FUCK and YES

I don't want to alarm you, but the following news might just blow out the back of your minds with sheer awesomeness. Blade Runner is about to become reality. No, flying cars are not on the horizon. Replicants~! And then soon attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. DARPA is starting up the Nexus-6 project.

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

They'll also come with genetically encoded loyalty, are traceable, and genetically designed kill switches should they go all "Roy Batty". Sure, this sounds vaguely impossible and kind of nefarious/dangerous should it ever occur. On the other hand: Blade Runner was awesome.

Soon we will have our genetic military underclass, then they will grow too smart and too strong too fast, they will attempt to overthrow us, they will have to be made illegal and be "retired", we'll need specialized police will be needed to do the job, and there will be all sorts of confusing moral quandaries about what it means to be human. Sure, "routine retirement of a replicant" may sound all right, but it doesn't make you feel any better about shooting a skin job in the back.

So thank you DARPA for attempting to bring beloved sci-fi classics to horrifying life. You churn out a hoverboard or a lightsaber for me and we'll just forget about the chilling ethical quandaries of spending millions to weaponize Philip K. Dick novels and Ridley Scott movies. I just hope no one has shown them Alien.