Out of Pod Experience

I suggest you read all of what you cut out of my post.

Look at the world of idiocracy: they have technology significantly more advanced than ours that has been operating for probably a hundred years without competent maintenance. This would indicate that the dumbing down of the world took at least decades more. It's quite possible that the world reached over 10 billion occupants by that time.

Once the population was unable to produce or operate the equipment that drove the industries that made it possible for that many people to live on Earth, the population would rather rapidly contract. The people most likely to survive this would be the smart ones, the ones able to anticipate future shortages, plan for multiple possible outcomes, and generally outsmart those competing for dwindling resources. Natural selection would return with a vengeance, wiping out the dumbest and leading to a resurgence of intelligence. The only way Idiocracy works is that it represents the rock-bottom of civilization, that brief moment in the history of humanity where morons reigned...and starved to death. Five hundred years after that, people would marvel at how it ever got to be so bad. It would be remembered in the same way we remember the black death.


That level of genetic change in a complex organism would almost certainly be fatal so frequently that it would wipe out our species. We need our DNA to be stable because if it's not, we'd find all sorts of new and unpleasant ways to die.

Heart transplants are fatal, gradual processes give bodies time to adjust and our children aren't fatal.

Then you don't understand how even a small change in genetics can affect the human body.

The wrong gene gets modified, or even just has its state of activity change, and suddenly one of your organs doesn't do what it's supposed to any more. Or it does it too well. Your immune system goes berserk and eats your brain. Or maybe your kidneys fail. Your stomach stops producing its protective lining and is destroyed by its own acid. There are so many ways things can go wrong in our bodies that there's no way we could have evolved a method for recoding our DNA on the fly. You can't just reshuffle DNA.

Chimeras are those whos bodies were able to survive developing as chimeras.

Transplants work because we have identified the factors for rejection and are able to match up those factors well enough to prevent total rejection of transplanted organs and tissues. Still, most recipients have to take anti-rejection medications for the rest of their lives.

But I'm not talking about chimeras or transplants. I'm talking about genetic changes happening inside each individual cell of a functioning body. It's like trying to retool a running factory...it won't work.