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Montero Lamar Hill, much better known as "Old Town Road" musician Lil Nas X, sure likes to look at himself in the mirror.

In fact, according to a recent tweet, the highly successful musician would love to go all the way with himself.

"I’m so sick of it," Lil Nas X wrote in the tweet. "I’m sick of pretending I don’t wanna clone myself and then make love to my hot sexy body."

It's almost certainly a characteristically tongue-in-cheek quip, not meant to be taken at face value — Hill's Twitter account is nonstop stream of weird internet humor.

But it does raise an interesting question: would it ever be possible to clone yourself and then have sex with the duplicate version? And would it be ethical?

Human cloning is a hugely controversial field of study. Carrying embryonic stem cells past a certain point in maturity has not only been a taboo, but it remains illegal in many parts of the world.

And that's without getting into the idea of cloning a grown human, like Dolly the sheep.

As far as we know, no human has ever been cloned. But scientists are probably getting close to being able to if they wanted. In January 2018, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai managed to clone macaques, in a world's first.

"It could be a step towards human cloning, but why would you do it?" Peter Andrews, a professor in the University of Sheffield’s department of biomedical science told New Scientist at the time.

"In terms of human biology, it’s illegal to clone a human in Britain and many other countries, and I don’t think anyone would rationally want to do it," he added.

But Lil Nas X might beg to differ.


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