One Decanted Every Minute

Science fiction is a genre that extrapolates the future of both societies and technologies. In the popular imagination, those technologies often have a rather traditionally-masculine feel, leaning towards rockets, weapons and similar devices. However potentially the most revolutionary technologies of the future may well focus elsewhere, and be considered from a very different perspective. Indeed, they may change fundamental elements of human life. Here we take a look at the science and science fiction of reproductive technologies

Daedalus 

Perhaps best known amongst early fiction discussing reproductive technologies is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (novel, 1932), which built upon ideas expressed in his earlier Chrome Yellow (novel, 1921). This is famous for describing a dystopia in which humans are raised in bottles and chemically treated to determine their class and function. However Brave New World didn't stand alone; it formed parted of a wider milieu of contemporary fiction and speculation about the role of technology in shaping future society. 

Published in 1923, the essay Daedalus, or science and the future by philosopher J B S Haldane explored the possible impact of scientific development on humankind. The text imagines a future undergraduate student presenting an essay on the history of society. In this hypothesised future, a revolution in society is caused by the invention of ectogenesis - the successful gestation of human embryos in an external device.

“Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.”

This is applied eugenically, i.e. to promote the health and fitness of humanity as a species and as narrowly defined by those in positions of power. Inevitably, given the time and context, this includes clear biases in class and race; as Haldane’s student puts it:

“Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt that civilisation would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.”

Importantly, the technology not only allows the desired eugenic selection to be implemented, but also causes a restructuring of the concept of family, and reduces the disparity in potential for industrial and agricultural work between men and women - although Russell does not explore the working potential of women in any detail. Russell’s science fictional framing enables him to describe a utopian future (for men, and from his perspective) without lingering on philosophical and sociological details.

A direct counter-argument was written by fellow philosopher Betrand Russell. Icarus, or the future of science, was published in 1924 and argued that while scientific development has great potential benefits to society, it is rarely if ever virtuously deployed. As he pointed out:

“a reform, once achieved, is handed over to the average citizen. So, if eugenics reached the point where it could increase desired types, it would not be the types desired by present-day eugenists that would be increased, but rather the type desired by the average official. Prime Ministers, Bishops, and others whom the State considers desirable might become the fathers of half the next generation.”

Perhaps the most famous response to JBS Haldane’s Daedalus is Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). Here, all humans are gestated in “bottles” on an assembly line and raised in creches. The people are divided into castes classified from alpha to epsilon, with the lower castes inhibited by exposure to hard radiation, temperature differences, oxygen supply restrictions and alcohol during their prenatal development. This ensures they are mentally handicapped to the level desired for their caste. All castes are heavily indoctrinated both before and after decanting. The novel’s protagonist rebels against the “everyone belongs to everyone else” motto of society [1] and his own rigid life role, but is unable to sucessfully bring about any meaningful change.

A very different response to both Daedalus and Icarus can be found in the science fiction novel Man’s World, published by Charlotte Haldane, the wife of JBS, six months after their marriage in 1926. Charlotte Haldane imagined an intermediate near-future, in which reproduction can be controlled but ectogenesis is not yet perfected or used on humans. In this society, mothership is a vocational and professional calling, to which some women dedicate a lifetime of training, while the remaining women - entertainers and asexual neuters [2] - undergo chemical sterilisation through a form of immunisation. The gender of a foetus can be controlled through pre-natal exercises, mental concentration and maternal activity. The society is ruled by scientists, who have taken power after the population was massively reduced by warfare.

In this context, the novel follows a brother and sister. The former is an artist and mystic who finds himself poorly suited for the scientistic society. The latter is destined for motherhood but rebels. She wishes to explore other options and so attempts to circumvent the immunisation process. Ultimately one of them opts to conform while the other is unable to do so.

In the openings to chapters, Haldane quotes both from her husband’s writing and from Russell’s Icarus. However her own writing is curiously ambivalent in its vision of the future, and scholars continue to debate whether she viewed her world of regulated reproduction as utopian or dystopian, and her characters as heroes or antiheroes. Certainly Haldane speaks approvingly of the eugenic principles also stated in Daedalus, and Man’s World is horrendously racist in its treatment of semetic and non-white races. Her society’s requirement that those who choose not to embrace motherhood as a lifelong occupation never have children frees some women to do other work, such as intellectual or physical labour. Unlike JBS Haldane’s ectogenetic future it does not minimise the possibility of maternal love and satisfaction in that role. However Man’s World also imprisons women in a life choice made once, at an early age. It denies the possibility that a woman can contribute to society through both motherhood and another profession simultaneously or even successively.

