Okay, so we know most of the Vaults had an experiment of some sort or another, such as doors designed to not close all the way, or overcrowded with people of wildly different cultures, or what happens when people are exposed to mind-altering drugs...
If you were to come up with an experiment to run on an isolated group of people for an indefinite period of time, what would you do?
I think I'd mess with the temperature controls, making some rooms a few degrees warmer than average, a few rooms colder. It wouldn't be a huge difference, and it wouldn't hit any extremes, and it'd be subtle; nothing like going from a room with AC into a hot summer afternoon. More like walking through a grocery store from the dry food aisles to the frozen food area, where it's cooler but you don't really notice it unless you're looking for it, or are hyper sensitive to temperature shifts.
The purpose? Who needs a purpose. But ... Would people notice the difference in temperature? would they try to figure out why? would they try to fix it?
Another, more involved experiment would be a Vault founded by Vault Employees and babies--they can make their own and bring some more in with them. The children would be raised with a completely fabricated notion of what's going on in the outside world.
Possibilities: "We're on a spaceship, we're going to colonize another world! Whee!" "We're hiding from aliens who have taken over the planet! Eek!" "This is the whole world, there is nowhere else, there has never been anywhere else, there never will be anywhere else."
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 9:28 am
Well there already were so many Vault experiments, but I guess I would just throw in a couple of young men and women, it has been done yes, but I am suggesting that we only throw in like 100 men and like 150 women, and then see what happens
Archmage Alicia
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forest-raven1993
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Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 10:30 am
A Vault with a Mirelurk tank and a Radscorpion tank. Lets see how long it takes for the Mirlurks and Radscorpions to get free and run amock. I'll give the citizens wepons though, so they can defend themselves.
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 10:35 am
forest-raven1993
A Vault with a Mirelurk tank and a Radscorpion tank. Lets see how long it takes for the Mirlurks and Radscorpions to get free and run amock. I'll give the citizens wepons though, so they can defend themselves.
When the Vaults were first created, there were no such things as Mirelurks or Radscorpions; why plan a vault around the possibility of future irradiated monsters?
Better to plan ahead. This vault could have caused the Mirelurks when experimenting on radiation.
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 11:43 am
Possibly.
I also had the notion of a Vault that is set up with advanced medical equipment, with the purpose of adapting FEV to use as retroviral medical therapy in additon to direct genetic tinkering to create enhanced humans. Not so much in the direction of Supermutants, but more to hugely extend lifespan, intelligence, agility, and perception, in addition to helping with defraying the effects of raditation.
I guess a fantasy collorary would be a Vault that would be making "Elves" instead of "Orcs."
They would primarily breed the traits into people, as in tweaking the egg and sperm and growing them with the modified genes from the ground up. But using FEV as a retrovirus, they could then figure out which changes worked best, and then go and add those modifications to themselves as adults. Naturally, the physical enhancements work best when they're bred in, but I'm thinking that an "immortality serum" would make for an interesting plot development.
I mean, what does radiation do? It's like a hammer on DNA, fractures it, breaks it. What is age? Much the same, but less dramatic. Age is simply our DNA fraying at the ends after repeated divisions; DNA is designed to repair itself, but it can only do so much, which is why we have things like cancer. Which is why getting too much sun can result in skin cancer--solar radiation damages the skin cells' DNA, and while it tries to fix itself, it isn't always perfect, and whoops, just one cell gets something wrong--not wrong enough for the cell to self destruct, but just a little wrong, in just the right way, and wham, cancer.
I get it. I took biology for two years and I like to do internet research on cellular regeneration.
There is more fact to the power of regeneration then you think. Theories suggest that if you continuously take hot baths (not scolding hot obv) Then you'r cells will not only be able to adapt, but will thrive in such conditions.
Also there are possibilities of children being born with a genetic marker that stops DNA from fraying. This results in faster, but not super human healing from injuries like burns and minor cuts.
Sorry I'm a bit of a genetics boff even though I'm 16. sweatdrop
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 1:45 pm
Well, right now it's in our own best interests that the older folks die off, to "make room" for the younger people, the newer generations.
If old people didn't suffer the effects of age, they'd out-compete the younger generations for food, territory, necessities of life, due to a greater experience and such.
But in a highly irradiated environment, I'd bet that child mortality is pretty high; I mean, as suggested in the Pitt, babies born there tend to succumb to the disease caused by the pollution and radiation within weeks of birth. The survival rate is probably better in somewhat cleaner environments, but I bet that outside of Vaults, a lot of babies don't make it.
So modifying people to both live longer and be better equipped to survive, with maybe extending/enhancing their fertility, means that they are more likely to have more kids that "make it." And those kids have the improvements too, maybe diluted, but there.
It wouldn't be completely re-writing humanity as a whole, but it'd probably serve well to help give people an edge. whee
Now... we're talking about experiments that will benefit the vault occupants right? Or just an experiment out of curiosity right? surprised My experiment is more for the study of the human mind - but in a curious way rather than beneficial. sweatdrop
Now, I'm not very intelligent in the sciences... sweatdrop So knowing a right-brainer like myself... I'd probably create an experiment which involves the Arts. For the most recent generation in the vault (so to those who have never been outside in the real world), my experiment to them would be as follows: - I would ask them to draw or paint what they imagine. Both of what they think of the outside world, and what they generally daydream about.
