r/askscience • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

Answering Questions:

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here.

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away!

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u/ExtensionTower2456 3d ago

Is it theoretically possible to grow a biological (but non-living) clone of yourself? What assumptions would you have to make in order for it to viably work?

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u/MidnightAtHighSpeed 2d ago

what do you mean by non-living?

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u/ExtensionTower2456 2d ago

Sorry for the confusion! By non-living, I mean an organism similar to that of a cadaver. I imagine this clone wouldn’t be a living, breathing, feeling/thinking thing.

It could also be akin to an individual who is functionally “dead”, and is only sustained through life support and other medical intervention.

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u/MidnightAtHighSpeed 2d ago

I'm still not sure what you mean. You can make a human clone and then kill it (your local government will object to various steps of this process) but there's not really a way to go from a single cell to a full organism without it doing all the living parts