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Artificial Life May Be Possible Within Ten Years
CapedOpossum writes "According to an article from a few weeks back on CNN, researchers in the field of genetics and biology think that we may be able to artificially create life within the next decade. From the article: 'Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of 'wet artificial life. "It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could run amok, but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.'"
Amok, amok, amok!
My blog
we're going to *grow* flying cars?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Since artificial life is the only kind they're every going to get!
The Cylons were created by man...
How hard could it be to create ugly bags of mostly water?
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"
- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang (The Human Hive), Dynamics of Mind
Artificial Intelligent Design!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Gah, that sounds so sleazy. Brings to mind the "Weird Science" build-a-babe scene.
Table-ized A.I.
So, when will we start seeing legislation for warnings on food? If this takes off, I can see companies making stuff like pseudo-cows and pseudo-chickens that are cheaper to breed in the long term.
I suppose they'll start out with plant-like forms of life for simplicity. Strangely, eating artificial plants wouldn't bother me as much as artificial animals.
Of killing & eating each other. That's life on earth.
... disadvantaged.
Any artificial life without that pedigree is going to be
Deleted
It still won't suck as much as real life.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
Between that and the guy who wants to extend the genetic code to twelve bases, it seems a little avant-garde to just trust everything to evolution (although, in a sense, I suppose that's the point of being a forerunner). It seems that would be more useful to trust evolution for advancement only in the intermediate phases of getting organisms that do what we want, rather than letting them evolve and evolve until we have the final designs for proto-organisms that do what we want. Upon reflection, I don't really expect them to try the latter method since it would lead to all kinds of dead ends, but I do sorta wonder how many other people out there will jump to that conclusion like I did. Of course, dead ends in genetics maybe don't matter if you're breeding billions of proto-organisms and have a reliable method for killing the ones you know you don't want. Then again, unless you remove the ability of the organisms to breed (which, if we're designing them from scratch, may not be too hard), evolution will just continue on even after you have what you think is your final design.
I guess all this thinking is a little preliminary. People will begin to take these issues perhaps a little more seriously when the time comes to start breeding little proto-organisms.
One of the answers to the Fermi Paradox that is often thrown around is the idea that intelligent life tends to destroy itself after a short amount of time. Normally, people think this means huge wars, but I actually have pondered a different theory. As technology advances, more and more power is put into the hands of relatively small groups, and then ultimately to individuals.
I've wondered if perhaps there was some sort of energy-conversion technology that we don't know about yet (such as an easy way to create antimatter), but once discovered, it puts too much power available too easily. Basically, a single nutcase then creates a doomsday bomb, and that's it. If that were possible, and assuming it was relatively undetectable, it would be inevitable that life would be destroyed. You simply can't stop determined crazy people.
On the other hand, things like this make me wonder about biological weapons. As this technology matures, it will get easier and easier, and be available cheaper and cheaper to create artificial lifeforms. You see it on the Internet... script kiddies have an immense amount of power to destroy property. Once biolife is cheap and easy, and you get a human-hating nut who *wants* to destroy humanity, how can you stop it?
It won't be war that kills everyone, it'll be the lone Unibomber type.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Let me venture a guess... 10 years?
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
I like to think that the creation of artificial life might be used for medical research applications but I shudder to think that an already overcrowded planet has to make more room for "fake babies". And the potential for anarchy is more than a slight worry for me, being that even if you could replicate the inner-workings of life, it doesn't mean you can give it a "soul". Next thing we know, our streets are filled with wandering empty shells with no knowledge of "right" and "wrong". Just because science "can do it" doesn't always mean it "should do it".
Humans have become so technically evolved that they can now make a living, breathing person.
A summit of scientists believed that because they now had the power to create life, God was no longer needed. So they all decided that someone should go and tell God this. One man volunteered to go. One day he climbed a mountain and called upon God.
"God! We humans now have the ability to bring people from the dead, we can create our own life, we don't need you anymore so you can leave us alone."
God listened to the scientist and nodded his head. "Okay, I'll tell you what, if you can really create life, let's have a competition, if you can create a better person than me, I'll go, but we'll have to do it the way I did it in the old days."
