Ask Lemmy

Just wipe out ALL mosquitoes, and then measure what the actual influence is on the food-web for other animals and plants.

I heard there's a guy called Luigi with a cool idea.

I really want someone to just really start messing around with the human genome, see the limits of gene expression. Let's add horns, let's add tusks, let's add tails, and wings, and carapaces, and antennae, and claws, let's just see what happens. Human evolution has gotten so tired and trite; let's add some spice.

Here's a very unethical linguistics experiment that I think would be interesting:

Raising a group of children completely isolated from any language, spoken or otherwise. They would not be fully isolated from people, but those people would not be able to communicate with each other in the vicinity of the children (no speaking, no gestures, etc.) Of course, to isolate them from language would mean strictly controlling their lives (very unethical). Could they communicate with each other, and maybe even develop a language?

Try to find out at which temperature Musk begins to melt.

Lobotomize all conservatives to see if their IQ increases.

We've exhausted all other options.

Seems pretty tame compared to various other answers, but keeping people under anesthesia longer than expected during surgery and seeing how it affects things like memory or personality.

Supposedly after an open heart surgery I had gone through over a decade ago, my mother swears my personality changed. Though I can't remember if that's true because my memory has felt, in a sense, kinda foggy since then. So I wanna know if it was because I was under for longer than expected or because the surgery itself.

Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.

What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?

At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.

Take the people expressing their violent political fantasies in threads like this and make them live in the worlds they're advocating for.

The mouse utopia experiment but on humans. Ive always seen a subset of people who bemoan having to work or develop specialized skills to contribute to society. They want everything provided for them so their whole life can be leasure and comfort. A lot of socialism and communism selling points tend to be about having social services and things provided to you.

I'm interested to see the long term affects of people in a society where EVERYTHING is provided for you all the time. Every survival concern, sexual pleasure, every base urge, every whim and desire. For decades and decades and decades. Would it be a genuine good for society or would it be a monkeys paw situation?

Ive always hypothesized that any human society that attempts this will quickly erode into something similar to the mouse utopia.

Without any environmental pressures or meaningful challenges to overcome a large portion of the population without strong internal drives will become lethally/suicidally lazy, apathetic, and narcicistic

I suspect theres a large amount of people who simply have zero internal drives to apply themselves to doing a thing unlesd they have to. without the pressure of survival in either a physical or economic way they would simply sit on their ass, jerk off, play games, and maybe groom themselves, for decades until they die. Merit and overcoming challenge are important aspects of drive and dopamine generation. You deprive a person of those things they become lethargic. If that sentiment proves itself true it will be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of ideologies.

Unethical questions:

Statistically speaking, how many people would escelate their wants to socially taboo depravities? How quickly?

How long on average would it take for pleasure to become less meaningful in the face of instant gratification? Is there a logarithmic function that charts this?

How many people on average decide to begin self harm out to seek novel sensations? How long until onset?

How many people choose to live out a full life vs taking the placebo cyanide capsule and being removed from experiment? What would their reasonings be?

Lock someone is a room-wide 24h fMRI or some other imaging technique to get a full recording of a human body working.

The metal gear solid thing where you clone someone into two separate people but one gets all the recessive genes and the other gets all the dominant ones

Who from the US government will last the longest in a bonfire. Although it might be questionable if this experiment is really unethical.

I want to see what happens we just have mob lynchings of politicians if their approval drops to below 50%.

Maybe the world would become a utopia?

👀

Nice try, Mengele

Separate a child from society. Like place them into a void with no human culture. And see what they think later on.

Recreate the setup of Training Day and see how many people become dirty cops because they get finessed by Denzel Washington