Mars

[Anomalocaris]

Because I think in less than 500 years our mastery of all the processes behind all human function would be so complete all mysticism surrounding human beings, value of experience, and the potency of the will, feeling and thought  will be totally gone, and we will be able to manufacture humans of any desired size, age, knowledge, experience, inclination, personality on order in fabrication plants.   Biological reproduction, child rearing, education etc will be superfluous.  Embryos will no longer occur in human society.

Yeah, so where's our flying cars?

Waiting for you right outside your window.  Mind the gap.

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Why are children required?  

I don't think that we're looking at this the same way.  We don't have to imagine the future to see what you're describing.  We've done it here, from the excursions to the new world to remote jobsites to offshore rigs.  Children bring no more practical utility in those situations than they would in off-world colonization.  Broadly, that's the difference between a labor camp and a colony.  While it may be tru that children aren't a requirement for an off world (or on world) labor camp..it's probably not accurate to assert that they bring nothing (even to that labor camp).  The presence or absence of children profoundly indicates success or failure of colonization, to me.  It cuts to the entire point of colonization as distinct from the creation of labor camps.

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-for the above, the more we suggest that these human beings have been modified to be unlike us the less we're talking about a successful human colony and the more we're talking about a "whatever the hell they are" colony..still likely used by us as a labor camp.  Perhaps even more so, if these designer adults can be effectively argued as property rather than people.

The presence or absence of children would only indicate success of the colony if biological reproduction continue to remain an important was by which human societies expand themselves.   I think in the relatively near future (say 100 years) means of producing new humans through processes other than traditional biological reproduction will become available.   Over another 100 years the process will be be perfected, made generally available, and largely replace biological reproduction.  Over similar period, direct programming of human mind will also become possible, practical, and supplant all means of instructive child rearing, education and training as we’ve know hitherto.

Once that has happened, the presence of children will no longer denote the success of a colony, but its failure and collapse of its organization and infrastructure, more like children of school age running wild and eking out a marginal living by scavenging might say about a colony in our time.

Ours is an extremely young technological civilization. We’ve only been in a position to scratch the very surface of what really is going on during reproduction for about 100 years. Prior to that the underlying mechanism of reproduction was a total riddle wrapped in myth and handed down from time immemorial, well at least from hundreds of millions of years ago. We don’t understand it, so we can’t make it work if we try to change it. That’s why we hold it in such idolatrous reverence.

But there is no reason why any technologically advanced civilization need to remain rooted in biological and behavior limitaions if its pre-salients evolutionary path.