If you store more than one genome, any additional genome is only 4MB because human genomes are 99% identical.
So you could store the genomes of an entire city on your hard drive.
"The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes."
So does this count as a form of intelligent design and would a hypothetical alien race be able to detect this kind of intervention by examining future species?
No, because the resulting organisms are still very much evolved rather than designed. They still have masses of junk DNA and stupid path-dependencies like the appendix and the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
> would a hypothetical alien race be able to detect this kind of intervention by examining future species?
Yes; we've been able to tell from its genome that brewers' yeast is an ancient deliberate hybridisation of two wild yeast strains, so future aliens could presumably do the same.
Recent research has shown that the appendix isn't as useless as it was long thought - there are strong suggestions that it acts as a "safe heaven" for the gut flora: https://time.com/4631305/appendicitis-appendix-gut-bacteria/
> Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc.
The Catholic Church does indeed oppose genetic engineering human beings and the like for very well-developed ethical reasons. However, I'm not sure where you get the idea that "religious people" find it offensive _that_ human beings can be cloned. Which "religious people"? Certainly, many people find the act of human cloning, among others, offensive, but _that_ a human beings can be cloned? FWIW, the term "religious people" is rather meaningless. It's not a meaningful category in the way it is used here and just used as a vague insinuation that people of a certain stripe (typically Christians) are superstitious people with arbitrary hangups and irrational beliefs (your choice of words says as much: nativity "myths", souls). Religion is just what someone holds to be ultimate reality, the highest good, and aim of life. In that sense, everyone is religious, so it's not a question of _whether_ you're religious, but how, and whether your religion is correct (I know, an unpopular thing to say today, but that's just a feature of tacit modern liberal sentiments and not the product of reason).
> Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges [...] Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely.
Why do you think that is? Why do we think that euthanizing non-human animals is morally licit while doing that to a human being isn't? I leave that as an exercise.
> We're kind of ethically flexible.
Either actions are morally licit or they aren't. To say you're flexible is to say that either you're an immoral person to the degree that you depart from the licit, or that there's no ethical fact of the matter. If there's no ethical fact of the matter, then ethical concerns are pure fiction. You can't have it both ways. Either something is licit or it isn't. It may be determined by circumstance (killing in self-defense), or it may be an absolute (murdering an innocent person), but each concrete action is as such either licit, illicit, or there is no fact of the matter because it is a meaningless category.
>Religion is just what someone holds to be ultimate reality, the highest good, and aim of life. In that sense, everyone is religious, so it's not a question of _whether_ you're religious, but how, and whether your religion is correct
Why would everyone be religious? Religious people act on beliefs. Non-religious people act on evidence.
Some people act out the rituals to avoid upsetting their relationships, but revert to evidence based decision making for important choices.
Where it gets interesting is what happens when we start manipulating and improving DNA digitally before we implant it. Basically things like Crispr are stepping stones towards getting there. But we could be digitally creating and evaluating combinations of genes and genomes from very large databases of historical archives of individuals.
The philosophical and ethical questions around this are largely centered on boys of brazil type scenarios. Most of that stuff is driven by popular fiction rather than reality. Another factor is religion and religious objections against stuff like this happening or even acknowledging that this is possible.
But the reality is we already have celebrities ordering clones of their deceased pets. From there to designer babies is not such a huge technical leap. Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc. Now imagine dog breeders going digital and creating new dog breeds digitally before planting an embryo. Not possible today but also not that far off probably. If that bothers you ethically, think designer grains or rice from digitally crafted DNA. GMO foods have been a thing for decades. That stuff going digital would be about as controversial. When that happens it won't stop there.
Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges such as the low success rate of implanting embryos, the high error rates of dna modifications, the correspondingly high number of abortions needed because of failures, availability of stem cell material (until recently this required embryos), etc. This is not a problem for chihuahuas but kind of a show stopper when it concerns our own genetic offspring. Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely. We're kind of ethically flexible.
There's a good chance that this already is happening and that we simply don't get to learn about it for a while because it is kind of illegal and the people involved are not likely to want to be exposed. But the combination of billionaires, fertility issues, and technical capability makes this more a question of when than if, I would say. Supply and demand are not going to be the issue.