The other argument I've seen, the real argument, is concern over Human Beings playing "God." We just shouldn't do it, we're not up to the task and we really need to stop. Given that I don't believe in gods, I find that characterization of the argument specious at best. We've been "playing God" with the Human race for thousands of years, ever since some freethinker had an epiphany and decided to set a broken bone instead of waiting for the Invisibles to do it for him. The vast majority of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for our miracle medicine and the lives it's managed to save.

If the Raelians did what they said -- and I doubt they did -- there's no real ethical concern. Reproduction through somatic nuclei transfer makes you a twin, not a "clone" in the popular, Sci-Fi sense. There's no immortality involved, unless I missed something and identical twins are immortal. ( I wouldn't mind these guys being imported into my bed, but then I digress.)

If the Raelians did not do what they said -- which is more likely -- then tomorrow hasn't arrived. Yet. But Tomorrow is still coming. It'll probably arrive on CNN, interrupt yet another season of Friends and be discussed endlessly in Blogdom. It will happen though. We will clone someone. We will harness stem cells. We will engineer DNA. We will actually become "Gods." (We can already throw the whole lighting bolt thing....)

The cold reality is that our "ascension" to "Godhood" has been going on ever since that first bone setting and will continue long after we've taken apart our solar system and reconstructed it as a impossibly large walkup with central heating and really panoramic views.

What we have to concern ourselves with isn't the "God" argument. The Gods never did that great a job anyway, bastards of the Id all. We, from time to time, actually have. We change, we grow, we adapt and we learn. They don't. Our society refflects this. Theirs never do. Besides, as Uncle Nietzsche said, they're dead and it's best that way. (He got a little silly after that. Beer, you see.)

We have to wrestle, we have to argue, we have to debate and we have to understand. There's so much promise that lays ahead in this feild -- and so much peril. Hiroshima gave us nuclear medicine and we are the better for it. Genies don't go back into bottles and, quite frankly, I'm not certain they should.

I am concerned about the long term health effects of whatever child is brought into the world through cloning. As so much of who we are -- our inquisitiveness, our compassion, our anger, our religiosity, our sexuality, our "humanness" -- is a product of our genes, I'm also very concerned about what, in the future, we're going to be selecting for, modifying from or engineering towards. What are we going to cure? What are we going to cause? What are we going to breed out of us? What are we going to breed into us? Those are the questions we're going to be wrestling with from here on out.

As the world today is unrecognizable (generally...) from the way it was 2,000 years ago, wonders and magic do tumble all around, our world will be radically different 100 years hence. If you think I jest, ask your grandmother about what she's seen in her 80 years and what your mother has in her 50.

We're always living in our Tomorrows. We scarcely notice until they become Yesterday. The discussion we need now isn't should we or shouldn't we -- it's far, far too late for that -- but what should we, what shouldn't we and why?

The God bit -- red herring. The real bit is choice and responsibility, hard actions both. Yet, in the end, that's really what the future is made from.