Alien Genetic Engineering [Biotech/Space]

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

While I can't tell you how TL12 would really work, or how alien brains would really function, according to the game rules in Bio-Tech at TL12 you can add a maximum of +4 to the horse's racial IQ of 3 giving an IQ of 7.

Yeah, that's dumb. There's some challenges to convincing the DNA to express what you want, so at lower tech levels you might have trouble creating a horse with human intelligence without making it a chimera, but by TL 12, as long as you don't care about being able to breed with the original stock, it's just a question of what you can fit.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Yeah, that's dumb. There's some challenges to convincing the DNA to express what you want, so at lower tech levels you might have trouble creating a horse with human intelligence without making it a chimera, but by TL 12, as long as you don't care about being able to breed with the original stock, it's just a question of what you can fit.

How do you know so much about how TL12 should work?

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Yeah, that's dumb. There's some challenges to convincing the DNA to express what you want, so at lower tech levels you might have trouble creating a horse with human intelligence without making it a chimera, but by TL 12, as long as you don't care about being able to breed with the original stock, it's just a question of what you can fit.

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

How do you know so much about how TL12 should work?

You're not cleared for that.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

How do you know so much about how TL12 should work?

It's about how TL 12 should work, it's about how biology works. The basic questions are 'is it possible' and 'can we figure out how to encode it into DNA'. Adding a human-sized or larger brain to a mostly horse-shaped body is obviously possible. Figuring out how to teach DNA to create said creature is challenging, but not TL 12 worth of challenging.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

How do you know so much about how TL12 should work?

TL 12 ought to be able to do pretty much anything that's physically possible. There's no particular reason why a human-equal biological brain couldn't be located in a horse-sized chassis, although it might have a funny-looking head.

[AlexanderHowl]

The question is not whether you can shove a human brain in a redesigned horse head, that is a TL9 transplant, nor whether you can can give a human a horse's body, which is a TL10 genetic procedure. It is whether or not you can uplift a horse to human intelligence, which is a completely different problem.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

It is whether or not you can uplift a horse to human intelligence, which is a completely different problem.

It's not uplifting a horse, it's designing a horselike creature with human intelligence. IQ+4 while remaining the same species is a nonstarter, though you can probably manage a decent percentage of horse DNA.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The question is not whether you can shove a human brain in a redesigned horse head, that is a TL9 transplant, nor whether you can can give a human a horse's body, which is a TL10 genetic procedure. It is whether or not you can uplift a horse to human intelligence, which is a completely different problem.

Coding a horse's genome so it grows a human brain is a quick-and-dirty method, and given the horse is born with it it should be able to control the horse's body just fine. Reincorporating horse neural features, like instincts, would be more advanced, but should be possible. Once you've figured out what it is about the human brain that makes it smart, you can probably avoid the mess of human-brain-with-horse-bits-reincorporated, and just enhance a horse brain to human (or parahuman - if you can make IQ 14 people, you can make IQ 14 horses) levels. The horse is going to be behaviorally distinct from a normal horse, but that's to be expected of any uplifted organism.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The question is not whether you can shove a human brain in a redesigned horse head, that is a TL9 transplant, nor whether you can can give a human a horse's body, which is a TL10 genetic procedure. It is whether or not you can uplift a horse to human intelligence, which is a completely different problem.

I do not understand what you mean by "uplift a horse to human intelligence".

[AlexanderHowl]

Enhancing the neural tissue of horses (IQ 3) to the point where it possesses average human intelligence (IQ 10). Just using human DNA or human genes is just producing a chimera, which we do all the time at TL8, as we have mice with human brain tissue growing in them right now (and they are frighteningly intelligent, for mice. Uplifting a horse to human intelligence takes a lot more effort than just making a half-human that thinks that it is a horse (as we could probably do that right now, if we had the reason to create such a pathetic creature).