Not to mention that it wouldn’t do you any good anyway. An “XX male” with a penis and sperm would still not produce any Y sperm, so you’d be right back where you were in the first place.
The point was it may be easier to just make XX males then perfect cloning, or otherwise combining two X eggs.
Just to throw a (monkey) wrench into the discussion: if chimps are so closely related to humans, it’s likely that our “Femme Virus” would wipe out the female chimps, as well, isn’t it? I thought we shared most of our illnesses with them.
The problem with the male pregnancy, as I understand it, is that they’re not stretchy enough. The uterus is a mind-boggling organ which stretches from the size of a small coin purse to the size of a basketball while still retaining the power to contract it’s muscles. It’s amazing, really. That’s why ectopic or abdominal pregnancies kill - the innards of the woman aren’t as stretchy there, so blood vessels get ripped apart and you bleed to death internally. Same thing would happen with a man.
Oh, and according to the docs in the neo-natal intensive care unit (highly rated, urban hospital), we’re certainly not within 100 years of an artificial womb. The very, rarely earliest we can incubate them now is at 22 weeks. And 99% of them die or have awful disabilities. 23 weeks you have a 30% survival rate, with 70% of those suffering major disabilities like blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy or mental retardation.
One of the reasons why the Gileadians were so screwed populationwise was that they rejected any & all forms of artificial reproduction. No in vitro, no fertility drugs, no artifical insemintation, etc. They also refused to event acknowledge the possibilty of male sterility. This combined with their 3 strikes and you’re out rule must have led to lots of fertile Handmaids being sent to the Colonies.
Techically yes, an animal has been a surogate for a different species, but they’re both types of cats so they’re both family felidae. Cows and Pigs are different familes, bovid and suidae. We’d probably have luck with people and chimps (both family hominidae) sooner than pigs and cows.
Hey, it is not just shove an embryo into a random uterus! Pigs and cows have different types of placentation (diffuse vs cotyledonary), and I doubt the pig embryo will survive for long in an uterus that is not adapted to it.
Primates (and rodents!) have similar (if not identical) placentation types, so embryo transfers may work better.
Posted by ** whynot**
So, going back to the OP - the answer is no. We aren’t within reach of artificial gestation. But we are able to artificially fertilise.
The secondary question or what would happen if either gender vanished? We’d struggle, but probably manage without the total breakdown of society, same as we’d manage if all the whites/blacks) vanished, all the producers/ consumers vanished - any arbitrary half of the population vanishing would cause issues that the remainder would most likely struggle to cope with. The nearest we have to an example are the plagues of medieval Europe. Society lost a lot of trained personnel, in a very brief time. There was a loss of skills that took hundreds of years to replace (some skills have been bypassed rather than regained). Humanity itself survived, the same cities exist now.
Also (and I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I can’t find it on a search) - During the world wars, women took up the ‘male’ dominated jobs (I know England / Aus / NZ, can anyone cite others?). Factory and farmwork. Technical, engineering, accountancy, you name it. When the soldiers came back, women were asked (in New Zealand at least) to give up their jobs so the soldiers could have work again. Some industries never went back to the male dominated ratio they had previously - Bank staff for example.
Well, now we aren’t, the question of whether or not it’d be possible in the next 70 years seems to be up in the air. In the next 70 years if a trillion dollars a year was spent on reaching that goal? If nobody thinks it’s impossible, which I don’t think anybody claimed, then that’s decent enough I guess.
I do think women would fare far better, I was just arguing that humans wouldn’t be extinct within 150 years.
There can be no question that an all-woman society would have no problem at all reproducing. No new technology needed. However, I think it’s almost certain that men could get by, too-- if we didn’t all kill each other first! It would take some work, but nothing that a few years of research couldn’t tackle.
Yes, but you haven’t shown that it’s probable or even possible, we just can’t show that it’s IMpossible. Given the current rate of medical research, it’s highly, highly unlikely. I agree that throwing more money and more scientists on the problem (taking them off other research like curing cancer and AIDS and the common cold) MIGHT accelerate the industry enough to find a workable artificial womb within the human lifespan. They might also invent leprechauns.
I don’t know how to prove a negative in speculation. But the womb and embryo present a terribly complicated subject that we really don’t understand completely*, much less have the technology to duplicate the thousands of critically sensitive hormonal washes that happen throughout pregnancy.
*Yolk sacs, for example - no one knows for sure why they’re there. They might have something to do with gonadal development. Or not. All we know is if there isn’t one there at a certain week of gestation, the embryo won’t survive. But we can’t see that it actually *does *anything.
What’s the current rate of research into creating an artificial womb or implanting a human embryo into another species? That would increase 100 times on the extreme small end.
As has been said before it’s been done with other closely related species. Why not humans if there’s an incentive?
What chance would you guess there’d be for a human child to be born having never been inside a human woman within the next 80 years? If it’s the single most important thing in the history of mankind?
Maybe I’m just looking for the information I want to see and am taking too much stock in the successes in other species and the projected growth of research in the future, but it seems to me that it’s nothing close to being a long shot.
Again, anything likely to kill all female humans would likely kill all closely related females, like chimps.
Unless you’re positing some sort of [del]genocide[/del] gendercide wherein the men kill all the women. In such a scenario, I suspect they’d do more damage to one another and the infrastructure as well. If they’re going to turn into misogynistic Reavers, how will they calm down and get to studyin’ artificial wombs - especially considering that there will be no women left to observe with wombs that work to base their experiments on?
I’m not a specialist in this area, but I’d say about 5%. It’s not zero, 'cause it never is according to my statistics teacher, but it ain’t large, either.
Well, it’s hard to say. What’s the single most important problem in the history of mankind right now? Why haven’t we solved it? Just because we really, really want to and throw a lot of money at an issue doesn’t guarantee we succeed within a lifetime.
See, I’d be happy just to see some cites on “the projected growth of research in the future.” Right now all I see is wishing. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you haven’t supported your argument well.
I’m going to have to backpetal here and say that I don’t have any direct evidence, and as you point out there are other closely related species that are interfertile and/or can successful bear the implanted fertilized ovum of one another. This isn’t a guarantee that it will work, though.
I suspect, however, that John Mace’s assumption that advances in the next few decades would bring such a capability into the range of possibility. There are tremendous hurdles to viable genetic manipulation and artificial that are given only passing attention by most science fiction authors, but the rate of increase of knowledge and capablity in these fields has virtually lept forward in the last couple of decades–it’s never been a better time to be working in the field of molecular biology from a capabilities point of view–and we have every reason to expect that trend to continue. It would be far easier, however, for an all-female population to reproduce than an all male one, perhaps even in the realm of feasibility today were we to cast aside concerns about bioethics (and the professional bioethicists with them, who, as a group of people I have relatively little use for).
Regarding the issue of the effects of losing half a population: owing to the not entirely artificial gender dichotomy we’d expect some pretty severe adjustments. It’s true that women are vastly underrepresented in the physical sciences and mechanical and electrical engineering fields, and to lose (whether by calamity or decline) those segments of the working population would result in some loss of continuity and legacy knowledge. In chemistry and chemical engineering there’s something close to parity, and at least in school the civil engineering department seem to have a substantial representation of female students. Although the legal and medical fields have traditionally been male dominated there is a significant and growing portion of women in both areas, and of course nursing and primary education are substantially female-dominated. Losing half the population, as Chronos suggests, would be devestating regardless, but if it occured over time that the male population declined I suspect that it could be aptly compensated; modern technology has rendered most jobs without need of great physical strength. We’d likely lose some scientific prowess and legacy owing to the extant dearth of women in those areas, but with an impetus toward greater automation I’d expect more women to move into the science and engineering fields.
I’d be far more concerned about the loss of the female population from an evolutionary sociological point of view; it’s not just the simplist “men fight and women gather and raise,” but the fact that women are apparently hardwired to be more attuned to body language, deception, emotional response, et cetera. It’s certainly possible for a man to be a nuturing and caring single parent, but it seems easier, or at least more common in women. How much of that is truly nature and how much is socialization is debatable, but certainly the societies where women did not have a significant hand in rearing male children were some of the most warring and aggressive.
