An excerpt from “A Test Tube Colony,” a segment of Life magazine’s 1965 four-part science series, “Control of Life,” which imagined a future in which cold-storage embryos were used to create a space-age Noah’s Ark:

“In this symbolic photograph, Dr. [E.S.E.] Hafez [of Washington State University] holds a set of dummy vials which, he says, could contain ‘the barnyard of the future–complete with the farmer.’ Fertilized egg cells could be shipped anywhere in cold storage in containers like these, each vial color-coded to identify the species it contains. Hafez believes his techniques are are particularly suitable to the space age, as a means of colonizing planets. ‘When you consider how much it costs in fuel to life every pound in the launch pad,’ he says, ‘why send full grown men and women aboard spaceships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist who could grow them into people, cows, pigs, chickens, horses–anything we wanted–after they get there? After all, we miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers?”