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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!
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.
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
"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
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...
So, if I created an artificial woman I'm betting she still wouldn't go out with me.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
46 chromosomes ought to be enough for anybody.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
People said, to the word, the exact same thing about babies born from IVF therapy. Do you think they're soulless automatons too? Should we, perhaps, go kill them all for the greater good of our super-moral "normals"? Don't you see just a bit of irony in your denial to give something a chance at life, partially from revulsion over it being different, in terms of reasoning from your own position of moral superiority?
Everything will be taken away from you.
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturally_significan t_phrases_from_The_Simpsons#Our_new_.E2.80.A6_Over lords
Artificial life impossible for the next 9 years.
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
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.