How will life find a way if all of one sex of the human species dies?

Science, test tubes and lubricant, lots of lube.

^ Science, test tubes and lubricant, lots of lube.
How is test tubes going to be the fix?

For some reason I can’t GA rojo so here you go in text form.

Hypocrisy, they can make fertile eggs in labs, and implant them in women.

@XOIIO Hypocrisy, they can make fertile eggs in labs, and implant them in women.
OK, you do this before all the women are dead, any girls born to them will die, so you are not changing much just depleting the cache of eggs there are on ice.

Well, it would work in the scenario where men die, if it was women that died off it would be much more complicated.

I mean monkeys and pigs are pretty genetically close to us, you could take the fertile egg from one of them, and “neutralize” the animal dna if that was possible somehow, like flushing away everything but the cartilage in donor hearts (recollection from a popular science article) and in theory make that work to make more human beings, or as close as you could get.

You could freeze a bunch of eggs and use them for many many many years to extend the ability to make babies while they work on finding a cure for the illness killing off all the women.

Similar to Jurassic Park, if they can suck all the genetic material out of an ovum and inject DNA, then you could make a generation of all human men using other species I would guess. The trick is growing the fetuses. In Jurassic park the reptiles were born from eggs outside the body. Science already has birthed a mammal that grew outside of it’s mother in a lab. Or, we could use another animal, but I hate that idea. I much prefer a lab.

I agree that if all the men due it’s a much simpler problem than all the women dying. The science of putting a strand of girl RNA into an egg seems “easy”. Maybe they can already do it.

Die not due.

”... it attacks female chromosomes.”

Well, you just failed biology, but I am going to do a little charity, give the benefit of a doubt.

In most mammals, humans included, female is the default unless you add chromosomes. If you go after “female chromosomes”, then all males of the species will have half their DNA shredded as well, thus leaving nobody of either gender.

X X = Female
X Y = Male
X Y Y = Genetically atypical male; Jacob’s Syndrome
X X Y = Genetically atypical male; Klinefelter sydrome
Y Y = Not humanly possible ; won’t make fetus

Human life is impossible without at least one X chromosome!

So let us flip it around and kill off all the males. From the five combinations shown above, one cannot happen, and of the four that do happen, three (those with at least one of each chromosome) result in Males. The Y chromosome can be targeted without wiping out the entire species though; all the males will be gone but the females will still be around.

Well, it’s not terribly hard to fertilize an egg with technology we’ve had for decades. Aside from both the genetic “father” and the resulting child being female, and reproduction requiring outside assistance, humanity could survive. At least those with access to the sort of medical care that only the First World offers, and even then only to those with plenty of money.

At that point, it becomes more of a sociological thing as finances become the determining factor in survival. Would we become a bit more Socialist for the health of our species, or would we be Capitalistic enough to put profit ahead of survival? We’d have a MAJOR social change, and I think it safe to say that the US would actually be hit harder than even the poorest regions of Africa and be the first nation to topple. Maybe humanity would make a united government, maybe we’d become a dystopia, but there is no way the US would survive, which would lead to a power vacuum in the world that would cause even greater upheaval… okay, let’s just stop there and leave it at there being drastic social effects.

In the end, I don’t think losing one gender would kill humanity….. though it may cause humanity to kill itself.

They would have to find a way for chimps or gorillas to carry the fetuses of humans.

In the meantime, women would have lots of choices for dates, as each woman would be in high demand and very valuable.

A lack of males would not be a real problem. Just do the genetic recombination of female genetic material in the lab. Alternatively, there is research right now to turn female eggs into sperm.

A lack of females could only be solved by creating chimeras between male humans and female animals, and growing the result inside a female animal. Good luck with that.

The Y-chromosome has been disappearing for aeons. Sexuality appears to be a failed evolutionary experiment. The original Y-chromosome was a mutated X-chromosome; female was the original sex. As time has passed, the amount of information on the Y-chromosome has been shrinking, and will probably disappear entirely within the next few million years. Chances are very good that if we don’t reach some sort of Singularity and take control of our own evolution before sending ourselves back to the neolithic through war, disaster, or environmental collapse, that humans will eventually be replaced be a single-sexed hominid.

@jca “They would have to find a way for chimps or gorillas to carry the fetuses of humans.”

As the official representative of the global primate community, we politely decline your request.

Well if it’s men who disappear, the answer is easy: “The rand consulting group, hired to do a head count, concluded that 400,000 frozen embryos existed—a staggering number, twice as large as previous estimates.” Source

If it’s women, that’s a little bit more problematical, but will soon be possible. There are a bunch of frozen eggs too.

@SmashTheState There’s no specific need for an X and a Y for sex to occur. Not all species that reproduce sexually have an X/Y sex determination system. There are lots of other possibilities.

So even if the Y-chromosome fades away (which I think is unlikely, though it makes a nice story), that doesn’t mean we won’t be a sexual species. All that is required for that is the mixing of genetic material in reproduction. We don’t absolutely need X plus Y for that.

Couldn’t God just pull a few virgin births out of his miter?

Yes, @jerv I couldn’t stop laughing when he said, ‘It attacks the female chromosome’.... MEN have a female chromosome, as you so patiently explained. He can’t even kill us women off in one of his hypotheticals.

IF, for some reason, women died out stem cells can be used, but some sort of artificial womb would have to be invented for the incubation of the fetus. If men died out, we could pretty much do this tomorrow with either stem cells or frozen sperm.

Here is something on the stem cell research: http://www.explorestemcells.co.uk/stem-cells-same-sex-reproduction.html

@SmashTheState Actually, that’s non-linear, at least in primates. Humans haven’t lost a gene that way in many millennia.

@dappled_leaves Well, yes, but avians are not mammals, nor are fish, reptiles or insects. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that humanity could evolve to a different natural reproductive scheme given a few thousand generations, but we’d need to find some way to handle ourselves in the meantime.

@jerv Well, you just failed biology, but I am going to do a little charity, give the benefit of a doubt.
In most mammals, humans included, female is the default unless you add chromosomes. If you go after “female chromosomes”, then all males of the species will have half their DNA shredded as well, thus leaving nobody of either gender.
X X = Female
X Y = Male
X Y Y = Genetically atypical male; Jacob’s Syndrome
X X Y = Genetically atypical male; Klinefelter sydrome
Y Y = Not humanly possible ; won’t make fetus
_Human life is impossible without at least one X chromosome! _
All that was nice, but has no relevance to this question, let me make the bread crumbs larger to those who have a problem following context. What I felt I did not have to add (less make a novel of the question) was that if male chromosomes are present, the virus has no effect, so it will not kill off any of the males. Furthermore, it was just humans the virus attacked. But let’s bring all of that into play. If there are no women, there are no future males with an X chromosome or not, so having one, not having one is irrelevant.

Well, it’s not terribly hard to fertilize an egg with technology we’ve had for decades. Aside from both the genetic “father” and the resulting child being female, and reproduction requiring outside assistance, humanity could survive. At least those with access to the sort of medical care that only the First World offers, and even then only to those with plenty of money.
If all the men are toast, you can use frozen sperm and inject it in a woman, and do so long after all the males are gone, but that will only prolong the inevitable, eventually you will run out of sperm, then what? You will not get the storehouses of sperm replenished because every new male would die before he could ”pop”. A law could be passed that every male 14 and up as to give X amount of sperm a year if they liked it or not, but eventually even those just hitting adolescence will eventually die off, taking their sperm making ability with him. Even if you have hundreds of millions of vile in cold storage, one day it will run dry. The only hope would be that scientist had better luck with the virus than they have with the common cold which they have yet to lick.

@jca In the meantime, women would have lots of choices for dates, as each woman would be in high demand and very valuable.
In @jerv scenario that in what men would enjoy. Whoa Nelly, the dogs men would be then, and you think we are bad NOW.

@Hypocrisy_Central “there are no future males with an X chromosome or not, so having one, not having one is irrelevant.”

What @jerv was trying to explain is that all men have an X chromosome. Every human has at least one X.

However, your premise “if male chromosomes are present, the virus has no effect, so it will not kill off any of the males” is sufficient to create your proposed scenario. Only men have a Y chromosome, so if the Y chromosome somehow confers immunity from this virus, that would leave only the men alive. I’d stick to that explanation. :)

Hopefully our species would just go the way of the Dodo and Dinosaurs and leave the planet to the other flora and fauna. I think this would be ideal. haha

@dappled_leaves Only men have a Y chromosome, so if the Y chromosome somehow confers immunity from this virus, that would leave only the men alive.
Yes, males would survive initially but dwindle over the next 80 years or so, given no terminal diseases, was, or other un-natural deaths, then somewhere between 80 and 105 tears after the last female is gone, men will be too if ”nature cannot find a way”. Man can fight it using science, which is destine to fail in the long run, so what is nature going to do in 80 years or so to keep people on this rock?

The Earth will continue on as it did for the few billion years that man was not walking around. Nature didn’t give much of a shit then and I don’t see it giving much of a shit in your example.

Life is diverse and we are not special.

@Blondesjon Agreed, 10,000% by the luck of the DNA draw we could all have just as easily been born an Eel or an Elephant or a Toad. lol