collapse in a matter of hours if staffed solely by the present number of female operatives. Otherwise, the woman referenced in the OP just seems to be singing “All Praise The Miraculous Womb!”, which I thought was a little outdated in the present era.
We have done more than that. We have cloned a guar (type of Asian cow) using the emptied ovum of a domestic cow + DNA from a guar, with the cow being the surrogate. Now, guars and cattle are in the same genus, but as **Blake **mentioned above, putting humans and chimps in different genera is hard to justify-- it’s more of a conceit on our part than anything else.
As for pigs and cows, I’m not sure what the inter-relatedness limit might be, but pigs and cows are pretty distantly related. Both belong to the order Artiodactyla, but are probably separated by about 50M years of evolution (vs 5-6M years for humans and chimps).
A good story about a no man future was Houston, Houston, Do You Read?.
The other side of the story is The White Plague.
Actually, it has been reported that scientists have been able to get human embryonic cells to differentiate into the earliest stages of eggs and sperm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4104680.stm
There is a series of graphic novels/comic books based on the premise in this thread.
“Y: The Last Man”.
Its execution is mediocre, but its premise is fascinating. Everything on Earth with a Y chromosome had mysteriously died except for the book’s protagonist. The traditionally male-dominated professions are shot to hell, and Israel, with its nearly 50% female army, takes over the Middle East and much of Asia.
This would not help the all male scenario but for the all female one, even if all the sperm banks contain Y (male) sperm were also removed I beleive it would be possible.
The gender is not determined by the XX or XY, but only influenced by them and it is possible to have a XY female and a XX male. IIRC the chromosome is responsible for the hormones during development, which we can alter in a fetus and change the gender. So a female pregnant with a female fetus can us this to change her baby to a male. True it would be a XX male, but would produce sperm which can be used to create more offspring, some of which can be converted to males via hormones.
That’s by Margaret Atwood.
The recent movie Children of Men (which I haven’t seen) was about the rapid and absolute infertility of (virtually) all the world’s women, IIRC. On the other hand, A Boy and His Dog posited an underground, post-WWIII American community whose men were all sterile. A wandering young man thought he was in for some fun with the women of the community when he arrived; he learned otherwise when he was forcibly hooked up to a semen-extraction machine. :eek:
I think that if the human race suddenly lost half of its population by any means, regardless of which half, the rest would have a pretty chaotic time of it. So let’s instead posit that instead of all of the men (women) dying, that something happens to cause no more baby boys (girls) to be born. The current population would continue doing their jobs, and you’d probably get about the same total number of babies, just all of the same gender. I believe this was the way it happened in Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, do you Read?” mentioned above (which I also recommend).
Not true, unfortunately. If a woman carrying an XX fetus takes large amounts of androgens during her pregnancy, the resulting infant may end up with a greatly enlarged clitoris which could be mistaken for a penis, but would still have ovaries and female internal reproductive organs (but might be infertile). It takes more than male hormones to cause male differentiation of an embryo; it also requires a few proteins made by genes from the Y chromosome. (Those cases of XX males occur because faulty translocation has resulted in one of the X chromosomes having a small piece of a Y chromosome stuck to it.)