Abandoning dragon engineering

What would you be if you weren’t you?

As it happens, our astronomer took no biology courses at all in High School.  He filled all his science requirements with chemistry, which for some reason was considered equivalent.  Nonetheless, he was aware of the basics of genetics and also of some of the promising new developments of the time.  One of the folders he made up then to collect various ideas and projects was labeled “Dragon Engineering,” which shows something of how his thoughts were running.  It seemed that soon it would be possible to create new species by doing clever things with DNA; certainly the idea was taken up by science fiction.  Putting together some bat-flying capability with reptile shape looked fairly simple.  (Of course, when you lack any detailed knowledge lots of things can look easy.)

Well, the folder was repurposed and he never did get much formal background in biology.  Perhaps that’s just as well; we have enough trouble maintaining the biosphere as it is, without the introduction of creatures that appeal mostly to adolescent minds.  And nowadays we all understand much better the tendency of very complex things to fail in catastrophic ways.

But suppose our astronomer did go into genetics, in a serious way and with the proper training.  What might he have done?

One possibility, in collaboration with our scientist-turned-historian of last week, would be the tracing of historical and pre-historical events through DNA.  Really amazing things have been put together from genetic material recovered from thousands and tens of thousands of years ago.  There’s no space to go into it all here, and the results are still somewhat in flux, but the whole peopling of the globe (as one example) now looks very different from how it appeared when we were in school.

But looking back from maybe a more mature viewpoint, we see practical things to be done, even vital ones.  Consider the genetic sources of our crops and domestic animals: prehistoric manipulations that gave us the basis of civilization.  All well and good.  But by optimizing we have arrived at specialization in a few species, even sub-species (of wheat, rice, bananas for example); and optimizing is fragile.  By using the very best species for one set of conditions, we risk disaster when the conditions change.  And conditions are changing.

Here is a genetic task for our alternate-history astronomer: to produce crop species that are tolerant of the changing weather patterns, changing population patterns, changing diseases that we face in the future.  There need be no spectacular breakthrough, say for rice that can grow in the desert; just something more resilient than the optimized monoculture that prevails in too many places.

It would be less romantic, but far more useful than a foot-long flying lizard that you could use to light your campfire.