Sci-Fi Nightmares That Could Come True | Episode One | Unveiled

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Sci-Fi Nightmares that Could Come True - Episode One</h4>

Have you ever watched or read science fiction and felt like it came scarily close to what’s actually happening in real life? Or witnessed a technology or event unfold, knowing full well that a sci-fi writer predicted it decades ago? Have you ever worried that something horrible in sci-fi could one day happen to you?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at the terrifying future potential for clone harvesting.

In 1996, a sheep was born that changed the world. Dolly goes down in history as the first cloned mammal. She was the product of some truly astonishing biological science at the time, although today the list of successfully cloned animals has grown at a staggering pace. We’ve now seen cloned rats, cats and camels; pigs, monkeys and wolves. The breakthroughs are almost so expected and normal now that they don’t always make headlines anymore. For all the positive applications that these developments could have, however, there has always been an underlying ethical debate. How far should we go?

The concept of hatched humans first came to the fore in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, “Brave New World”. In it, the population is genetically engineered before birth, inside artificial wombs. Once born, the children are taught and nurtured to fit into certain predetermined groups. Huxley then explores our freedom (or lack of it) under these conditions. In a purely practical sense, it’s a setup that arguably could happen in real life. So-called “designer babies” are increasingly possible thanks to gene editing, with many fearing that the technology will lead to customizing human beings. Combine it specifically with the tech that birthed Dolly the Sheep, however, and that fear cranks up another notch.

The Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the prospect of harvesting clones in his 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go”. In the book, cloned humans are grown specifically to provide organs and other biological materials for non-cloned human beings. Ordinarily, the clones’ inescapable fate is kept from them; they’re oblivious that they’re only ever alive in order to one day be cut open and die young. However, the characters in Ishiguro’s story learn the truth, and events unfold from there. What’s clear is that while organs-on-tap might represent some kind of scientific utopia in theory, what actually unfolds is an unsettling dystopia when it’s realized in this way. Ishiguro’s cloned beings think, feel and love just as anyone else would… but they’re never free. And the scythe of death really can be ordered for them at any time.

Elsewhere, the issue of cloning is explored from a different angle in Michael Marshall Smith’s 1996 book, “Spares”. Published in the same year as Dolly the Sheep was born, it again captures the then-burgeoning (now fully grown) ethical landscape. Here, the action starts off on a “spares farm” where clones are grown to provide body parts for high-paying customers. The clones are entirely owned beings, with Smith creating a hellish scenario that his characters are desperate to escape from. The film rights were once bought but never acted upon, although many believe the 2005 movie “The Island” to be a very similar story. In it, the main character learns of an entrenched conspiracy wherein clones are effectively kept prisoner until they are required by their human parents. 

Meanwhile, and although not clone harvesting, the issue of organ harvesting is at the heart of Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist’s 2006 novel, “The Unit”. The eponymous Unit is a purpose-built facility where older people are sent by the state to live out their final days, before they too go under the knife to die by donating their organs and body parts. In Holmqvist’s near-future world, those who are sent to the Unit are known as dispensables, as the author asks the reader to imagine a time when certain groups of people are no longer considered worthy of life. Or, at least, their only worth is to be physically butchered in the name of younger specimens. Again, “The Unit” isn’t about mass cloning, but many of the themes it raises are transferable. And, more generally, the same kinds of questions are often asked in stories involving artificial intelligence. What happens when robots feel? Should machines have rights? The TV series, “Humans” looks directly at what might happen if synthetic humans ever became almost indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood, organic people.

With cloning in particular, the fact is that we are still a long way from fully-cloned human beings. But nevertheless, the groundwork has been made, and many deem that the barriers between us and it are almost always ethical rather than technological. Practically speaking, and while research into artificial wombs is ongoing, if a clone were to be born it would most likely be to a surrogate mother. Science fiction likes to show cloned creatures suspended inside vats of an unknown substance, but the real world work toward inventing those vats hasn’t really materialized. This, in itself, could breed concerns for what a future of cloning might look like, though, with the potential for clone carriers to be treated badly - something akin to the Handmaids in​​ Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

More broadly, the potential for corruption with cloning could be huge - including with the advent of clone slavery, the creation of clone armies, and with the birthing of secret clones for variously unjust, duplicitous and malicious purposes. A darkening picture gets even worse if we consider that, in the real world, cloning is arguably less desirable in the scientific mainstream as it once was. Due to the development of gene editing, for anyone wanting to create seemingly perfect people - no matter the moral problems that that raises - cloning is no longer necessarily the best route forward. Because how do you choose who (or what) gets cloned? And why would you bother if you could just write what you wanted into the genetic stream at source? These developments will never suddenly remove the knowledge of cloning from human society, however… and so, if tech develops to make cloning easier (which it surely will) then could we be laying the foundations for a wild west of copied creatures in the future? Today, the world is littered with long discarded products that were once deemed the height of technology, only to be replaced and thrown out… if cloning ever arrives then will it eventually go the same way? Could we ever see a time when human bodies are so easily made, and so little cared for, that they are just piled up in landfill?

For now, there are plenty of big strides that need to be made before that disturbing reality comes to pass… but what do you think? Is there a place for cloning tech in the modern world? Would you feel comfortable with cloning part (or all) of yourself in the future? And if it does one day arrive, then how do you think we should govern it? Let us know in the comments!

There are some common themes that run through all the science fiction stories and moral dilemmas that dip into cloning. What do we count as life? How do we value life generally? Is any one version of life worth more than another? If a clone is born, then are they a clone or a human first of all? Beginning with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, writers have long mused over the direction that this kind of deeply biological research could take us down. It’s now almost a century since “Brave New World”, however, and are we now about to step into the time that Huxley envisioned? 

In the time since Dolly the Sheep, we’ve fast-tracked to a level of knowledge that would have been previously hypothetical only. So much so that perhaps we’ve never properly considered the long-term implications. In a near-future era when cloning is commonplace, there’s ample opportunity for people to take advantage. With an immediately clear threat such as nuclear weaponry, there’s always the fear that the knowhow will one day be widespread, and the consequences will be dire… but it’s arguably much the same in this case. It’s frighteningly simple to imagine a path for cloning that could lead to people born to die, to some very literally unwanted children, and also to a time when only the rich get replicated. 

And, as incredible as cloning is, and as useful as some aspects of it could be in the future of our species, that’s how this science fiction nightmare really could come true.