So the scientist agrees and begins to collect some dirt to make his person. God simply watches him and finally asks him what he's doing.
"I'm using the dirt to make a person."
God smiles, looks at the scientist and replies, "Go make your own dirt."
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
I'm curious: Is there any chance within our lifetimes that this artifical life could actually survive in a non-meticulously-controlled real-world environment, or will our attempts to best God destined to die with a whimper in a petri dish?
The first and most obvious reaction to this is worrying about some sort of mega-virus (created by accident or on purpose) that will either turn us all to zombies or be no fun and just kill us, but the first "artifical life" will be, compared to anything natural, a joke. (Note: still a huge accomplishment and very hard/impressive/better than I could do, but not anything that will compete in nature.)
TFA says the main hurdles are creating a cell membrane, some sort of genetic system, and a metabolism. Once they have that, how close is it to something like a real bacteria or virus? And after that, how many steps to creating an organism that could be introduced into the world and actually survive? Are we talking decades? Generations? Millennia?
So, if I created an artificial woman I'm betting she still wouldn't go out with me.
I find it's easier to take an existing program, and alter it a bit here and there, than to start writting completly from scratch. If they are successful though, I'm willing to bet they won't be in a 'sharing' mood. (more likely a 'patent' mood)
I will send my robotic man servant to take the flying car and pick up my new pet blob.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
That's cloning. This is LFS (Life From Scratch),
not to be confused with Linux From Scratch.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I for one am excited to see what happens though I'm waiting to see more headlines about religious protest than usual to respond to this. I support the idea as the applications could be amazing, but the whole 'playing god' moral outcry thing is, as always, going to be right up in arms on the tail of the 'yay, we did it!' party.
Either way---'mmm, yay' for science.
Its the amazing technicolor cheese wedge!
They came as little artificial pellets, but once you put them in water -- look out -- LIFE!
Let me venture a guess... 10 years?
It must be a bunch of Unix developers trying to avoid having to deal with the 2038 overflow problem. Us geeks will do just about anything to slack.
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
With every new scientific enhancement comes the man-made horrors that Hollywood is more than willing to capitalize upon...
For year's I've been trying to "get a life"
Now I'll finally be able to create one!
Because we know that the media is really good at predicting the future of technology. I mean, check out my personal jet pack... what's that you say? Oh. Right.
Not to be an alarmist or anything.
But it's not like they'll face stiff resistance taking over..
Then I'm all for it.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
46 chromosomes ought to be enough for anybody.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
I've been toying with this idea a bit, what if we become able to completely engineer life forms as complex as, say, bugs and plants.
That would put the notion of biodiversity in another perspective. "So what if these species are endangered, if we need something like it, we'll just create it again." And any newly created lifeform would be 'close to extinction', and yet at the same time a artificial, manufactured product.
I'm thinking a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with something that so clearly raises questions about the value of life.
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
...but only with the permission of the Chinese central government.
Oh, well; five down, one to go.
Yes, pirating software is not as honourable than writing one from scratch :)
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
They're attempting to manufacture a cell.
Cloning is nothing more than tricking a cell to do what it's already designed to do. You aren't creating anything, the cell is creating another cell.
It's the difference between going to a Frys buying a motherboard, processor, case etc and assembling it at home vs mining ore, refining, designing, building a fabrication unit printing circuits and assembling that.
Maybe we should grow this artificial life as a food source. After all, you are what you eat ;)
"...welcome our wet, artificial overlords!"
;-)
Gah, that sounds so sleazy. Brings to mind the "Weird Science" build-a-babe scene.
Pris from Blade Runner was my first thought.
Dolly was a 'copy', its DNA was identical to its mother DNA. These scientists are creating (or trying to) life from nothing. Not only this artificial life being won't have the same DNA as its mother, it won't have a mother and its DNA will be different from the DNA of any other species.
If there were laws that forced certain genetic experiments to be done on the moon, it would be a lot safer for everyone, and it could form the basis of a real commercial space industry.
It would also be another good reason to build a space elevator on the moon, which would be extremely good for further space exploration.
