 October 29, 2013 - 5:52am | Just caught a movie trailer for Delivery Man and naturally it made me wonder about sperm banks in the Frontier. Do dralasites use a spore bank? Vrusk? Egg bank? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 29, 2013 - 6:38am | I can see the viability of spore banks for dralasites. I can see vrusk having sperm banks and egg banks like humans and yazirians. I just think that frontier medicine is advanced enough that these methods are antiquated. They are able to fix fertility problems so banks are more appropriate to colony establishment where a small seed population needs to create great diversity. Then there would be those rare individuals who want offspring alone and guaranteed anonymity of and from the donating partner. -iggy |
October 29, 2013 - 7:00am | There would also be the circumstance of someone having a potentially hazardous career like a starship engineer working around radioactive materials. Perhaps this is one of the services the Brotherhood of spacers provides: genetic screening and fertillity insurance. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 29, 2013 - 8:43am | Some of this would depend on the level of cloning available in the Frontier. If they can clone populations or perhaps even use artificial wombs and stored male and female reproductive material then a colony would be able to develop on its own without alot of immigrant influx. Two things work against this in SF: 1) The game was meant as a kids game so reproductive elements were only generally covered. 2) The idea of a "Frontier Society" leads to rugged individualism and independance. This usually means strong family ties and conservatism which means a cultural bias against cloning and much more toward natural extended families (strongly represented in Yazirian clans and Vrusk trade houses) and not hordes of clones. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
October 29, 2013 - 3:02pm | The question you seem to be asking is, has frontier tech advanced enough to clone like Star Wars or propagate beings like in Logan's Run? -iggy |
October 30, 2013 - 4:02am | Thats a great question Iggy; levels of cloning- Star Wars would be the high end of the ladder. When I started this thread I was thinking purely in terms of today's fertility tech. Which I would suppose would be the low or bottom end of the spectrum. 5th element would be a high end level- where you could take a dead hand and recreate the individual though the implication of 5th Element is that who you are is bound up in your DNA -not something I'd aggree with. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 30, 2013 - 9:05am | I also agree that DNA does not contain who you are in the personal sense. All clones would be individuals and not like the funny Multiplicity movie. -iggy |
October 30, 2013 - 11:36am | I suppose we should not actually call it levels of cloning but rather levels of fertility tech or something so that you could describe the levels with non cloning tech that is applicable here, like artificial wombs and In utero gene therapy, bio-engineering, etc. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 30, 2013 - 11:50am | I think I know why Jedion is asking: Those fancy Dralasite Schools don't pay for themselves. (nothing to be ashamed about, really)  By the way, I found info on cloning in Dragon Magazine issue #90, For a Fist Full of Credits. (So if a guy made a clone of my... ah.. himself for the sake of making sweat-monkey-love to it, would that be gay, incest or masturbation?  Just asking?  ) |
October 30, 2013 - 11:50am | Yes let's separate cloning from grow new offspring. Let's define cloning as making an exact copy and propagation? as making new generations or offspring, they are a mix of the contributing biologicals. Cloning is used for medicine, healing, etc. The (propogation?) science is used to create new beings, augment gene-banks and their output, etc. -iggy |
November 4, 2013 - 5:37am | Well if you think clones will have their own personalities and that enviroment plays a key role in personality development then you must have watched the BBC show Orphan Black. Here's a link that discusses the show and cloning in general: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/29/orphan_black_how_farfetched_is_cloning_like_on_the_bbc_america_show.html Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
