When I was 11 I cut off some of my very-much-alive cat’s fur to ensure future cloning would be possible, and put it in a little plastic bag I hid from my parents. He died when I was 15, and the bag is still somewhere in my Trunk of Everything.
I don’t imagine there’s much genetic content left but also I have a vague intuition that we severely underestimate how much information a superintelligence could extract from reality—so I’ll keep onto a lingering hope.
My past self would have wanted me to keep tabs on how the technology is going.
(For those hypothetically wondering, I also cut off some of my own hair that day in case someone would like to clone ME after death, and that bag is still in the Trunk as well.)
(And I couldn’t do this to my cat, but my past self also wrote over a million words about everything he experienced in a google docs in the hopes that the clone could know who his predecessor was and model himself accordingly. I was one of those terrified-of-death kids.)
I’m sorry to break this to you, but cloning requires live cells, not just DNA. This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to bring back the woolly mammoth. (The other reason is that it’s really hard to do IVF on elephants.)
So if you want to make a clone, you’ll need to do something like what I did (take cells and preserve them in liquid nitrogen).
Touching. Thank you for this.
When I was 11 I cut off some of my very-much-alive cat’s fur to ensure future cloning would be possible, and put it in a little plastic bag I hid from my parents. He died when I was 15, and the bag is still somewhere in my Trunk of Everything.
I don’t imagine there’s much genetic content left but also I have a vague intuition that we severely underestimate how much information a superintelligence could extract from reality—so I’ll keep onto a lingering hope.
My past self would have wanted me to keep tabs on how the technology is going.
(For those hypothetically wondering, I also cut off some of my own hair that day in case someone would like to clone ME after death, and that bag is still in the Trunk as well.)
(And I couldn’t do this to my cat, but my past self also wrote over a million words about everything he experienced in a google docs in the hopes that the clone could know who his predecessor was and model himself accordingly. I was one of those terrified-of-death kids.)
I’m sorry to break this to you, but cloning requires live cells, not just DNA. This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to bring back the woolly mammoth. (The other reason is that it’s really hard to do IVF on elephants.)
So if you want to make a clone, you’ll need to do something like what I did (take cells and preserve them in liquid nitrogen).