🧵 Creating Domesticated Dragons with Biological Engineering
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 01:11:13 UTC No. 16283056
Many believe human industiral activity has irreversibly altered the earth's climate. Transportation technology, including cars and air travel, play a significant role in polluting the environment with greenhouse gases. Transitioning away from fossil fuels will not address mobile transport on the ground or in the air, and the current electrical grid is not prepared for a conversion of all the cars on the road and all the planes in the sky to electric actuation, were even the technologies to do so mature and cost-competitive with their gasoline-powered counterparts. In response to all this, you propose to use genetic engineering to produce a flying horse for personal transportation. Using a biological machine would not require electric or fossil-fuel input, and so would not produce any greenhouse gas emissions. If it is engineered not to be a grazer, than not even methane emissions from its excrement would be an environmental concern. A domesticated dragon would cost much less in maintenance, require no traffic stops or registration, and result in unlimited free travel worldwide (subject to breaks for sleeping or rest). Giving your teenage children transportation would be free: you simply get your dragon to reproduce with a neighbor's. You will never need spare parts or maintenance (other than regular veterinarian visits), and are thus insulated from the inevitable collapse of society that will make cars, dependent on intercontinental trade and petroleum distilling infrastructure, unusable for possibly many generations.
Anonymous at Tue, 16 Jul 2024 01:11:37 UTC No. 16283057
>>16283056
With that motivation aside, my real question is how would you actually do this in a laboratory: Create an organism that can be ridden for personal travel and can fly in the air, something a lot like a horse, which has been a transportation staple for centuries. The fire-breathing part isn't really at all useful for personal transportation. Obviously, no existing animals fly that are large enough to ride, and dragons aren't real so they can't just be captured and domesticated. I was thinking of breeding eagles (or some other bird) for size, but since there have never been any modern avians that big, that suggests there are fundamental physical maximum limits to that anatomy and physiology. Similarly, that no insects are currently large enough to ride also makes me think that their basic design cannot be scaled up high enough. In that case, it might make more sense to revive pterodactyls or pteradons, but those have been extinct for dozens of millions of years, and DNA only lasts for a few tens of thousand (even if preserved in amber). I doubt we as a species currently have the genetic engineering know-how to create wings on an existing animal, say a horse, or even graft functional ones onto a horse through vivisection. And vivisection would not lead to an organism that can reproduce fertile offspring with those same traits. All modern and extinct flying animals, aside from insects, seem to use their forelimbs as wings, so it seems likely this creature would stand on two legs (its rear limbs) and wings would be made out of its forelimbs. On the other hand, it would be convenient if this flying creature could also double as a ground transport creature, as a horse, which may be difficult on only two legs. Its back will also not be horizontal, optimal for riding, if it is stands on only two legs. We have more of a history of domesticating mammals compared to insects, and all mammals are quadrupeds.
Any ideas, how would you create real dragons?