Ask Lemmy

I heard there's a guy called Luigi with a cool idea.

Just wipe out ALL mosquitoes, and then measure what the actual influence is on the food-web for other animals and plants.

How many billionaires need to be publicly executed to fix the usa political system.

I really want someone to just really start messing around with the human genome, see the limits of gene expression. Let's add horns, let's add tusks, let's add tails, and wings, and carapaces, and antennae, and claws, let's just see what happens. Human evolution has gotten so tired and trite; let's add some spice.

Allow all kinds of drugs and other enhancements in sports and see where the limits of the body are

I want to see what happens we just have mob lynchings of politicians if their approval drops to below 50%.

Maybe the world would become a utopia?

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Here's a very unethical linguistics experiment that I think would be interesting:

Raising a group of children completely isolated from any language, spoken or otherwise. They would not be fully isolated from people, but those people would not be able to communicate with each other in the vicinity of the children (no speaking, no gestures, etc.) Of course, to isolate them from language would mean strictly controlling their lives (very unethical). Could they communicate with each other, and maybe even develop a language?

Seems pretty tame compared to various other answers, but keeping people under anesthesia longer than expected during surgery and seeing how it affects things like memory or personality.

Supposedly after an open heart surgery I had gone through over a decade ago, my mother swears my personality changed. Though I can't remember if that's true because my memory has felt, in a sense, kinda foggy since then. So I wanna know if it was because I was under for longer than expected or because the surgery itself.

Try to find out at which temperature Musk begins to melt.

Take ten or twenty thousand children, take over a fairly large portion of a midwestern state, build a large and complete environment for them to live in including towns, museums, theme parks etc. and raise them as normal Americans but absolutely 100% avoid introducing them to the concept of religion until they're 25.

Making a lot of clones of myself, raising them all differently, and seeing how many of them turn out in the same way as me.

Worldwide, making all coffee decaf, and not telling anyone.

Lobotomize all conservatives to see if their IQ increases.

We've exhausted all other options.

The metal gear solid thing where you clone someone into two separate people but one gets all the recessive genes and the other gets all the dominant ones

Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.

What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?

At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.

Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.

Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.

Currently these kinds of things can't be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.

Nice try, Mengele

The mouse utopia experiment but on humans. Ive always seen a subset of people who bemoan having to work or develop specialized skills to contribute to society. They want everything provided for them so their whole life can be leasure and comfort. A lot of socialism and communism selling points tend to be about having social services and things provided to you.

I'm interested to see the long term affects of people in a society where EVERYTHING is provided for you all the time. Every survival concern, sexual pleasure, every base urge, every whim and desire. For decades and decades and decades. Would it be a genuine good for society or would it be a monkeys paw situation?

Ive always hypothesized that any human society that attempts this will quickly erode into something similar to the mouse utopia.

Without any environmental pressures or meaningful challenges to overcome a large portion of the population without strong internal drives will become lethally/suicidally lazy, apathetic, and narcicistic

I suspect theres a large amount of people who simply have zero internal drives to apply themselves to doing a thing unlesd they have to. without the pressure of survival in either a physical or economic way they would simply sit on their ass, jerk off, play games, and maybe groom themselves, for decades until they die. Merit and overcoming challenge are important aspects of drive and dopamine generation. You deprive a person of those things they become lethargic. If that sentiment proves itself true it will be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of ideologies.

Unethical questions:

Statistically speaking, how many people would escelate their wants to socially taboo depravities? How quickly?

How long on average would it take for pleasure to become less meaningful in the face of instant gratification? Is there a logarithmic function that charts this?

How many people on average decide to begin self harm out to seek novel sensations? How long until onset?

How many people choose to live out a full life vs taking the placebo cyanide capsule and being removed from experiment? What would their reasonings be?

Take the people expressing their violent political fantasies in threads like this and make them live in the worlds they're advocating for.

Lock someone is a room-wide 24h fMRI or some other imaging technique to get a full recording of a human body working.

Who from the US government will last the longest in a bonfire. Although it might be questionable if this experiment is really unethical.

Actually just stop allowing anyone with "defective" genes to reproduce.

I am fully I wouldnt exist in this hypothetical world (-11 vision in both eyes), but I would be curious what would happen if we only ever let perfectly healthy people with no genetic defects have kids.

Like would it eventually just become a perfect world where nobody needs glasses or asthma inhalers? Or would we die off because not enough genetically "perfect" people exist to make this plan work?

I'd be really curious about the Tarzan experiment, having a human infant raised by apes.

I'd like to see if we can build hybrid computer systems using cultured animal tissue (like Cephalopod or maybe GMO human / Cephalopod), basically grown onto an array of tiny wires. Push sensory information through the tiny wires and see if the lump of cells can learn. If it does, put it in a Eva. Or a butler robot. Or a robot vaccuum.

Idk. Its an idea for a scifi novel I've had. Some company does this and what people don't realize is the supposedly autonomous systems making their lives easier are fully conscious but live tortured existences. It would get more and more lovecraftian as the cephalopod hybrids some how take over (I was thinking maybe cancer? or networked mind) and start chopping everyone to bits. Maybe they try and eat them but they have no mouth, like how an octopus arm when detach will hunt and try to feed a non-existent mouth.