Stranger
The hypothetical is some magical thing. Say space aliens kidnap all the women for sex slaves or something.
That’s fair enough. It’s impossible to say what will happen in the future. I didn’t mean to imply I had some hard data. I suppose that conjecture doesn’t belong in GQ.
Sorry for posting off-topic, but is anyone else creeped out by feminist gynotopic science fiction about an Earth with no men? I find it “thought-provoking” in the same way that The Turner Diaries is thought-provoking. Basically somebody’s fantasy about a world that is Judenfrei or Schwarzenfrei or Herrenfrei or whatever.
Gynocentric, don’t you mean? A society focused on women, not men (not androcentric). I don’t find it creepy that there’d be no men, but kind of sad. Although the fact that men are gotten rid of all together, rather than subjugated it kind of extreme; I think it has to do with the authors considering men so threatening that the only way to keep them from regaining control is to elminate them all together.
Any scenario where there is only one gender will be icky - we need each other for way more than making babies.
However much gender differences are hardwired or socialised, we complement each others skills and abilities. There’s crossover, sure - and either gender can learn the skills associated with the other (both Maori and Ancient British cultures gave their women folk the choice of taking over for their slain husbands on the battlefield).
But it would be half a society. I can’t think of any fictional gender-centric society that would be bearable in reality, let alone actually workable.
Then again, I think that stripper calendars are equally offensive whether they’re male or female strippers. (since we’re OT anyway).
Sure, and the author of The Turner Diaries felt the same way about Jews, blacks, etc.
Good point, pass the brain bleach.
elfkin477 wasn’t necessarily espousing that viewpoint, just noting it as a symptom. Extremists of any stripe are painful. It was a small part of the feminist movement, which comprised a small part of society.
I always liked Henry Kissengers quote “No side will win the Battle of the Sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” 
I remember we had a long discussion on the Dope about this a few years back - started by Satisfying Andy Licious IIRC. “Feminist Utopian Fiction”. The feminist Dopers took the line that there was no such thing and all SAL’s cites were from men’s rights websites and therefore unreliable.
I think the premise in Califia’s Daughters is broken; males are functionally fertile from about 13 onwards and, even in a scenario where females outnumbered them ten to one, most of us would have no problem impregnating enough women between puberty and early twenties to more than achieve replacement rate, all between homework and bedtime. It’s a win-win situation: all the pussy we can handle without having to be the sole providers or look over our shoulders for disgruntled men who are pussiless and resenting those who have appropriated their share, and certainly no need to lock up the scarce males in a gilded cage.
I haven’t read the book, but the authoress, if honest, should include at least some tribes, cities, social groups or whatever, where men aren’t disenfranchised, and show that they can breed just as well as those that sequester their males, and address the distinct possibility that men’s non-breeding contributions to the species are of such great benefit as to explain why gynarchy hasn’t historically competed well with andarchy.
Having fired off an earlier answer to the matter of men being under-represented in midwifery, I realize that I ought to have mentioned male gynaecologists and obstetricians, of which there is a buttload, and argued that they could pick up the slack for the missing midwives fairly adequately.
I can’t remember if frozen sperm is ever touched upon in Y: The Last Man, of which I’ve read several volumes though not all. Of course, one obvious problem with it is that the sperm would have to be resorted to pretty durn promptly as it wouldn’t stay frozen for long once the power grid went out. I don’t know how long liquid nitrogen lasts, but I’ll venture a little pocket change that the number of women in the liquid air-products industry wouldn’t keep it going for long.
See, that’s being vindictive for the sake of it, as well as just plain stupid - on a par with killing the goose to get all the golden eggs at once. If a healthy young man can’t knock up all the women the community needs knocked up within the space of a year or two (and why can’t he?), what’s wrong with getting his willing daily donation and sharing it five ways with the aid of a syringe? 1825 inseminations a year not enough or something? :rolleyes: