Why so expensive?

Let's do the math...

Why so expensive?

Let’s do the math...

So just everyone wants one these days, and why not?

A clone to do all your chores for you?

Or just to attend all those annoying public events you just must appear at to provide support for your brand, but that are just so tedious you think your brain will explode if you had to do yet one more meet-up?

Or those hugely fractious family holiday meals! Who wouldn’t want to say, Send in the Clone.

A clone is just the thing. Solves a lot of your scheduling problems, and may even be a bit fun.

But why are clones so damn expensive.

Well, let’s do the math.

For this examination we will use the figures provided by the ACME Cloning Company as being representative of the whole of the modern cloning industry.

First, a clone is just a human body, created from your cells, and has the same number of cells as you when it is matured. Thus adult clones are like regular humans and have around 10 trillion cells.

This is a lot of cells. You have about 10 trillion cells, and look how long it took you to get to where you are now.

It’s all about energy. And energy transfer.

Your body’s cells divided, that is multiplied themselves by doubling, over 42 times to get to your total of 10 trillion cells. It took you decades.

For a clone, the manufacturer has to do all that energy transfer in a very short period. This really adds to the costs.

So let’s look at what you body had to do to grow you to where you are now.

First it took your mother (no, not a birthing person, but your mother, the woman who gave birth to you) over 126,900 calories to bring you to your emergence into this world. She consumes more than that in order to get you the 94,890 calories that will have been used to create your body in her womb.

Thus you start off with nearly 95,000 calories necessary to get you out the door, so to speak.

Then, over the first three years of your life, you needed between 1000, and 1400 calories daily. This results in a range of 365,000 to 511,000 calories per year for each year producing a total range of 1,098,000 calories out to 1,533,000 to cover all 3 years.

For 4 to 8, your body used up 1200 to 2000 calories daily resulting in an annual range of 438,000 to 730,000, or a 5 year total of 2,190,000 out to 3,690,000 calories for those years.

Similarly, years 9 through 18 will require more calories at 1400 to 2400 per day, yielding 511,000 out to 876,000 annually for a total range of 5,110,000 to 8,760,00 calories across those 10 years (9 through 18 INCLUSIVE).

For the years 19 through to 30, we have daily calories at 1800 to 3200 for total ranges of 657,000 out to 12,168,000 calories required annually. Across that decade of your twenties, you consumed at least 7,227,000 to 12,848,000.

All this sums to a range, that at the low end is 15,719,000 out to a high end of 19,041,890 calories.

Fifteen million out to nineteen million.

That is a lot of calories to get you to age 30.

Now true, your body will gradually slow down its calorie demands as you age, but overall it is not very significant to the calories consumed over a lifetime.

No matter what, that is a lot of calories. This is just the start of the costs incurred by your clone maker. True these calories are not in the form of foodstuffs, but are mainly electricity (as an energy source), light, and chemicals, but in the main, these ‘raw’ energy sources are about 3/three times as expensive over those same calories obtained through foods. It takes a lot of expensive electricity to replace what sunlight + soil + a seed will produce.

So just if you think about it this way, that your clone maker is paying for three times the energy equivalent of ALL the foods you have eaten since you were born. That puts it into perspective, and this is JUST the energy that goes into the actual clone body.

Besides the expenses of the cloning technicians salaries & tools & support costs, there is also the huge cost of the containment field. Note that this is the time distortion device that encloses the artificial womb in which your clone will grow, and mature.

The containment field is the largest single expense in the production of your clone. This field has to have enough energy to encapsulate the womb machinery, and to distort the time around it for the duration of the clone grow period.

Time distortion is a giant energy sucker. The containment field takes about 150,000 times the energy equivalent of your clone’s total calories necessary to build the body. Yes, the time distortion, and compression, is the single largest expense in producing your clone.

In examining the question of why cloning is so expensive, we have not even touched on the related costs of government regulation, including the price that all clone owners pay to support the Global Clone Police force. Or all the insurance costs associated with clone creation, nor the required set asides for the Clone-gone-bad disposals. These are not trivial costs.

The disposal costs must not be minimized. Cloning is not an exact science. It is more of an industrial art.

Every cloning job is a gamble. The manufacturer puts it all the necessary base chemical constituents together in an incubation capsule, then puts the capsule in the AW (artificial womb), and then puts the AW on its STB (stable time base), and then fires off the containment field. Then you wait. Months. Until the process is mature, whereupon, hopefully, you retrieve a good clone.

Even with our advanced knowledge these days, 2 out of every 3 clones will ‘go bad’ and need disposal. Mostly it is brain quirks, though sometimes we still see the more gross abnormalities. As the Time Containment Field prevents any information traveling through it, you don’t know the state of the field until you ‘crack the shell’ as they say in the business.

Then, mostly you are disappointed, and start over.

There is also the hidden costs of a clone that ‘sort of works’. That is, the clone may look good, and seem functional, until it is actually placed into service. Then defects begin to show in its behavior.

That’s what the White Hats ran into when they replaced Charlie Ward and Simon Parkes with clones.

The first Charlie Ward clone looked fine, and seemed good, until it was actually placed in the field. Then all manner of mental problems appeared. Every thing from agoraphobia, to compulsive, and inappropriate, insect eating. Not a pretty sight.

Charlie Ward Clone number 2 was a distinct improvement though it also is manifesting defects, though the most notable is that its head bobbing rhythm is off, compared to the real Charlie Ward. Something that, hopefully, will go unnoticed by most people who interact with it.

The Charlie Ward series had some extra costs as the original model is fat. More calories involved so the needs escalated.

It is wise, with the state of clone rejects running at 2 out of every 3, right at the shell crack stage, to say nothing of what appears during actual use of the clone, to purchase clone creation insurance. It can really be a life saver (joke intended) when it is a case of “clone gone bad”.

The great expenses of cloning should now be a bit more understandable. It’s a difficult and energy intensive task to build your clone, and with all the recent past and bad history of clone replacements (think the Biden years), it is no wonder at all that the Cloning Industry Council spends a lot of time, and energy (money) promoting their Responsible Clone Ownership program.

Be Safe, Be Responsible, and Happy Cloning!