This I Believe #13

...that once you develop a technology that allows you to clone humans, your first application of  that technology should be the cloning a race of super-soldiers.  Forget all that fooling around with Neanderthals, Jesuses, Lincolns, Einsteins, and Marilyn Monroes—I'm not even going to mention Hitler, because you know better—and surrender to destiny.  It's simple, it's traditional, and it's mandatory: as the day follows the night, when you figure out how to make clones, you clone a race of super-soldiers.

I can't believe I have to explain these things.

Comments

[includedmiddle]

Cloning technology alone is insufficient. First you need a super-soldier to clone. Hence you start by cloning scientists and have them work on creating a super-soldier.

[Patricia Mathews]

And besides, cloned super-soldiers have the neatest theme music!

Now go read Lois McMaster Bujold's "Labyrinth". for another take on them. (snicker, chortle, grin.)

[Angelo]

One word: Serpentor.

[The Tensor]

Angelo wins the prize for "Best Single-Word Synthesis of Seemingly Opposed Ideas".

[includedmiddle]

But what if someone combines the DNA of Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, MLK Jr., and a fuzzy kitten to create a line of adorable super-pacifists whose skulls not even a Serpentor could slice through without feeling... extremely guilty.

[Tim May]

Even if you have a reasonably super soldier to clone, cloning itself is almost the least interesting part of creating an army of super-soldiers. All cloning gets you is a bunch of embryos with the same genetics as your best existing soldier.

[The Tensor]

All cloning gets you is a bunch of embryos...

That's just the kind of negative attitude that's keeping us from having an army of super-soldiers. I'm sure some kind of direct-neural hypnotic handwave device could be designed to deal with the training problem.

[Owlmirror]

What about snowclones of the great soldiers of history?

E.g., Genghis Cohen.