Oh good, I see we've resolved all of our societal differences & this sort of test would in no way reflect socioeconomic divisions.

Yes test the embryos for their future in college debt enslavement.

Ah I disagree. Society can set social norms, but society can't dictate what is and isn't allowed. If someone wants to live outside of those social norms than they have every right to do so.

If my sperm is ending up in multiple zip codes, I've got more pressing matters to be concerned with.

If you can afford this test, your child has a good chance of going to college. Now, where can we send the bill?

[removed]

It is actually the exact opposite. A council of elders was put in charge to save male babies, not kill them. Too many healthy male babies were killed by their parents.

Disabled babies were allmost always left to die in ancient times, that was not the issue. Infanticide was a problem for spartan manpower im regards to the military.

The spartans did not toil the land or build things. They were landlords, wariors, writers, poets. Quite lazy asses, drunk and feasted a lot. They did not work.

Every spartan family was given a lot with thralls to work on. Thralls grew food and delievered to the spartan landlord living in the capital communual barracks.

Yet if there were too many male children, there was trouble. A land lot cannot be divided in too many small pieces, or a warrior cannot live off it and hold his station in society. Thus male babies were killed off.

In time spartan elders worried about their numbers relative to the slaves in their land and neigbouring powers. Thus regulation was set in motion to keep up the right balance in population control.

Now consider that this is a myth invented much later about Spartan society by Romans to try and illustrate how backwards and barbaric the Spartans, and Greek culture, were.

I'll keep bringing it up to illustrate how dumb this correlation is;

You can already do this with your ZIP code.

We already know intelligence is complex.

[removed]

Hahahaha. I’m looking forward to seeing this in action. I think it will be entertaining

Someone just got confused when they were told they had fraternal twins.

This is a super niche effect that has been argued over and over many times before.

Yes, there are specific cases where the salinity increase was dangerous for the local, very local wildlife but all, repeat all the study refer to very specific ecosystems usually in freshwater or at the confluence of freshwater with marine water, as you correctly point out.

I argue that none of the proposed desalination plants fall on these categories and starting FUD campaigns based on very picked and chosen data is really dangerous and detrimental to the credibility of future valid arguments.

If you are an hammer does not justify treating everything like a nail. This post was about desalination on large scale. Do you want to post a warning on not dispersing back brine in high concentrations, fine, but proper disposal of brines is not only feasible but totally inconsequential

This kinda reminds me of that horrible Spartan practice of judging the babies on day 1 if their life, and deciding to put the rejects out into the wild to be killed.

Will the test be able to tell me what major the embryo will choose? If it's anything in business or finance, I'm gonna lobby my spouse to terminate the pregnancy.

I want a lawyer or a doctor, only. /s

People are already cloning their "beloved" pets to have them around again after they die... So yeah, I'm not surprised.

Welcome to the world of Gattaca. Or Brave New World...

The following submission statement was provided by /u/ChickenTeriyakiBoy1:

>Imagine that you were provided no-cost fertility treatment and also offered a free DNA test to gauge which of those little IVF embryos floating in a dish stood the best chance of getting into a top college someday.
>
>Would you have the test performed?
>
>If you said yes, you’re among about 40% percent of Americans who told pollsters they’d be more likely than not to test and pick IVF embryos for intellectual aptitude, despite hand-wringing by ethicists and gene scientists who think it’s a bad idea.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1136iwq/americans_are_ready_to_test_embryos_for_future/j8o99zg/

If it worked reliably, it would be a great thing

I suspect that once testing starts, researchers will discover that intelligence isn't nearly as simple as they speculate

Who doesn't cringe at this. Some weird psycho people among us.

Yeah, I get that, but it is still a finite resource, not just for us humans because we drink it.

That makes me feel somewhat better, thank you!

It really isn't. A few things to consider:
As I pointed out, the LOCAL effect is the most dangerous.

Infiltration rate of ground water into rock is relatively low, but recharge due to water permeability of rocks into aquifers is on the order of thousands of years. Which means when you take all that water and combust it somewhere else, a reasonable amount of it ends up going into recharge zones and being taken out of the "dynamic" cycle for a while. As well as being removed from the drainage basin feeding back into the soon to be hypersaline environment.

Plenty of research out there to show that very small salinity changes cause significant damage to ecological niches, though it is considerably more pronounced in freshwater systems, it still has far reaching implications in Salt water. Even a small percentage of change in the ocean leads to changes in the freezing point/dissipation rate which can disrupt weather patterns, change density of currents which carry nutrients and also provide turbidity.

You have zero idea about this topic, and are basing what you are saying on a notion that it FEELS like this is just too big to fuck up. And yet here are some things we have done that have fairly drastic impact....our world has been getting warmer since the industrial revolution. Denuding of forests for agriculture has caused drastic changes to groundwater runoff. Using Potash for fertilizer has caused massive algae blooms that have created dead zones in various places around the world. Hypersaline water has destroyed local fishing ecosystems around the Middle East where desalination plants have been very common for a long time.

Don't want to believe? Go do some research on Florida Estuaries and how the spawning grounds of quite a few important marine fish are being changed by salinity changes. (Only a tiny portion of these changes come from the handful of Desal plants Florida has, but the point is that salinity is still important).

Or here is a link of evidence in a local area of how desal plants hurt a sensitive biological marker species. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/142a/293bfa6e2e618b777ab328dacd3e33144908.pdf

I'm sure if you spent more than 5 minutes searching around, you would find plenty more.

Should be made illegal. It’s illegal to choose the sex of a baby in the UK but it isn’t in the US. US is more open to designer babies than the UK is.

I fear for a world where designer babies are an excuse by the rich who can afford it to build a master race while the poor will stay poor because they can’t afford it.

>Imagine that you were provided no-cost fertility treatment and also offered a free DNA test to gauge which of those little IVF embryos floating in a dish stood the best chance of getting into a top college someday.
>
>Would you have the test performed?
>
>If you said yes, you’re among about 40% percent of Americans who told pollsters they’d be more likely than not to test and pick IVF embryos for intellectual aptitude, despite hand-wringing by ethicists and gene scientists who think it’s a bad idea.