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Tabula Rasa Promotion To Send Gamers' DNA to Space
Bridger tips news that NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, created in part by Richard Garriott, is running an unusual promotion right now. Garriott is going to the International Space Station on October 12th, and he'll take with him a digital record of the DNA of various players and celebrities. The basic plot of Tabula Rasa is that Earth was attacked and humans almost completely wiped out. Garriott's promotion is playing on that idea; the hard drive with the DNA data will be left in orbit "just in case" something happens to humanity on Earth. NCSoft has been running a variety of polls and contests to include further data about humans on the hard drive. The deadline for joining the project has recently been extended to September 29th.
That might give you a body, but what you really want is the person: all the memes that s/he has would need to be recorded and suitably grafted in, even then what you get won't be much like the original.
OK: I'll admit that it is a fun idea, but that is about it.
They must be anticipating the demise of the human race really soon. So far I've outlived every hard drive I've ever owned... and all of those weren't exposed to hard radiation.
On a more abstract level, I doubt you'd be able to reconstruct any living creature using its DNA only. From what I understand of biology (which is rather limited), the DNA itself only contains the blueprints for how to create proteins, but the how, when, and how much is controlled by RNA, which previously had been overlooked as "just a carrier molecule". To put it in computer terms, the DNA is the processor, while the RNA is the operating system. You'd have a tough time re-creating Linux/Windows/Mac OS X based solely on the circuit diagram of a processor.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Um, no.
People don't laud Planescape: Torment because it is new or because it has fancy graphics. It isn't new and its graphics are outdated, only less so than Ultima IV. What they laud about Planescape: Torment is the computer role playing experience and the depth of story. Ultima IV can't compete with either of these aspects. The first isn't surprising because making a good RPG experience on a computer was only mastered after the end of the Gold Box games and because the Planescape multiverse is extremely well suited for fun RPG games (in contrast with the one dimensional world of Britannia). The second point is actually surprising and is most of the novelty of the game.
Ultima IV wasn't a deep game. It was a fun game, but the game plot had little more depth than solving your virtue quests to go to the final dungeon crawl so that you can become the Avatar. Planescape, on the other hand, had an extraordinarily deep plot that you had to work to decipher. The virtue quests in Ultima IV never had a tenth the depth of the fundamental question in Planescape: Torment of "what can change the nature of a man?"
No, that's not what I meant --- a lion embryo will develop in a tiger womb, and vice versa. I'm not talking about the ability to cross-breed (although the reason why they're developmentally compatible is because, as you say, they're closely enough related that they can almost cross-breed).
The same applies to donkeys and horses.
isn't there already a problem with too much crap from earlier missions in orbit? do we really need another chunk of metal whizzing around for the next million years?
Tragic PR stunts should stay out of space.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What's more interesting to me is how they are going to obtain the DNA sequence of the gamers, that's a far from straight forward process, even the next-gen sequencers would have a tough time creating a reasonable sequence for $100,000. My guess is they are talking about mapping some common SNPs and that's it. Still I'm tempted to enter just to get a copy of my genome.