Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

(knowablemagazine.org)

35 points | by gscott 1 hour ago

7 comments

  • didibus 22 minutes ago
    The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
    • ethanj8011 17 minutes ago
      Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
    • defrost 12 minutes ago
      > what if there's an even better horse out there

      Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.

      Many years past, and early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.

      Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.

      I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.

  • foobar1962 4 minutes ago
    Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.
    • acestus5 2 minutes ago
      cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?
  • walrus01 1 hour ago
    For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.
    • fzil 25 minutes ago
      And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.
    • beau_g 1 hour ago
      Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/
      • walrus01 54 minutes ago
        This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.
    • valiant-comma 1 hour ago
      Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.
    • aussieguy1234 34 minutes ago
      That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.

      Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.

  • apt-apt-apt-apt 34 minutes ago
    Humans can likely be cloned too.

    Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.

    Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.

    • didibus 23 minutes ago
      Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?
    • downrightmike 2 minutes ago
      Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for
    • thefounder 29 minutes ago
      I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.
    • el_io 24 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • jofzar 42 minutes ago
    Surprised that the legal drama part of this wasn't discussed, it's how I first heard about this

    https://youtu.be/VARJnzhVryc

  • connorboyle 1 hour ago
    Another Argentina/cloning-connected story is that President Javier Milei cloned his dog Conan at least four times: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-26/the-myst...

    The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.

  • aaron695 49 minutes ago
    [dead]