From a biological perspective, the meaning of any organism’s life is to dominate its species’ genepool. That can be done by eliminating or subduing rivals and/or by producing as many offspring as possible that survive to adulthood. Though we humans resist thinking that this applies to us, a passing familiarity with evolutionary psychology makes it clear that the instinct to dominate others (or at least reduce others so they are less powerful) and to reproduce underlies countless aspects of our thinking and behavior. In the short term and long term, a human’s goal is to increase his “slice” of the human genetic “pie” as much as possible.
A question I’ve been pondering lately is how present and future technology could be best used to satisfy this biological imperative. Donating your eggs or sperm to people who want to use IVF to create children is probably the smartest strategy right now since the amount of effort (especially for sperm donation) is minimal, but the genetic payoff is large since someone else bears the costs of raising your offspring (note that this implies that you adopting a genetically unrelated child is the worst strategy). If sperm and egg banks reject you as being beneath their donor standards, there’s always the wonderful world of direct, private donations (one example:
https://www.justababy.com/ ).
Failing that, or in addition to it, you should of course conceive and raise biological children of your own. If this is impossible due to infertility or an inability to find a partner, technology again offers solutions. Convincing a close blood relative to donate their sperm or eggs to you for IVF would allow you to conceive a child that shared much of your DNA. If your problem is singlehood, then the solution is going to a sperm or egg bank (though this is a much more expensive option for men since they have to pay surrogate mothers to bear the child). It goes without saying that you should pick a donor that has high reproductive fitness.
Once it becomes possible to clone humans, it might make sense for you to do that instead of having children the normal way. From a genetic standpoint, a child conceived the normal way only shares 50% of your DNA (with the other 50% coming from your partner or “donor”), whereas your clone would share 100% with you. In an important biological sense, making a clone of yourself is as good as having two children with someone else. Your genes don’t get diluted from one generation to the next. Moreover, since intelligence and personality traits are heavily genetic, it would probably be easier for you to raise a clone since you’d already know your offspring’s strengths and weaknesses and because you’d think and act similarly.
Pushing the technological envelope farther, it would be even better if you made genetically engineered clones of yourself. When your clone was still just a fertilized egg, you would use genetic engineering techniques to change genes that coded for your known flaws, like defects of appearance or a congenital health problem. The resulting person wouldn’t be a true clone since it would have these “tweaks,” but it would still be incredibly similar to you. It’s probably better to have a “99.9% clone” that lacked some of your weaknesses than a 100% clone that had them, as the latter would be likelier to live long, reproduce, and attain the social and financial means to support their own offspring better.
Taking advantage of technologies that extend your lifespan and maintain your health also supports your biological imperative. It leaves you with more time and ability to raise children of your own, and even after your own reproductive years are done or you’ve gotten too infirm to be a primary caregiver, to also care for your grandchildren and other blood descendants. So long as you are a positive presence, your efforts will advance their survival, and hence the proliferation of your genes. Of note is the fact that cryonically preserving yourself upon death is included among the array of technologies that could extend your lifespan. Even a 1% chance of being resurrected to continue spreading your seed and/or helping your descendants is better than the 0% chance you get by not opting for cryonics.
Finally, an overlooked way to use technology to perpetuate your genes is to sequence your genome and then ensure the data survive after your death, so hopefully someone might use it to clone you in the future. Because gene sequencing costs are dropping, most people will be able to easily afford this within ten years. Taking pains to protect the data–perhaps by making several backups and periodically cross-checking them for fixity–and arranging for the file to be made public or transferred to a major genetic database in the event of your death would be the second element of the plan. Attaching a message to it saying you wish to be cloned would raise the chances of it happening (again, 1% is better than 0%).
I used to view the project to catalog the genomes of humans as special a thing unto itself, somehow more mystical and important than the rest of the scientific enterprise, but then I realized it was just part of the much broader, millennia-spanning effort to gather data on everything around us. The body of science and of known facts expands, and it’s almost incidental that our knowledge of human genetics is included. Today’s internet already represents a massive store of such knowledge, and the future internet (or whatever the internet evolves into) will be even bigger and more detailed. I can imagine a day when very advanced genetic labs will have access to the genomes of trillions of unique humans and animals, and could use the genomic data to synthesize any one of the individuals from scratch.
And there you have it. Even if the product of such a synthesis procedure wouldn’t be “you,” it would be a clone of you, and if the perpetuation of your genes is the ultimate meaning of your life, the creation of a clone of you in the far future would advance your interests.