How to Change the Climate: Bioengineer Humans

If we can’t get human beings to stop contributing to climate change, maybe we need to re-eingineer humans. Many contactees (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this interview) think "the Grays" are biological machines–maybe we need to be that too.

It doesn’t mean turning us into machine-men (NOTE: Subscribers can get a beautiful hardcover of this Whitley Strieber novel for less than $5!) "Human engineering" could try to induce changes in personal behavior or policies to help stave off climate change.

Some of the (not always serious) suggestions for this are: Induce intolerance to red meat , since livestock farming accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions (or DOES it?). We could also reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates, and we could engineer humans so that the children we DO have would be smaller (and thus use less energy).

We could treat people with the hormone oxytocin, in order to make us more altruistic and empathetic.

In LiveScience, Wynne Parry quotes ethicist Anders Sandberg as saying, "If I want to test out one of those brain-enhancing devices, I can test it on medical students. If something goes wrong, I might get a lawsuit, but it is a localized problem. How do you test geoengineering? How many Earths do we have to test on?"

Sandberg says that we already have "all the tools (we need) to mess with ourselves to improve our performance. A lot of them are quite controversial, except the ones we don’t recognize." Someone will tell you, ”I think it’s horrible people take pills to become smarter,’ but they are saying it over (caffeine-filled) coffee.’"

Supplementing salt with iodine is credited with preventing brain damage in infants, and as a result, boosting intelligence around the world, and Fluoride is put into water systems to protect our teeth, and we get vaccinations to protect against disease.

Parry quotes Sandberg as saying, "I am mildly skeptical if anything we propose is going to happen. I think it’s most likely green changes to human nature aren’t anything we have thought of."