But I digress.
Roy: Can the maker repair what he makes?
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you...
Roy: I want more life, fucker.
Tyrell: The facts of life: To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once its been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate is an alkylating agent and a potent mutagen. It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressor protein that blocks the operating cells?
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again... but, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you, you're the prodigal son, you're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things, revel in your time!
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I've been to Venice, Italy once for six days. I still dream of going back. Venice is one of the great jewels of humanity, a place like no other. Assuming that the Italian government and regulations didn't drive me crazy, I'd love to love in Venice.
This train of through seems to have been the logic behind ProtoLife. The company has been founded and run by a group of Americans without any particular experience in molecular biology or any other kind of biology. The closest they seem to get is an organic chemist. The whole motivo esistere (reason to exist) seems to be "lets do something that sounds cool in the coolest city in the world". Given their backgrounds, I think that there are serious questions about whether some of the people involved have any real understanding of experimental method (and instrumenting a roulette wheel doesn't count), much less the "wet lab" work of biology.
In short, this is not a serious company and they don't deserve to have any claims they make taken seriously. If artificial life is created in ten years it seems very unlikely that this will have been done at ProtoLife.
In theory this is a start-up company that is supposed to have some prospect of making money. Artificial life, which really amounts to assembling pieces (enzymes and organelles from cells, along with selected genes). This doesn't mean that the assembled organism is of any use from a commercial stand point. This just reinforced the idea that this company is nothing more than a hobby.
If we can make new ones that can replace the ones that are already there with broken-down mtDNA, then this brings us closer to extended lifespans!
e =mitosens
http://methuselahfoundation.org/index.php?pagenam
I personally prefer the existing technology used to create life.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let's hope they create life from oppositely handed aminoacids (OK, they may use glycine ;-) ) and oppositely winding DNA. That should keep us and the environment fairly safe.
Bert
And they will be fusion powered.
I see the joke "I, for one, welcome our new 'insert entity here' overlords!" used all the time in slashdot. Is this a reference to something? Why do people think this is funny? What am I missing that makes this something worth laughing about? I'm not trying to flame the author, I'm just trying to understand why this is considered funny, and gets such a high slashdot score in any of its regurgitations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturally_significan t_phrases_from_The_Simpsons#Our_new_.E2.80.A6_Over lords
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Artificial life impossible for the next 9 years.
Did you ever play 'Joust'?
Sig cannot be found.
It was funny once, maybe twice. Then it stopped being funny for a while, then it became funny again. Then it stopped being funny again. Truth is, no one knows whether of not it's funny anymore.
meh
hell, it's barely crowded.
Considering that the global population is in decline, I don't think you need to worry about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm sure there is artificial life at the bottom of any true Geek's shower curtain. .
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"You can't create life from non-life!"
That one will be unuseable. Either that or they'll insist that what was created isn't life.
If you're separated by a few million or billion miles of vacuum in a sealed biosphere/spaceship, biological warfare has a little less impact on you.
That says nothing about nanotech, however. Ultimately, the only way for diverse life to survive is to spread as far as technology allows it.
...I may be married to Jessica Alba within 10 years. ...in addition to my current wife. ...and my current wife may be fine with the arrangement. Yup, 3 to 10 years, I'm tellin ya.
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had
come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one
scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we
no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and
do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the
scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this,
let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist
replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in
the old days with Adam."
"Sure, no problem," said the scientist as he bent down to grab
himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You don't understand. I said just like I did; you
have to go get your own dirt!"
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
This is just what we need.
.. we have psychopathic astronauts running amok whilst wearing nappies .. and now just when things couldn't possibly get any worse, we have scientists threatening to unleash a plague of flying spiders from their labs out into the wider world.
Today it's 2007 and we have MS stuffing ballots to get OOXML declared a standard
Giant foot long flying spiders for god's sake !!
Im locking the door and going back to bed.
I'm pretty sure that this has been ten years away for the last twenty years. Every few years a new headline saying it's only ten years away...
