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Re:The drab stupidity of Soylent by kevingadd on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @10:16AM (#6205806)
Are you seriously saying that sex hormones and sexual reproduction should be phased out because they make us die earlier? And that we have the technology and the science to do that now?

Cause if so, I don't know what you're smoking. I can tell you from personal experience that modern medicine does not have sex hormones completely figured out, nor do we have a way to replace them entirely with something 'better'...

Re:The drab stupidity of Soylent by auganov on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @11:12AM (#6206192)
Well I was talking specifically about the desire part rather than the actual functional/technical part of reproduction. Surely we have no tech to replace sexual reproduction. But we do have mental and intellectual capabilities to overcome such urges without any harm to our body. I was trying to illustrate that while appetite might be something innate it doesn't mean it's a perfect mechanism that we have to give up control to. Humans might simply have many instincts that are not that beneficial to us. It's easy to make it into a philosophical argument/discussion.

//FOLLOWING IS NOT RELATED TO THE ACTUAL TOPIC, COMPLETELY SEPARATE AND SPECULATIVE

As for the particular case of sex hormones you're right that we don't have a solid solution yet. But having said that many papers show that anti-androgens might not destroy male fertility even with long term usage. Actually that research kind of helped introduce the chemical-castration penalty in many countries, cause it's supposed to be reversible in terms of fertility (not to say it's every single effect is reversible. The evidence is pretty strong, but could be better. Other solution is simply castrating yourself after you have the number of children that you want to so that you don't care about fertility. For women I think it would be taking uterus and ovaries out. The thing is with women the life-expectancy might or might not be significant. But not having period would probably be nice.

Personally I don't know. My gut feel on these issues tends to fluctuate. It's actually kind of amazing - when you go and read actual papers and look for proof of this or that it often turns out nobody really knows. The line between something being good or bad (for health) is so very thin sometimes. Gosh, I wish I could get an answer on the whole supplement thing.