World’s first lab-grown meat facility pumps out 5k burgers per day

Thanks for the essay :)

> It's not like 2017 came along and Harvey Weinstein was like, "omg, is rape wrong now? Things change so quickly and I didn't know!"

Within my lifetime (I'm in my 50's) it used to be acceptable to pat girls on the bottom in public, pressure them into sex, rape them if they were drunk enough to not be able to say no, and a whole slew of other nasty behaviours that we now rightfully consider completely unacceptable. The whole Jimmy Saville thing in the UK - the stories coming out of how his demands for young girls to molest as payment for gigs were met by "respectable" organisations - sounds crazy now. Yes, this has changed fast, and caught a lot of people by surprise. I'm not defending any of them; they deserve everything they got. It was always "wrong", and they knew it, but society tolerated it to a certain extent so they could get away with it. Until they couldn't, thankfully.

> Jewish texts certainly do - and they have a lot to say on how.

Thanks for the detail, it's really interesting. I'm don't have much knowledge of Jewish practices. I'm glad to hear that there's some adaptability there. In most of christianity there's a strong element of "god's word doesn't change" - morality is unchanging and immutable, laid down in the bible. There's a strong opinion that atheists cannot be moral because we don't have an objective moral code to follow. This is where I find the fascinating part of the religious aspect - what happens when society's morals change? To a certain extent we can see it with gay marriage - most of the vatican is gay but the catholic church still condemns homosexuality. But this is more about politics than morals - the majority of catholics live in countries where homosexuality is not culturally acceptable, and the church downplays the whole question in countries where it is acceptable. The anglican church faced this crisis a few years ago, kinda, the African bishops did not want to accept gay marriage, the European and American bishops politically had to.

But I think the eating animals question is different, as most people publicly eat meat at the moment. It's not something you can be "in the closet" about and pretend doesn't happen (though I guess that will eventually happen - small groups getting together to kill an animal and eat it secretly). Which is why I think it's going to be more interesting to watch. It's possible that in 30 years we'll have the whole "have you ever eaten an animal?" thing going on, but I doubt it because the vast majority of people have eaten animals at the moment.

Thomas Jefferson statue pulled down in Portland: https://www.opb.org/news/article/thomas-jefferson-statue-pul...

True, I hadn't considered that. The "should you eat horses?" question.

So if there is vat-grown pork but they never manage to get the beef quite right, will it be acceptable to eat cows but not pigs? I guess that's the slope.

So yes, this has to be a slippery slope ;)

In reading up on this I had a good laugh when i discovered the URL for the "Bureau of Engraving and Printing" is https://www.moneyfactory.gov/!

You're completely right - SF is not about the future, in the same way that Narnia is not about wardrobes. It's an allegory about current society. Not trying to predict the future, but taking current trends and seeing where they go. The point is not really about guessing right or wrong, but making commentary on our current society and getting us to consider choices we may have to make.

Banks himself said that the Culture has no chance of being created by actual humans, that people would need to change in order to create it. But as a thought experiment for "what would a technological Utopia actually look like?" I think it's a very valuable contribution. There are very few Utopias that I've read about that I would actually want to live in - the Culture is probably the most attractive of any of them.

In this respect, the advent of lab-grown meat does pose the question of whether it's morally acceptable to eat animals. As far as I'm aware, only SF authors have considered this, because that's the kind of thing they do. A technological change has triggered a moral conundrum - this is the stuff that good SF ponders. It's not necessary to get the details of the technology right, or to correctly predict it. It's enough to get us thinking about this stuff before it happens.