Creating Life Is Awesome

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To be able to create intelligent life. Not just having a regular baby, but actually creating something through science or magic. How awesome that would be.

Well. Awesome, assuming that it actually works. And that it works in a benevolent way. In some works, it actually does.

In many works, Creating Life Is Bad. An ultimate show of scientific hubris. Western literature has its roots in a religious tradition in which the act of creation is the turf of God Almighty, along with eating apples and building really high towers. Thus, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein not only became very influential, but also constantly interpreted through the lens of this condemning mindset.

Over the last few decades, more and more authors have been moving away from that old trope, instead moving towards Creating Life Is Awesome - either defying the Frankenstein tradition or ignoring it completely. To qualify for this trope, the created life must be good and be treated as such. And of course, it must be created by humans or similar, not by deities in the traditional sense.

If other created individuals are evil by nature, then both tropes apply. If all the created individuals are good (and remain reasonably good, instead of falling into the Frankenstein tradition) but all humans hate them, then it's Torches and Pitchforks or Cloning Blues rather then Creating Life Is Bad.

The creator is likely to be a Motherly Scientist or Deity of Human Origin.

Examples of Creating Life Is Awesome include:

Anime and Manga

• In Cardcaptor Sakura, Clow Reed created Kero, Yue, Spinel Sun, and Ruby Moon. We neither get nasty results from them or Humans Are the Real Monsters type reactions to them.
• In Mahou Sensei Negima, the mage known as "the Lifemaker" got his title for a reason: the Magical World, with its own entire ecosystem and intelligent ensouled beings numbering nearly a billion, was created by him. His creating life is never portrayed as a bad thing... it's the fact that he now wants to end said life that makes him the villain.

Film

• In Tron, we have this guy named Alan. He's a rather meek guy, but he also created the title character, who is this awesome holy warrior. And they are really fond of each other too, although Tron's perception of Alan as moving in mysterious ways and everything seem a bit strange to those who know Alan from a very different perspective.
  • We also see other Programs created by Encom personnel, like the formidable Turbulent Priest Dumont (created by Encom founder Walter Gibbs). Gibbs, in fact, provides the closest we get to an explanation by shouting at Dillinger that "our spirit remains in every Program we design for this system!"
• In Tron: Legacy, Tron himself has fallen to tragedy. But that is not Alan's fault, creating him was still the coolest thing ever. Kevin Flynn is a benevolent creator of programs that are alive... and who also transform into biological humans when/if they beam over to the human world. While some programs can be considered bad people, the act of creation done by a human is treated as cool and worthwhile in itself. Clu was the one who turned bad and corrupted others, but the mistake Kevin made was not creating Clu in the first place but rather charging him with a well-meaning but inherently flawed agenda.
• In Never Let Me Go, the artificial humans are kind and compassionate, and so are the humans who try to help them. Ironically, society doesn't want them to be good - it's easier to justify exploiting them if one can pretend that they are soulless.
• Frederick Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein starts off a highly rational man, then gets excited once he finds out it is possible to create life, and once he gets over some fearfulness of his creation, he learns to love it. Matter of fact, this is one of the very few Frankenstein stories that has a happy ending, because the creator accepts his flawed creation instead of rejecting it.

Literature

• The title wizard of Diana Wynne Jones's The Dark Lord of Derkholm creates new life forms all the time, including griffins and winged humans. Some of them contain his own DNA and are treated as family members. Although this creates some unusual parent-child tensions, his creative work is treated as a positive thing on the whole.
  • This story also subverts Creating Life Is Bad, by having various characters wrongly believe the protagonist to be evil.

Live Action TV

• In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data is an artificial person. He's a good guy, and his creator is cast as a benevolent father figure. Unfortunately, his elder brother Lore was decidedly not a good guy.
  • Sapient holograms in the Star Trek universe fall on either side of A.I. Is a Crapshoot.

Tabletop RPG

• In Mage: The Ascension, both the Traditions and the Technocratic Union create intelligent lifeforms in a benevolent manner. These creations can even become playable characters without any drawbacks from their artificial origins.
• In GURPS "neogenesis" is the ultimate biogenesis technology and classified as TL11 development, the creation of a truly viable species doesn't occur until TL12.
• In Genius: The Transgression creating life is considered perfectly acceptable. Creating intelligent life is considered a modest Transgression more because it's socially frowned upon than because it's automatically unethical. Mad Scientists tend to do both anyway.

Web Comics

• Far Out There has Tabitha creating the zombie children Bridget and Alphonse. This has gone well.

Western Animation

• In Titan A.E., mankind triumphs by creating an entire planet for itself, complete with a fully populated biosphere.
• In the Disney version of Pinocchio, the title character is created by the joint efforts of Gepetto (who built his body) and The Blue Fairy (who gave him life). It is all treated as a good thing.
• The original Transformers series and Marvel comic often do what humans would consider unforgivable acts of playing god. Many robots were created in moments of "We need someone to do X; let's build 'em!" Their society just sees this thing differently from humans. The things that go wrong when humans do it seldom show up - the result is usually perfectly sane and treated as an equal from day one. Fridge Logic dictates the necessity of this trope, since how else could robots reproduce? The comic even has an instance of five Autobots who allowed full copies of their data to be made, to be placed in new bodies if Optimus needed extra backup on Earth. No sign of Cloning Blues, though unfortunately we don't get to meet the versions of them who are still on Cybertron.

Real Life

• This is the entire goal of the field of synthetic biology. Specifically, the "ultimate goals of being able to design and build engineered biological systems that process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures, produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and our environment." Not exactly Frankenstein.
• Snark aside, it might add perspective to remember that ordinary people of all types are Creating Life every day. The "horizontal mambo" has (often desired) consequences. And the issues above of Pride and playing god are not absent in this example, only less dramatized.
  • Might not be so awesome anymore when you have to deal with overpopulation...
• Pretty much the ultimate goal of AI research, although this might have some undesired consequences.
• Should one consider that a virus is a life-form (and that's a big debate right there), then technically self-propagating computer viruses are artificial life-forms as well. They don't inhabit the same plane of existence as we do, but Stephen Hawking and a few others seem to consider them alive. Which goes on to prove that the first lifeform ever created by man was made for destruction.
  • There's no debate among biologists. Biologists do not define viruses as alive, nor are they the simplest parasitic crystals which are able to replicate inside hosts organisms. That honor belongs to prions, which are normal proteins which have changed shape and stabilized in a very wicked configuration, then go on to stabilize more copies of that protein in the same configuration. Prions would also fit that definition of alive - and they are nothing more than large molecules with no genome, no metabolism, and no "purpose" except killing their host. Whatever a person's gifts in their field (physics, in this case), it does not make them an authority in another field to attempt an Appeal to Authority by appending their name to an out of context statement, especially in other fields (biology, cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy).