You're missing the point. Some people want a "solid, sleek, core" desktop. These are still available in the form of Ice, black Box, twm etc. Others want a "feature-rich" desktop. With KDE, that is available now too. Nobody is forcing you to use it. Others, like myself, are glad they have the option.
Why do some people find this so hard to understand?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
After seeing the movie I re-read the book and I found a small reference to the weapons. I've just looked again but I can't remember where it was.
I'm not sure the weapons were emphasized in the movies because someone thought hand-to-hand fighting was unlikely. It could have been because some self-important studio exec demanded more special effects (it being a sci-fi move and all).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Mary Shelley wasn't American, she was English you dumb ass!
Geez, that's so *typical*. Just like Hollywood war movies, where the hero of every battle has to be an American regardless of the historical facts.
I suppose that this Americanocentrism is so pervasive in your media, education establishment etc. that it's virtually inescapable.
I'd like to think that the internet will change this and introduce a more international outlook all round the world. After all, international boundaries don't mean much out here on the net.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Just imagine being one of the guys who announced the 50nm vertical transistor a couple of days ago. They must be feeling pretty sick right now...
Would anybody be willing to fetch the JPEG image of this new device out of their browser cache and stick it up on the web? All the graphics seem to have been removed from the original site (slashdotted I guess;o).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
There are plenty of lightweight X desktops around if that's what you want. But KDE does not pretend to be aimed at that type of user. It is a feature-rich environment which really requires modern machine configurations if it is to run at an acceptable speed.
So, if you have a newish machine then KDE will leverage your hardware better with its rich functionality. But if you have an older machine then you should probably be running Windowmaker or Black Box, or fvwm2 or maybe even twm if you're really squeezed.
Let's not beat up on KDE just because it's too advanced to run on a Sinclair ZX81;o)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you want to have KDE access menus you've created for other window managers you should be running SuSE. It contains a utility (called susewm I think) which automatically duplicates *all* menus into *all* configured windowing environments. So no matter which window manager you fire up, you get access to all the desktop menus on the system.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
If all the self-assembly steps are low-power, I wonder if it will be possible to finally make these logic circuits in a cube form? (Building up the cube layer-by-layer, instead of starting w/raw silicon wafer & eating layers away like we currently do).
It would be very difficult to disperse the heat released during computation if the surface area to volume ratio were that of a cube. The whole thing would need to be permeated with fine capillaries carrying fluid coolant off to a heat exchanger. If miniaturisation is really an issue, I expect it would still be easier to manufacture separate wafers and assemble them around some sort of cooling scaffold.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have heard of this version... Yet all other information I have seen has only indicated the ~2 hour video release, and the three hour television release. Do you have any furthur information on the 27 hour version you mentioned?
He's kidding, you dope. There's no such version.
27 hours, my ass...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
The long version also gave me much more appreciation for Kyle MacLachlan (sp?) in the lead role -- who I thought was a lousy choice at first.
I agree (and still do). MacLachlan was physically too tall and broad for the role. Paul was supposed to be of slight build, somewhat nerdish in appearance by todays standards. This was important in order to emphasize the intensity of the transformations he later underwent in becoming a man, a warrior, and a political leader.
However I've read that MacLachlan was a fairly rabid Dune fan and it was he who convinced Lynch to do the film in the first place. I'd guess he intended to play Paul from the very start.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm not really looking forward to the TV miniseries version for the simple reason that it is bound to look cheap compared to Lynch's faithful adaptation which, let's face it, looked great on screen.
The people who criticised the movie generally weren't those who'd read (and understood) the book. It has to be realised that because of the intospective nature of the story, without a constant stream of voiceover narration the movie would never be able to explain itself. To a large extent the novel was quite self-consciously about what people think but don't say out loud, and parts of it were even more abstract. Consequently any un-narrated movie adaptation had to be less directly representational and rather more interpretational or else it would simply fail to capture any of the flavour of the original. In that sense I feel Lynch certainly succeeded. The movie is clearly the child of the book in a way that most screenplays fail to be.
For those who would maintain that this "art-house" style of production is pretentious or irrelevant, I'd like to remind them of Kubrick's wonderful 2001: A Space Odyssey whch also employed imagery rather than dialogue to build atmosphere and convey abstract ideas. Lynch is hardly less skilled than Kubrick in the use of imagery.
Finally: You mentioned the weirding modules...actually the weirding modules were present in the original novel but occupied such a small amount of the text that they are easy to forget. Since most of the text was lost in transposing to the screen, the few bits of technology that appear tend to stand out in the film.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
The system where the user is harnessed up to stand on a platform consisting of a number of freely-rotating trackballs: this was demonstrated in the 1994 movie "Disclosure" starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
KDE 1.x on top of X does seem to want a lot of memory though it isn't so bad if you can avoid using Netscape.
Since they rewrote it and dropped CORBA, KDE 2.0 is supposed to be faster and less bloated. Besides, the spec of an entry level PC these days is double what it was a year ago (and we all knew that's how it goes, year on year so there's no point bitching about it).
With regard to the Win95-esque features: that's what people want, by and large, so it's appropriate to support them. For myself, I detest Windows, but only largely because of the bugs and instability. If it worked as it was supposed to it would be a reasonably good desktop platform. I do quite like the right-click context menu particularly, it saves a lot of unnecessary mouse movement and IMO should be used even more extensively that it is now.
Anyway, what's the alternative? Has anyone yet come up with a GUI paradigm that isn't solidly based on Xerox Parc WIMPS idea? I haven't seen one.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
DNA can actually be a nasty poison since it easily becomes airborne, and can be taken up by your human cells in vitro. Presumably it could also be taken up by a living body through mucous membranes for example if inhaled.
If there was enough DNA floating around in the environment, who knows how much of it might end up integrated randomly into your own DNA. Since it'd be "junk" DNA designed for structural rather than genetic properties it wouldn't code for anything specific, but random insertion of arbitrary DNA strings into your genome is genetic damage pure and simple.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've never been one to criticize Red Hat for their corporate aspirations, but I have to say I'm not too happy about the likely outcomes from this new arrangement.
In the first place, Szulik said in March that he wouldn't want to see the LSB being used by other Linux vendors with less market share to catch up with Red Hat. With him now firmly installed in the driver's seat, it now seems unlikely that Red Hat will be making any concessions towards compatibility standards for Linux, and as an inevitable consequence there will be no change in the trend towards distribution-specific software releases. That's fine if you're a Red Hat user, of course.
In the second place everybody knows that these days corporate control rests with the CEO; the position of chairman is often little more than a sinecure. Moving Young (and his Open-Source outlook along with him) into this figurehead position necessarily makes him rather peripheral to the daily decision-making process.
However before he departs for his higher plane of existence as chairman, he leaves us with a warning, referring to their current policy of acquisition: "We intend to scale this business as quickly as we can to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us".
First comes gcc maintainers Cygnus - a done deal by all accounts - and next, perhaps, Linuxcare - their primary competitor in the support market. And plenty of money available thereafter, no doubt, for further shopping sprees.
Marvellous. Now Red Hat is swallowing up all who come before them. Hmmm...now where have we seen this strategy employed before?
I remember seeing a little while ago a piece of satire predicting that a couple of decades into the new millennium, Red Hat are the subject of an Anti-Trust investigation, with a much-reduced Microsoft among the plaintiffs. It was just internet humour and it did seem funny at the time. But it's beginning to look like prophecy now. Are we about to replace one tyrant with another?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
An alien-human hybrid is certainly unlikely but not because of the reason you've given.
The "primordial soup" experiments proposed independently by Oparin and Haldane 70 years ago and conducted over the last 50 years by Miller, Ponnamperuma and many others did prove one thing. Just about any aqueous mixture of dissolved gases including Carbon and Nitrogen, energized by just about any energy source including heat, UV light or electrical discharge, will result in the chemicals that are employed as the building blocks of biochemistry on this planet.
Amino acids, sugars, lipids, purines and pyrimidines have all been synthesized under a wide range of conditions including those currently thought to have prevailed on this planet around the time the first life forms appeared.
When such a mixture is allowed to react for a longer period of time, peptides, polysaccharides, phospholipids, nucleotides and even nucleosides are formed. Under hospitable conditions which allow the concentration of the reactants, such as in the presence of the correct catalysts (quite prosaic substances such as clay will do) these have been encouraged in the lab to form short proteins, complex sugars, and even short ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acid chains.
It's quite possible that other simple organic molecules could be used to build persistent metabolising structures - and implement a genetic code thus enabling reproduction - but don't forget it took a very long time for the first lief to evolve. There would have been ample opportunity for other chemical systems to establish themselves. The fact that RNA and DNA alone have inherited the Earth with no known exceptions tends to suggest that it is by far the most efficient method. If there were any organisms based on another system they have perished without leaving any descendants. Presumably they were eaten by, or out-reproduced by, their nucleic acid counterparts.