Eyes of Heisenberg

The gradual development of biological science and laboratory experiments on animal reproduction shaped the evolution of science fiction through the mid twentieth century. In addition to the possibility for controlling breeding, with potential for racial and gender selection, developments in the understanding of DNA in the mid-twentieth century raised the possibility for deliberate editing of human characteristics before birth.

John Wyndham provided a different perspective on social roles for women in his 1961 novella Consider Her Ways. In this story a medical doctor of the mid-twentieth century wakes from an experiment in chemically-induced changes in consciousness to find herself in a different world. She occupies the body of Mother Orchis, one of a caste of women with grotesquely distended abdomens who exist only to gestate sets of four infant girls at a time. Other women are differentiated into muscular and tall workers, dwarfed and childlike servitors and administrators with a more conventionally normal physique. She learns that this circumstance arose after a virus engineered to target brown rats instead targeted male humans, rendering them extinct within a year. The surviving women doctors not only mastered parthenogenesis (reproduction without the intervention of a male) in a lab environment, but also decided on physical as well as class and societal differentiation in the surviving population.

As in Man’s World, many of the women are freed from the physical strain, emotional struggle and time investment in childbearing in order to master other activities, but are denied a free choice in whether or not they will do so [3].

Less driven by urgent necessity and more considered is the society in The Eyes of Heisenberg, by Frank Herbert (novel, 1966). This described a future in which in-vitro fertilisation, followed by genetic editing of embryos before implantation, is an accepted norm. Indeed the society depends on restricting the potential of some, while optimising others, and preventing their independent procreation. Not even the birth, but just the prospect, of a child escaping such editing due to a chance event is sufficient to destabilise the civilisation.

Similar gene editing technology is widely deployed elsewhere in science fiction of the same period (and since). In some cases, it is a benign technology, designed to enhance favourable traits. In others, as in The Eyes of Heisenberg, it is a form of control [6]. In some cases, the infants may even be genetic clones. Elsewhere the gene editing is required as a response to some environmental trauma - often nuclear war. More recent examples include Stephanie Saulter’s Revolution trilogy of novels starting with Gemsigns (novel, 2013), in which all human infants must be gene-edited and raised by their grandparents after a traumatic neurological Syndrome caused by excessive exposure to modern information technology wipes out a generation. A subset of humans are edited more extensively and commodified, becoming the property of corporations, and the trilogy focuses on these 'Gems'.

However while DNA editing technology in science fiction modifies and in places controls the reproductive process, it nonetheless remains necessary in most cases for embryos (engineered or otherwise) to be gestated by human women. Thus while the susceptibility of engineered humans to disease and genetic disorder is reduced, to general societal benefit, there need be relatively little impact on reproduction-related gender roles or social structures.

Ectogenetic Revolutions

The concept of ectogenesis - of gestating children in artificial or external devices in place of wombs - appeared in Haldane’s Daedalus but it took a number of years before plausible technologies for this purpose could become common in science fiction.

An interesting approach was taken by Morton Klass in In the Beginning (short story, in Astounding, July 1954). In this story, Professor Putnam runs a laboratory in which extinct creatures are artificially gestated in “uterine tanks” - a de-extinction that long predates Jurassic Park (let alone recent premature announcements regarding dire wolves). Controversy is focussed when the laboratory gestates eight neanderthal foetuses in tanks. As the professor protests:

“There’s nothing different about it! If I can take an Appelbaum chromosome print from a bone cell of a Stegosaurus fossil and transfer it to a crocodile zygote, what’s different about changing the gene pattern of a chimpanzee zygote to that of a Neanderthal? Both the method and the result are the same.”

The difference, of course, lies in the evolutionary closeness and possible moral status of hominids, as opposed to other creatures. However both the humanity of Homo neanderthalensis and the concept of academic freedom in universities are soon under debate.

