Breeding humans for battle - Writers Forum

Creator · 06-01-2007, 12:24 AM

This is for my tale of Alpha Omega, a tale about genetic discrimination.

Basically I am wondering if there is such a thing as farming humans for the millitary? I am not talking about clone armies, that's Star Wars.

Hodge · 06-01-2007, 12:42 AM

Not really. It's easier, cheaper, and quicker to just build machines...

Creator · 06-01-2007, 12:45 AM

So what would be the attributes that would be selected artificailly?

Strength, Stamina and what else? Faster growth? And how is obediences inherited?

Ilan Bouchard · 06-01-2007, 01:15 AM

Assuming Hodge actually meant "yes," I'd tell ya that genetically we don't know how such physical and/or psychological attributes are inherited (if at all). Things such as faster growth could be achieved through nutrition and hormones, as can, I suppose, physical characteristics such as strength.

But like Hodge said, we are already seeing robots superseding people in warfare, and that's the beginning of the trend.

Hodge · 06-01-2007, 01:20 AM

Obedience would be something you trained children with. You'd just indoctrinate kids as they grew up to be unwaveringly loyal, single-minded, and violent. They'd also train rigorously to build and keep muscle. Genetics would play a role, and I suppose you could engineer people to be stronger, bigger, have more endurance, and so on. But the most important thing would be to raise the kids a certain way. Like the Spartans did, actually, only more brainwashing.

But I didn't mean "yes." I suppose this could be a plausible scenario, but you'd have to do it well and explain why some scrawny dude couldn't just shoot the genetically bred warrior with a Glock or something.

lin · 06-01-2007, 01:30 AM

Breeding soldiers would be cheaper than building robots (and nobody has ever built a successful combat robot) by an order of magnitude.
Physical characteristics are in fact extremely easy to eugenic...are people really that different from racehorses or gamecocks.
State of mind is a different story. There was a Kurt Russell film that presented a pretty believable scenario for how to attain the mindset you want.
I thought it was so stupid when cloning came into the media's ever-volatile eye for fifteen minutes and article after article was saying like, "Great, we could get Einsteins, but what if somebody mass-produced Hitlers." Neither person had anything you could breed or clone for. Who you'd end up cloning is the Meat. A litter of Shaq O'Neils could deal with a lot of problems. A spring line of Brigit Neilsen's or some such would be a hit.

WIth modern techniques you could spawn a jillion perfect Goliaths. And dump them into some sort of killer kibbutz until they reach about 12, which is the best age for killers.

I beleive Haliburton already has the contract.

archer88iv · 06-01-2007, 01:50 AM

Think of some details to throw in. Things that will make the reader go, "Wow. That's really selective." Don't just play football coach and go, "Biggerfasterstronger!"

...perhaps they're all the same height so that they can be crammed onto landing craft in ideal configurations? Maybe their arms have to be a specific length to fit their rifles perfectly?

Humans generally adapt their environment to suit themselves. Any specific reversal of this condition will stand out as very clearly weird.

playstation60 · 06-01-2007, 12:22 PM

Lin, you are wrong. So wrong. A) The trend is already pointing towards artificial combatants, not humans. B) Much of the world is still very much run by religion and a sense of what is morally right and wrong. Do you really think that if there is so much resistance to researching a way to generate a new heart for someone, or a new limb that people are going to allow scientists to spend BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars creating HUMAN life, only to destroy it, because it didn't hold the qualitites they wanted? No. Not a chance. Even if the created lives weren't destroyed in the conventional sense there are too many issues to prevent them from joining the general populace.

Hodge · 06-01-2007, 02:52 PM

Quote:

Breeding soldiers would be cheaper than building robots (and nobody has ever built a successful combat robot) by an order of magnitude.

Uh huh. So feeding, training, and taking care of a human for 18 years or so before it reaches maturity is cheaper than just building a machine (I didn't say robot, but that would probably be cheaper, too)? We have robots that fight. The U.S. military has several robot drones in service in the military. And even if you created a super strong human with unwavering loyalty and ability -- what's to stop me from shooting him with a gun?

mammamaia · 06-01-2007, 07:34 PM

been done in soooo many books, stories, movies and tv shows, you can find out all you need to know with a imdb and amazon plot search, plus some creative googling...

lin · 06-01-2007, 07:48 PM

It doesn;t take billions of dollars to create human life. It can be done in a few minutes for the price of a movie and dinner.

There has never been a robot that can't be taken down by humans. (Didn't you see Robocop????) Machines are cheaper for soldering on assembly lines, but not for combat. Note the experience of helicopters in recent wars.
And then what happens to you? You get swarmed over by a bunch of twelve year old maniacs. This is the reality. Trust me on that.

Sorry to say, but human life is pretty cheap. Breeding it for a purpose would be very cheap, actually. Could be made self-perpetuating...as many of the pre-teen freedom fighters are today.

Americans have funny ideas about what war is really like. Which is why it's been a LONG time since we won one. Tom Clancy devices are fun to read, but get mopped up on the battlefield. Which is, increasingly, not so much a field as a neighborhood, downtown, marketplace, etc.

Hodge · 06-01-2007, 08:00 PM

You have absolutely no clue, do you? Using a movie as proof that humans triumph over machines... Right. As for helicopters, why are we even using them if they're so useless? They're not, that's why. I think we've lost a dozen or so copters over in Iraq. How many insurgents have we killed? Thousands.

And yes, to genetically engineer humans for a specific purpose it would cost billions of dollars. Perhaps even more. Not to mention a simple fact you overlooked: babies don't pop out of the womb ready to fight. They need at least a decade and a half, usually more. You have to feed, train, and care for them during all that time.

archer88iv · 06-01-2007, 09:30 PM

You guys are both being silly.

He said the story was about discrimination and genetics, in which case it really doesn't matter whether or not machines would be more effective in the real world; they simply are not a part of his story.

Hodge · 06-01-2007, 09:33 PM

Well, it does, because again, even if there's some sort of genetic discrimination going on, there still needs to be a plausible reason why some computer nerd can't just pop a cap in the battle-bred humans' asses.

lin · 06-01-2007, 09:58 PM

Who said "genetically engineer"? He said "breed". You see what I mean. And yeah, it's really cheap to do that and can be made self-sustaining. It's hard to figure out what it would cost to make a machine that would be as effective in combat as a man because nobody's ever done it.

If helicopters are so effective, and we have so many of them, we must be pretty close to winning against those non-geneticly superior Ahabs, huh? Just like we kicked ass on all those Vietnamese. And those Mogadishu turkeys.

Please don't try to insult by being sloppy. I didn't use a movie as "proof" of anything. Acutally it was to draw a smile. Didn't work, I can tell. My guess is it's you who are influenced by films and scifi and books here. My thoughts on this matter come with experience in fighting and in war.

I'd say your attitude is a small symptom of something Americans just don't seem to get, but is really obvious in third world conflicts. And not getting it, thinking we can go in with enough machines and make people do what we want to is why we keep getting into these sickening messes.

But to try to get away from pointless argument and back to the story level...why does there have to be any cost at all in raising these little fighters? Parents to that. What I'm getting at is this, for your story... what if this breeding program is pumped up as big honor, a sort of Oscar for qualifying as a parent/donor? And people pay to get into it? Sacrifice to help try to make their future soldier come out better in the monthly contests than the other peoples' kids, push them to competitive levels, attend classes on how to do it? Yes, we're talking soccer moms of death here. Whattaya think?