OrionWorks wrote:
> * Of having surgery performed on your body. Of being examined, > typically in the gynecological sense. Eggs are removed from females - > sperm removed from males. > > * Of at subsequent abductions being shown their "offspring", the > result of their eggs (and sperm) having been "combined" in some > fashion with "alien" DNA components to produce "hybrids." But why would they bother to do that? If they're so advanced, *and* if they're capable of cross-breeding with humans (yeah right, that seems likely, for sure -- unless these 'aliens' actually originate somewhere on Earth, I find that a tad hard to swallow), then they should certainly have the know-how to be able to induce meiosis in any stem cell ... in which case why would they need gametes? There's nothing very special about a gamete, after all, except that (a) it's descended from a stem cell (telomeres fully intact) and (b) it was formed through meiosis, rather than mitosis, so it's haploid. And they don't really need stem cells, either, of course. All they need to do is take any old cell, remove the methyl groups from the chromosomes (which are used to differentiate the cell), throw the switch which causes the cell to express telomerase, and one generation later, poof, they've got stem cells. We can't do it today, and no doubt there's more to it than what I've just outlined, but surely by the time a civilization is zooming across the galaxy snatching victims from random worlds and fiddling with their genes they should be able to do this sort of thing in their sleep. And I don't need to point out that it's a whole lot easier to obtain a sample of differentiated cells (which can then be dropped into your handy-dandy 24th century Kitchenaide de-differentiator and meiosis inducer) than it is to dig out a few thimblefulls of pre-built gametes! But they don't do anything clever or advanced; instead they do their experiments using the same exact technology which is in use today on Earth at reproductive health centers across the globe. Their anesthesia is improved versus Earth technology, of course -- but that seems to be all. In fact, if what they want is human DNA, all they really need to do is set down on the outskirts of town and catch a few thousand mosquitoes; no doubt some will turn up with a nice sample already "on board" (cf Jurassic Park). The problem I have with all these scenarios is that the aliens are just *too* late-20th-century human -- it's a sci-fi writer's image of what an encounter would look like. Like the surprising realization that God so loved bilateral symmetry that He made the aliens all look just like humans, only with a different number of fingers and some very slightly off-kilter proportions -- they're cartoon aliens... They've apparently not only got our looks (slightly modified), they've got roughly our level of technology, with *none* of the not-yet-here technology we can imagine humans acquiring in the next half century, starting with nano-machines to do their bidding (like getting their silly DNA samples for them). In fact, they seem to have *exactly* the level of technology which would be imagined by a late 20th century human from the United States if that person tried to picture somebody from a flying saucer. And that's a pretty darn big coincidence ... if they're really aliens.