A first application of similar ectogenetic chambers to Homo sapiens was the subject of Pamela Sargent’s short story Father (Amazing Stories, Feb 1974). Here a twenty year moratorium on human embryo experimentation ends with the beginning of the year 2000, and a university geneticist is keen to start an experiment before any further legislation is introduced. In this case the infants are clones of a Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist friend of the geneticist, rather than normally fertilised ova, but the key enabling technology is the “artificial womb”. Indeed, this is discussed in more detail than in some other cases. We’re told that

The blastocyst, programmed entirely with Paul’s genetic endowment, would be implanted in an ectogenesis chamber. It would then attach itself to the wall of the chamber, protected by a synthetic amniotic fluid and nourished by an artificial umbilical cord which wound around the outside of the “womb”. At least they’ll have navels, thought Paul, almost chuckling aloud at the idea.

and that

Pipes and wires trailed out of the wombs. They were attached to large metal oxygenators which piped in needed nourishment and removed wastes. The blood circulating through the chambers was Paul’s, donated for two months prior to the experiment.

There is a mention of the idea that China may use the chambers to free women from childbearing in the interests of further work. However the focus of the story here is on the possibility of children (cloned or otherwise) for those who have previously been unable to have them, and the feelings of Paul Swenson as he recruits caregivers and prepares for fatherhood of no fewer than five infant children derived from his own genome.

A more mature and developed system of ectogenesis is described in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga (novels and short stories, 1986-2018). This series centres on the planet of Barrayar, which is in the process of modernising on rejoining galactic civilisation after centuries of isolation. Amongst the technologies being introduced are uterine replicators - appearing first as a way of returning the products of sexual assaults by Barrayaran soldiers on another world, and then as a way of saving the central character, Miles Vorkosigan, as a child in utero when his mother Cordelia suffers a chemical attack. The use of such devices is described as common on other worlds (indeed Cordelia herself was born from one on Beta Colony), but new and controversial on Barrayar - with extensive debate on whether a child gestated outside its mother would be a monster.

However the series spans several decades and by the middle and end of the series, the use of uterine replicators becomes as widely accepted and popular on Barrayar as on other worlds. Indeed, by the time Miles Vorkosigan himself fathers a child, there is no question that his wife - and those of his friends - will use uterine replicators. Children gestated for nine months are decanted, and then handed over to mothers who may choose hormone treatment in order to nurse, or may bottle feed. This process is described as far safer and less physically harmful for both the child and the mother than “body birth”, on a world in which maternal deaths in childbirth were common. It also allows genetic problems with the embryo to be identified and corrected through genetic engineering. On worlds like Barrayar which have been irradiated by past nuclear attacks, leaving lingering scars on the landscape, and societies in which travel in space (with associated additional hard radiation exposure) is common, this is an important consideration. 

Doting parents spend time with the replicators and watch videos of their children’s pre-natal development. Doubts nonetheless remain. As Miles’s wife Ekaterin, already a widowed mother, notes while their first two children are gestating in Diplomatic Immunity (novel, 2002):

“Nikki was a body birth; of course everything was harder. The replicators take away so many risks - our children could get all their genetic mistakes corrected, they won’t be subject to damage from a bad birth - I know replicator gestation is better, more responsible, in every way. It’s not as though they are being shortchanged. And yet…” 

Despite such wobbles, Miles and Ekaterin use uterine replicators for all their subsequent children, and have no problem bonding with their infants. Indeed, their births become family events:

“It seemed as public a birth as those poor monarch’s wives in the old histories had ever endured, except that Ekaterin had the advantage of being upright, dressed and dignified. All of the cheerful excitement, none of the blood or pain or fear. Miles decided that he approved.”

Mother Codes

Taking ectogenesis to its logical extreme is fiction in which infants are not only gestated in artificial chambers, but also raised by artificial intelligences, with little or no involvement from human parents.

This is the scenario raised in Carole Stivers’ 2020 novel The Mother Code. In the story, following the release of a genetically engineered bioweapon, the extinction of humanity appears inevitable. A last ditch effort manufactures a small group of human embryos modified to be capable of resisting the disease, and implants these in robust robots designed to gestate them and then raise them through infancy and childhood. However in the panic of a collapsing civilisation, these Mothers are scattered under emergency protocols with incomplete coding, and ten years later their over-active defensive protocols threaten their young charges.

