I think that we will have absolutely no choice but to figure out how to selectively express modified genes eventually.  I don't think we will make it into deep space without just those sorts of modifications.  We will need to tamper down atrophy and similarly time sensitive destructive biological processes.  We will need to be much more resistant to radiation too.  Probably have to find a way to use less caloric energy, and lie almost completely dormant, using as little resources as possible, for extended time periods.  Genetic manipulation could do all of that.  Or, if we learn how to modify ourselves, perhaps we can just put all that tech and raw material on some probe, which can make an intelligent organism from scratch, to suit whatever environment that it encounters on some exoplanet in deep space in 20,000 years.

 Likewise, we might eventually need to find a way to make us capable of imbibing salt water again.  That would solve a whole bunch of our potable water problems.  It would probably be cheaper and easier than desal plants too.  On a personal note, I would love if I could have had my fucking allergies turned off before I was born.  Those are just minor annoyances too, unlike real problems people have to endure, like Trisomy or inherited cancer or whatever.  The ability to fix that shit, plus all that space crap earlier, suggests to me that we need to get as deeply into this s we can, sooner rather than later.

Also, on another note, but related, I am actually looking forward to seeing the unintended consequences that designer babies might provide.  They might not have any common genetic problems anymore, but I'm sure something else, that we didn't expect, will happen often enough to warrant a whole new ontology of disease.

Yeah.  I mean, in just the same way there are no longer any biplanes around, because now we have jets and helicopters and rockets.  Once the teleological end game that evolution chose to follow to make the best suited organism for whatever environment evolution finds on the planet, it immediately gets rid of all the other organisms or designs that had to happen to get to that end state.  So monkeys, fish, worms, bacteria, are all gone now because they have all been replaced with humans.  No biplanes either, because it is the same exact mechanism.  Aristotelian Evolution via teleological natural selection is clearly the way only way nature can actually work.

On a serious note, I am starting to wonder what exact analytical justification we have for explaining big bunches of individually living cells, making a superveneal aggregate organism out of the collective of those cells, makes any real sense at all.  We  definitely have some good justifications for individual cells being considered alive, as they fit the criteria that we have invented to describe life pretty well.  So do our macro scale organisms, like humans, but we have to take a lot of axioms to heart that our compound nature is just as justifiable as single celled organisms.  I have been trying to think about my own existence in a way which says I am not actually a living being, but the denominator left over from my body cells keeping themselves alive, that for convenience and just not knowing any better, we have humans have always described as being.  I think it actually makes more logical sense to think about us being huge bundles of individual living cells wandering around on their own collective volition, which we mistake as being our personality and sense of self-self through our brain cells making us think we are actual things.  I mean, we really don't actually respirate, some of our cells were made in a way which forces them in aggregate to force air in and out of our lungs, but it is all little cells working in unison through a complicated chemical quorum sensing system to actually push those cells around, suck in air to the huge collective of cells that is our lungs, and spread individual oxygen molecules on individual cells so that it can supply all of the rest of our little cells with oxygen.

That, or I am just smoking way too much pot and have gone off the deep end.

It has snowed 3-4 times so far this month.  That is not uncommon for where I live though.

Identity politics once again proves to be pointlessly arbitrary and basically nothing more than a way to add pedantry into the national pastime that is virtue signaling?  To strawman dissent into the argument in order to try to (but utterly fail to) nullify criticism?  I am glad the pendulum is swinging the other way.  Soon, they will all eat each other because they find ways to virtue signal something outside the primary focus in Critical Theory, and use the same "if you disagree you're a bigot" tactics against one another.  Like when they did not let that Transman at Brown sit on the council for diversity, because through identifying as a white male, they suddenly became the enemy oppressor.

It's gonna be hilarious watching them devour each other.