Since this younger generation would have no experience of the outside world, their imagination and artistic views would vary drastically (perhaps in interesting ways or in shocking ways) since imagination and inspiration comes from the environment around you. If you're stuck in a contained environment - what would they see or think? They would gather visual things differently would they not? If you described what a dog looks like to one child and give the same description to a vault-contained child... would they draw the same creature? This is something I would love to experiment with biggrin
...Dammit! Now I wanna do this experiment - -" I'm really curious now gonk
Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 11:29 pm
To be honest, increased fertility can be just as bad for people as the elderly not dying unless you impose strick laws, which cannot happen in the wastes. We need to think of a way of subtly benefiting people for example, removing them from extremely irradiated areas. Also if we modify the repair gene in a human, it doesn't neccicarily mean we have to stop aging. I raed in a new that a guy who ages normaly, managed to regrow a finger. If we get more people like that, or with different natural genetic enhancements, then we could be looking at the next stage in evolution. I'm not talking about super powers but if a regular couple have a child who ends up stonger or faster or with antibodies that can be a cure for a virus, then we cannot rule out the possibility that evolution is taking another leap.
Sorry for yet another science based lecture. I just like exploring the theory of genetic evolution and survival of the fittest.
Well, a woman only has a limited number of viable ova, which is why we go through menopause after a few decades. We run out. Guys can replicate their zygotes almost indefinitely, though they do degrade after a while...
And a woman wastes nearly all of her eggs--our monthly cycle is basically a woman's body preparing to have a baby, not getting fertilized, and cleaning up. Given that the typical woman has what, two, three kids in her lifetime these days... and periods every month that she isn't pregnant or recently pregnant ... that's a lot of wasted potential genetic material.
Weeding out inherited genetic diseases and using a large genetic pool for experiments would go a long way toward helping ensure the survival of the species; incest is a problem because of the increased potential for genetic diseases. Two healthy cousins from the same family could have kids with no more problems than two seemingly unrelated people. It's continued inbreeding that causes issues in the long term.
By encouraging a sort of "for the good of the species" attitude, people with improved/extended fertility and long lives would be filling the gene pool with their own offspring... but heck, that's what Ghengis Khan did. It's estimated that like half of Asia is descended from him. I mean, I exaggerate but not by much!
If you introduce a bunch of good genes into a population, they'll combine with less favorable genes, sure, but good breeding will tell in the long run. If a modified person has kids with people from races A, B, and C, they're helping preserve the genetic material of those three races. Those kids might have a better chance of out-competing their peers, and passing their improved genes along while maintaining at least some diversity.
Scars: I'm totally a right-brainer... might not think it from the geek talk though, I guess?
Thing about the Vaults though...
They Were Not Designed To Save Anybody. Vault-Tec made vaults, in part, to study humans in enclosed, isolated environments, simulating long-term space voyages, for example. They were created and intended as social experiments, government experiments, military experiments, and pharmaceutical experiments.
Some Vaults were filled and sealed well before the Bombs actually fell. Nearly every Vault has long exceeded its original operating parameters to some extent or another. The "war" cut off communication, it cut off control, it left them to fend for themselves, and they were sometimes not even equipped to begin to fend for themselves.
The marketing and propaganda set up by Vault-Tec was all "Be Safe underground," but in reality it was "Be a guineapig with no rights, you'll probably be killed off in one experiment or another over the years." I mean, seriously, I think a lot of Vaults were, in fact, designed to fail. Necropolis anyone? Or here's one, let's drug everybody. Or implant subliminal suggestions! Yeah, I'm sure the Vault Researchers got a lot of interesting information out of those... but people weren't "saved."
So it's a moot point whether a given Vault's experiment is going to be useful or helpful. Corporations with money probably funded a lot of the Vaults, and had a say in the experiments. Existing Vaults prove that some of those experiments were downright cruel.
I still like the idea of running an experiment that is raising children to believe wildly outlandish things about the outside world. whee
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 11:49 am
I use wgual amounts of both sides of my brain. I also have a lot of memory cells so I remember everything I read like a German phrase I learned as a kid. Ich kaan nicht warten um zu sehen meign fruind (sorry for the rubbish spelling.)
I like the idea of spontanious cellular regeneration. It's interesting because if someone was capable of limitless cellular regeneration then in a sense their blood would be a cure for every wound and desease. If this person has offspring there is a chance that the offspring will inheret such genetic traits.
If this carries on it will mean that we have a species that is nearly impossible to kill and has extreme longetivity. We would out grow our planet and would continue to spread and consume.
As it is the healing atribute of the human species is already on an ever increasing scale. We can repair our skin from burns quicker and we have developed immunity to diseases that our predecessors would have been killed from.
How's that. It's gonna be the intro or part of a book I plan on writing, about the evolutionary probabilities we are facing today.
"Ich kaan nicht warten um zu sehen meign fruind" I misplaced most of the German I learned back in high school, and yeah, the spelling is rather lost on me, but I think that might mean "I cannot wait until I can see my friend."
I'm really hoping that if humanity ever hits space, that we'll have worked out the bits of us that are still pretty barbaric. I will die of embarrassment if the first thing we do when we become an interstellar empire is start a war. gonk
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 1:09 pm
I know. We really need to control our Abdula ablongata (I think that's the name.......I can remember some really big stuff but I'm lost on names.) which is the anger center of the brain.
forest-raven1993
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Scars-of-an-Undead
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Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 3:45 pm
@ Rayinte
Well, I read the vault info you wrote out. ... I guess my experiment wouldn't be funded much money now would it? xp Btw, is that spoiler in one of the earlier Fallout games? Cause I didn't hear of it when I played Fo3. I still like my experiment idea though and I wish I could try it out on someone/something >_>
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