data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • TLDR: The Commission probably wouldn’t like it, and the Federation even more so. Even so, there are practical hurtles such as genetic diversity and whether medical knowledge of symbionts is advanced enough to keep a large population healthy and happy.

    For one, a fundamental tenet of the ideology of the commission is to protect the well-being of the symbionts, sentient beings, from suffering abuse due to potential competition between Trill over a limited number of symbionts.

    If we take the well-being argument further, cloning symbionts has many issues to their well-being. Cloning them would be indignant because it would reduce them to a commodity that every Trill should have rather than a sentient being that chooses a relationship.

    Even if the idea got through the commission, I feel like the rest of the Federation might frown on this for those reasons in addition to another: I think there’s already a slight bias in Federation culture against the cloning process.

    This can be seen in TNG:“Up The Long Ladder” (in addition to revealing that cloning on a large scale has negative implications, Riker is so mad about cloning he murders his own clone and Pulaski’s) and TNG:“Second Chances”/LD:“Kayshon, His Eyes Open” (Transporter cloning is seen as a suboptimal circumstance). This suggest culturally, the Federation finds cloning inconvenient at best and a violation at worst. This might be partially negated if the symbionts were to give consent, but it would still feel iffy to most planets

    On another note, exact cloning symbiont genomes could have drastic consequences. For one, it would vastly reduce the genetic diversity of the symbionts; this means if there was say, 1 million Daxs with all the same DNA, there’s a higher chance that a virus could evolve that’s really good at spreading between Daxs, allowing the virus to spread in those Daxs and evolve, probably ultimately killing a lot of symbionts.

    The above might be able to be averted if say, you sequenced the DNA of all the (willing) symbionts and generated distinct genome sequences by simulated breeding between symbionts (if they sexually reproduce) or maybe simulating mutations if they reproduce asexually. You could then synthesize the genome and grow a symbiont from it.

    Even this better solution might prevent problems, though - what happens when symbionts have genetic defects? With symbionts being so rare, is the medical knowledge of them enough that a large population could be kept healthy?