[signature]
When a scientist attempting to make a self-reproducing organism is "winging it" I'm a little concerned. This is exactly the type of thing where they make a super virus on accident and kill everyone right?
A little off topic, but what I'm most worried about is when they figure out enough to make a bio-weapon that targets specific genetic traits..say a Persian lineage. They "accidentally" drop some in a well in Iran... Then of course it mutates and everyone dies globally. Far fetched, I know, but these type of scientists are just smart enough to be dangerous. Here's hoping they fail.
Always figured it would be the Russians that started the next mass extinction. Turns out it's either going to be a Chevrolet or an Italian scientist. Antarctica FTW.
I'm sorry, but I've met my share of wacky fundies in my day, and even the most tweaked Dominionist had to think long and hard before considering shooting an abortion doctor, a person, mind you, that they consider to be a murderer. Even suicide bombers don't make their decision to join up on a dime. What I find most ridiculous is not so much the content of the rationalization at the end (which was ridiculous enough ***SPOLIER ALERT***
.
.
.
...considering it was infanticide on an unimaginable scale, which might or might not lead to human extinction), but rather its speed. He accepted the rationalization far too quickly for it to be believable that a fragile and, dare I say it, slow human mind generated it so soon after that bombshell. Especially since the framework within which he was working (Christianity) would have had to be bent much more severely to accommodate a justification of murdering infant babies, especially since the driving motivation was combating moral decay, which babies of course do not experience (as the Bible itself indicates at several locations).
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Interesting... (FTA; emphasis added)
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways -- in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."
...
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."
and worrisome:
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously. [Jurassic Park]See also: "Murphy's Law"
I, for one, welcome our new ambiguously funny comedy overlords!
Artificial life may be possible within ten years. But then again, it may not. Predictions are usually useless, and predictions based on scientific progress are always useless. No one knows what we will have discovered in three months from now, let alone ten years.
-- Cheers!
"To make an apple pie from scratch, one would first have to invent the universe." Can't remember if that was Sagan, but I think so. It's not as funny, but it's elegant.
Does artificial life mediated by scientists who are themselves 'life' really count for anything? Might count for more if it were not water/carbon based - then at least it would seem original. But the real challenge will be to initiate a higher 'form' of life than our own - extensible self-replicating intelligence, say, in a more pervasive medium than our ecosphere. In fact, that would seem under some assumptions to be Homo Sapiens' long term strategic responsibility.
Al Gore looks artificial enough for me
The only line I remember is "DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!!"
which is totally what she said
How else do you explain George Bush?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is an old one. Well, no it isn't. However, if you attempted to define what life is, it does tend to qualify. It can move, it can 'eat' and 'breathe'. It can die. It can reproduce. You don't need intelligence for life. Life is complicated in a way that flames are not. Our assumptions of life seem to require the propagation of a complicated structure. Crystals can 'grow' but they have a long repitition of a simple structure. Planets can 'grow' or accrete, but there is no structure as such.
What is proposed here is that we can assemble molecules based on what we have learned from natural mechanisms, and these molecules ought to be able to reproduce themselves, given the correct environment. The correct environment, here, is probably sterile to avoid Real Life (tm) from contaminating it or (more probably) eating it. Scientifically, it will be an important demonstration. Maybe, like when urea was first synthesized, it will show clearly to people outside science that the border between life and chemistry is not as sharp and total as some people would have us believe. And, maybe, we can use them to make other complicated chemicals for the pharma industry. It isn't designer babies or giant dinosaurs designed to fight on after a nuclear war, or stuff like that - just a few chemicals doing their thing in a sealed tube.
It is tempting to believe that once we have made soemthing, then breeding and natural selection will cause our new biology to boot itself. I do not really believe this myself. Most self-learning or self-training in computer programming needs careful guidance before it can be useful. Most random changes kill, Nevertheless, such an experiments would set some bounds on how likely spontaneous evolution is. That, in turn, might set bounds on how likely life like ours is on other planets.
Okay, it is not nearly as cool as going to other planets, but it is a lot cheaper.
Does this mean no more robot overlords then? I was looking forward to that.
I haft say, I think life is already "artificial" enough.