| | Groyn88's Journals Recent Comments Looking beyond the immediate AIDS crisis, it is probable that with the intensive international efforts at developing a HIV vaccine and the discovery that existing drugs like valproic acid are able to wipe out latent reservoirs of HIV infection, a cure for AIDS will be found before the decade is out. The high mutation rate of HIV may delay the attainment of this Holy Grail by several years but even in the most pessimistic scenario, AIDS will be a manageable, non-terminal, chronic disease, much like what diabetes mellitus is today. This would remove the raison d'ĂȘtre for the current conservative backlash and the liberalisation that was witnessed in the years prior to 2004 would in all likelihood resume its normal course.
Beyond that, advances in genetic engineering will soon make it possible for homosexuals to reproduce themselves in a true biological sense, by the recombination of haploid chromosomal complements from both fathers or both mothers (the latter already achieved in mice) to produce a child with the characteristics of both parents, and not merely via adoption or cloning. It will then be possible to create a self-sustaining gay civilisation in Singapore where every citizen completely enjoys equal rights.
Peering even further into the future, Ray Kurzweil, the acclaimed 'restless genius' (Wall Street Journal) and inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era like the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the Kurzweil synthesizer and advanced speech recognition, predicted in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" and his most recent acclaimed work "The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology" that by 2020, computers will exceed the processing capability of the human brain. When this happens, robots will be intelligent enough to replicate themselves without human intervention and perpetuate ever-improving generations of their own kind. This is the event horizon at which memetic evolution surpasses genetics as the dominant mechanism for the transmission of consciousness. Life will no longer be the preserve of organic chemistry. Silicon or other forms of inorganic life will become a reality. Sexual or even biological reproduction will be an option and not an imperative. When the concept of life on Earth itself changes forever, questions such as the morality of homosexuality or of homosexual reproduction will be as passé as the phonograph record in the age of HVD (holographic versatile disc). | | |