An interesting feature of this narrative lies not so much in the gestational technology for its own sake, as in the way each robot is encoded with an artificial personality derived from the biological mother of the child it carries. This “mother code” is designed to allow bonding with the infants, but it has a more profound effect on their interactions. The Mothers and children become truly interdependent. Careful thought is also given to how the children (each initially isolated) are to be educated and socialised amidst the ruins of their parents’ society, although these plans do not all go as anticipated.

The Mothers in The Mother Code are derived from prototype technologies under development by NASA and other labs for hypothetical off-world colonisation efforts. And it is in this extraterrestrial context, rather than post-pandemic scenarios, where most android parenting is found in science fiction.

A prominent recent example of android parents is the short-lived television series Raised by Wolves (TV, 2020-2022), created and written by Aaron Guzikowski. The first two episodes of the HBO Max series were directed by Ridley Scott, who had a big influence on the imagery of the series and how the world was shaped. The narrative follows a remnant of humanity attempting to become established on habitable world Kepler 22b [4] after a catastrophic war on Earth between atheists and religious extremists following the cult of Mithras. The first to land are a pair of atheist androids who travel to Kepler 22b with twelve frozen human embryos. The first six of these are gestated simultaneously in tanks of gel attached to the female android, Lamia, known as Mother. After nine months, the infants are removed from the tanks and the children are raised by Mother and her male counterpart, Father.

Unfortunately, the remaining six embryos are destroyed, and five of the children die before two arks containing additional humans arrive from Earth. The deaths result from a mixture of accident and environmental effects, rather than directly as a result of having android carers, but ultimately, the attempt to establish an atheist colony using Mother, Father and their children alone is a failure. The series delved deep into religious imagery and symbolism, much of it connected with a degenerate and near-extinct human-like indigenous race on Kepler 22b, and was cancelled before much of it was resolved or explained. It is notable that we’re told the Mithraists consider the raising of children by androids an abomination. Certainly the surviving child of Mother and Father has a very different experience of life and parenting than those of children who arrive on the arks, and has a worldview shaped by their programming.

More successful but still with problems are the robot-raised human infants in Allen Steele’s Arkwright (linked short stories and fix-up novel, 2016). Dispatched as embryos aboard a starship called Galactique, these children were meant to be raised by the ship’s eponymous AI and her auxiliary service robots. However a solar storm on the red dwarf primary of their new world meant that the robots raising half the children lost touch with the ship. The proto-colony survived, but the resultant society is distorted by half-remembered memories of Galactique in the form of religion. While this could happen in any colony that lost its adult members, the technological basis in this case rendered it particularly vulnerable.

By contrast, a much more positive and optimistic viewpoint can be found in science fictional examples such as The Songs of Distant Earth (novel by Arthur C Clarke, 1986). Here we encounter a human colony seven centuries after it was established by the descendants of genetic material transported on a colony ship, gestated and then raised:

“They had to be educated, given tools, shown how to locate and use local resources. After it had landed and the seedship became a Mother Ship, it might have to cherish its brood for generations.”

On the whole the resulting human population is healthy, well-balanced and appear to have suffered no ill-effects through their descent from robot-raised children. Again though, the knowledge pool of the colony has been edited in accordance with the programming of the ship in the interests of only passing on the best of Earth - a restriction which would likely be challenging for any group of human parents to agree unanimously.

New Horizons

Android parents aren’t the only possible new horizon enabled by reproductive technologies. A range of science fiction has considered the possibility of men modified to gestate infants, or of technologically-enabled gender fluidity rendering the roles of mother and father in the reproductive process irrelevant.

Some interesting variants can be found again in the Vorkosigan saga. In addition to exploring the impact of reproductive technologies on conventional families and the role of women, Lois McMaster Bujold took the potential ramifications of safe, reliable and widely-available uterine replicators several steps further. 

