Breath farms?

[Bugglesley]

On 5/20/2024 at 1:58 PM, heliovox said:

As hard as it might be to believe, I actually think we might be able to go darker with this.

 

Humans are already kind of neotenizing themselves (making themselves more childlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans) through natural genetic drift.

This is similar but not identical to what we did by domesticating animals with artificial selection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals).

 

There are estimates that one could achieve domestication like effects in ~10-12 generations.  For humans, this is a lot of time (probably a little more than 1000 years), but, over the course of the cosmere timeline, a focused enough force could almost certainly achieve a breeding group of breathed humans somewhat comparable to modern earth's cattle farms (https://xkcd.com/1338/) which actually outweigh humans by mass.

 

My *suspicion* is that Edgli would probably step in to prevent this (/possibly already has stepped in to prevent this through returned?), but breath is just so danged useful, and producing it quickly is annoyingly hard.

 

I also have a really hard time picturing Brandon writing something this dark... now.... Dan.....?

 

I don't like this.

Why is breeding a group of "domesticated" humans (whatever that means, given the massively increased complexity of genetics->behavioral expression in literal dogs vs human beings, with our evidence being a wikipedia page which specifies really clearly that the only theory here is that neoteny compared to Apes is what made modern humans in the first place, so your use of it in this context makes no sense on its face and is mostly relying on vague presumptions based on absolutely bogus evopsych) remotely necessary??

Get some Nalthians, and ensure through whatever ethically horrifying means that they are constantly having children. In the "more flies with honey" tradition, let's say it's an extremely nice village with normalized polygamy and amazingly fun activities to do every day and lots of people you like around, and there are big rewards every time you have another child who will be taken to the nursery to have the very best of care and wow some of them even come back when they're grown! How nice! Mostly women, though? Oh and when you're too old to have more kids you go to the old folks home that nobody ever sees for some reason but don't worry they're happy there . Then you have a very beautiful and comforting nursery run by people whose only job is to get those kids to know how to say the magic words and mean it, and as soon as they do they graduate, hooray! Everyone wants to graduate as soon as they can! Let's all try to sing the song with the words, kids!

And then after they graduate you kill them and make them fertilizer or sell them to whoever has use for drabs. Some of them get to go back into the first habitat, sure, enough so your breeding stock is the size you can support and is young and healthy and relatively genetically diverse at all times.

The limiting factor is how fast you can get new humans to a point where they can give their Breath, not how they behave. It's not exactly difficult to manipulate a child you have taken care of from birth to do what you want. Even the above scenario, a stomach-churning setting for a horror story of unimaginable cruelty of a "factory" that you put food into and get Breath out of, in no possible world requires a genetically distinct breed of manmade subhumans to accomplish. You're adding that detail because you want it there and that's a little weird tbh bro. 

[heliovox]

On 6/8/2024 at 11:46 AM, Bugglesley said:

And then after they graduate you kill them and make them fertilizer or sell them to whoever has use for drabs. Some of them get to go back into the first habitat, sure, enough so your breeding stock is the size you can support and is young and healthy and relatively genetically diverse at all times.

 

For the purpose, this would be fine too.

I was just suggesting a different, longer range means.

It seems to me that your method has a slightly increased chance of rebellion/your breeding stock doing dangerous and stupid things if they see behind the curtain (soylent green, for example).

 

I am absolutely not saying that breeding humans who would be just smart enough to meet the cosmere requirement of being sapient while being so stupid that they couldn't rebel if they want to would be easy, exactly, but there are plenty of people around the cosmere with lots of time on their hands.

 

I *do* think that, in cosmere, a shard/something similar (in this case probably edgli) would step in to prevent something like this from happening, but I don't think it would be unprecedented for sci-fi/fantasy.  What I suggested was basically the background for the Eloi and the Morlocks in 'The Time Machine'.