Her early story Ethan of Athos (novel, 1986) described a future society in which a group of men decide to found a society free of women. They make use of cultured ovarian tissue (similar to that described in Haldane’s Daedalus) to generate ova which are then fertilised in vitro and only male embryos are brought to term in uterine replicators. The resultant children are raised to believe in the brotherhood of all men, in community of property, and consider approval for fatherhood a high honour. Women are semi-mythical seductresses and entrappers unknown on the planet. However, several centuries later, the eponymous Dr Ethan Urquhart is forced to risk entrapment and leave the planet when the original ovarian tissue brought to Athos by the founders becomes senescent and must be replaced. While this is an extreme example, Bujold describes a functional and satisfied society in which women have become as redundant as men were in Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways.

Further consequences of ectogenesis are explored in the final novel of the series (to date), Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2018). In this story, Miles mother the dowager Countess Cordelia (still no more than middle-aged given the long lifetime of Betans, and now Vicereine of the planet Sergyar) opts to start raising four daughters fathered by her late husband and frozen as gametes as a precaution against radiation damage. The male gametes were willed to her by her husband, and, as daughters, Barrayaran law gives Cordelia sole jurisdiction over the girls, despite the 40-year-old Miles inheriting authority as head of the family. The use of uterine replicators allows Cordelia to gestate her children much later in life without physical damage to herself, damage to the children or being forced to surrender her demanding job [5]. Given their noble rank, prominent political roles and family history though, the decision still causes consternation and debate in her extended family.

Less widely advertised but also relevant to the discussion is Cordelia’s decision to donate several of her enucleated frozen ova and her late husband’s sperm to their shared long-term romantic and sexual partner, Admiral Jole. By ensuring the resultant children are boys who carry Jole’s Y-chromosome and the X-chromosome from the late Count Vorkosigan, Jole’s parental rights as father are also unassailable under Barrayaran law. In this case, all the transfer of genetic material is consensual and stored as gametes, not fertilised until gestation begins. By contrast with the freezing of embryos, this reduces complications involving later relationship failures amongst the biological parents.

A still more extreme scenario is found in the series on the planet Cetaganda, in a narrative which harks back to the roots of this dialogue in eugenic discussions. On Cetaganda and its colonies no children are born naturally, as discussed in the novels Cetaganda (1995) and Diplomatic Immunity (2002). Instead, every child is the result of a deliberate pairing initiated by genetic authorities and is heavily genetically modified before being gestated and delivered to its parents. Indeed, the explicit aim of this society is to achieve post-human status: artificial evolution towards some optimum that is slowly being defined.

Ectogenesis, Ethics and Reproductive Technologies

Speculation of the impact of reproductive technologies is at least as old as the first conception of those technologies. In Allegories of Change: the “new” biotech in the eye of science fiction, a factual article for the New Destinies series, Lois McMaster Bujold (author of the Vorkosigan Saga where they’re so widely discussed) looked back on reproductive and biological technologies in an SF context. As she commented,

“Even the least alert person must begin to notice that the problems that are now suddenly puzzling ethicists, lawyers, and legislators — and, in a democracy, the public — have been discussed in an on-going forum for more than a hundred years. That dialogue is called science fiction. And biology has been one of the sciences in science fiction from the very beginning.”

Such dialogues have many tricky areas to consider. The stories mentioned above, and many other examples, interweave questions about a range of areas. 

Reproductive technologies associated with in vitro fertilisation could theoretically enable genetic manipulation, cloning and eugenics. Ectogenetic or uterine chambers ask questions as to whether pregnancy and childbirth is required for motherhood, whether it is a positive or negative experience for individual women, and for the role of women in society more generally. In more extreme cases, reproductive technologies present the possibility of human reproduction without limitations due to biological sex or gender. It also asks questions regarding the intangible benefits of maternal gestation to infants and whether any such benefits could be reproduced artificially. In environments where human parents cannot be present, science fictional discussion of childrearing by androids raises questions about the impact of nurture on human psyches, and also about the nature, capacities and limitations of artificial intelligence.

In many, if not most, of these use cases, the current state of the art in science is a long way from delivering the changes suggested. On the other hand, in vitro fertilisation and genetic screening of embryos before implantation are now relatively routine, while they were entirely fictional when first appearing in the genre. Cloning has been demonstrated in mammals and could theoretically be undertaken in humans. Limited editing of genes through the use of plasmoids to deliver new code into cell nuclei is a known technology. By contrast, the detailed manual editing of genes described by Herbert and Bujold lies far beyond current technologies, and, crucially, the development of artificial wombs and ectogenetic gestation is still firmly in the realm of science fiction. This doesn’t mean that they will stay there

Artificial womb technology has been under development around the world for many years, with the goal of saving extremely premature infants by removing them to an enclosed environment and using the existing umbilical cord to deliver oxygenated blood and other necessities. This has been demonstrated for some mammalian fetuses, although none have been gestated to term. However the researchers are clear that this technology cannot feasibly replaced the entirety of gestation and would be associated with extremely high risks. It would also have to take place at a relatively advanced stage of pregnancy, rather than the conception-to-birth devices envisaged in science fiction. Researchers have also noted that such devices may be unable to reproduce some functions of maternal gestation for the infant’s benefit, such as immunity transfer and impact of sound and movement on cognitive development. There is also debate over whether the lack of a physical pregnancy would affect maternal bonding and its associated advantages.

An obvious feature of many (although by no means all) of the stories discussed here is that they were written by women, for whom issues regarding reproductive technology have a more clearly immediate impact. Their positions have differed. Charlotte Haldane, writing in Man’s World, emphasised the importance of gestation and motherhood as a vocation. Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways shows mothers as primarily brood mares or walking incubators, with children raised by others. By contrast Bujold (herself a mother) was clear on the importance of mothers and their relationship with children, while also arguing that it can be enhanced rather than diminished by the maternal health benefits of reproductive technologies.

Stories of artificial intelligence used for raising children seem in many ways equally remote as those of ectogenesis in a lab setting. The large language models currently used to power online AI systems rely on vast databases of training information, and their answers are based on the most likely response by humans in their training set, rather than any genuine decision making process. Certainly they are capable of vast mistakes, and perform poorly when presented with the kind of unpredictable and one-off challenges likely to be encountered when interacting with an infant. Even with android robots becoming more advanced over time, we are still centuries away from self-aware robots equivalent to those in Raised by Wolves, or even The Mother Code.

Science fictional scenarios nonetheless continue to influence the dialogue regarding reproductive technologies. Such dialogues have an ongoing role in shaping the opinions of both the public and law makers, as well as in inspiring and motivating the next generation of scientific investigators. As with any other new innovation, each process discovered is subject to testing but also to speculation regarding its possible impact on family life, society and the health and safety of individuals. In some cases, such as Raised by Wolves or The Mother Code, these tend towards the negative, while recognising that such technologies may be the only thing that saves humanity from the problems that they (or variants on them) have caused. In others, such as Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, the representation is positive, but nonetheless challenges societal norms and expectations. And in many, the balance between the positive experiences of motherhood (for both parent and child) and an opportunity to rebalance the fundamentally asymmetric physical load of traditional parenting (enabling women to reach full potential in other fields and careers) is explored in greater or lesser detail.

However as Bujold noted in her essay:

“Unfortunately, the moral dilemmas of the new biotech are not to be resolved in fiction. Actual morality is solely a function of individuals possessed of free will operating in the one and only present reality. Fiction can talk, play, illuminate, teach, spot traps, suggest alternatives. It is not the arena of action.”

Throughout the development of our existing technologies, legislation has lagged a little behind the cutting edge of developments. In the UK, most issues are addressed in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 - which was less restrictive than the 1980 worldwide moratorium imagined in Sargent’s story Father, and allows study of human embryos for up to 14 days post-fertilisation. Legislation in the United States is far more patchy, being implemented on a state-by-state basis rather than nationally, although the 14-day rule is widely applied in the US, China and elsewhere. As technologies develop which aim to replace maternal gestation for the most premature infants, definitions of when life starts, and what degree of failure and loss is acceptable in the development of such technology, remain unclear.

The questions posed by many of the scenarios regarding use of reproductive technologies in both science and SF are ethical as much as they are technological. As with much science fiction, they may be seen as extreme scenarios, speculative possibilities that probe the limits of what we, as human beings, are willing to permit as well as what we can achieve. In this regard, science fictional thought experiments may prove crucial to shaping our future - and the children who will inhabit it.