Of course it's possible that on other planets the general nucleic acid structure may be the same but that different bases may be employed. However the same argument applies. What was to stop these alternative genetic alphabets appearing here? They probably did appear alongside the familiar one, but couldn't compete.
In any case the genetic alphabet on Earth is bigger than most people realise. Most high-school students know that the DNA code is written with the bases Guanine, Adenine, cytosine and Thymine, and RNA is written in the same code except that Thymine is replaced by Uracil (the other difference is that in DNA each moeity of the sugar phosphate backbone is missing an oxygen atom). This is, however, an oversimplification. There are other purines and pyrimidines present in the RNA and DNA found in living terrestrial organisms. Mostly these are formed by the addition of some small radical (eg by methylation). Any variations must be quite small because nucleic acid's stability is due entirely to the geometry of the molecule. If one of these bases is replaced by something else too different even in one small spot then the two strands of the helix will unravel spontaneously. It's been proposed that the variations that do exist are precisely for this purpose, eg. methylating a specific base in order to unwind the helix at that location, thus exposing a particular gene to polymerase and thereby "switching on" that gene.
To sum up: given that these chemicals are spontaneously produced under a wide range of simple conditions, even on laboratory timescales, and that no other analogous systems have survived on Earth over geological timescales, it's a good bet that if life evolves on other planets with a chemistry anywhere near similar to Earth's, it will employ RNA or DNA or something almost identical.
Of course, there's a world of difference even between a squid and a whale from the same planet. And eukaryotic chromosomes contain more than just DNA; the familiar blobby "X" shapes you see on photomicrographs are formed as the DNA helix winds in a very complex way around scaffold proteins called histones, and although DNA polymerases from any source ought to work, the enzymes and cell structures supporting mitotic and meiotic division are particular to the chromosomal structure itself.
Thus, on a chromosomal level, cellular reproductive machinery has a much larger number of elements than the genetic code, and a much less regular structure. Earth eukaryotes are far far less likely to be similar to their extraterrestrial analogues on this level. Certainly any differences would make even a single hybrid cell unviable (it wouldn't be able to undergo division).
Even if this weren't so, and an alien species had evolved a perfectly human-compatible chromosome structure, there is the matter of the precise number and size of the chromosomes. If they didn't match up exactly a hybrid might still be created artificially. But even then, the resulting organism would have two completely independent sets of metabolic pathways present. The opportunities for these complex biochemical systems to interfere with each other would be numerous to say the least. It's highly likely that a significant proportion of these interactions would be deleterious.
So, even though aliens are likely to have DNA, there will be no alien-terrestrial hybrids. Sorry Mr Spock (and Mr Worf), but you can't exist.
PS. I apologise for the length of this posting but there's been a lot of groundless speculation and it seemed a good idea to inject some relevant information into the debate. Congratulations to the few who had the patience to read this far. I bet those of you who did are all biochem geeks anyway;o)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Q11 was a semi-philosophical question, a bit like the one John McCarthy set his students: how does the man who can heal anything with just one touch dispose himself so that the maximum utility is achieved?
In this type of question, certain common-sense practical considerations are left out of the picture in order to reduce the problem to its essentials and get straight to the heart of the matter.
IMHO Q11 should be interpreted as a sort of simplified metaphor. He's really asking how this kind of technology, in its most ideal state, could be used to benefit people who are barely hanging onto the very bottom rung of existence.
Given that we've barely begun to explore the real possibilities offered by the internet, and that a meaningful answer to the question may well be possible, it's one of the most important questions that has ever been asked.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Even love and family relationships may change, for a mother that is 200 would proably look about 25 and seem to be by appearance a peer not only to her daughter but to her grandaughter as well.
But why? Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter? Some age will be the easiest to prolong...but don't count on it being the age that you would most wish to prolong. Going back to our friendly quadruple-lifespan roundworms, they tend to look Quite Old for a very long time. (A very long time for worms. Their lifespan is normally about two weeks, so two months is quite an accomplishment.)
You're assuming that death is postponed but that ageing would continue at the normal rate.
Telomeric renewal is supposed to defeat the Hayflick limit which causes cell lines to die out after about twenty generations. This would prolong the capacity for tissues to renew themselves. In theory, the whole ageing process is slowed. Tissues like skin, cartilage and bone would not deteriorate until much later and a youthful state (both inside and out) would be preserved.
It's likely though that some ageing processes not directly associated with senescence would need separate adjustment. For example puberty may still occur at age 11-14; menopause may still afflict women in their forties; male pattern baldness may still begin in men as young as twenty.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Even love and family relationships may change, for a mother that is 200 would proably look about 25 and seem to be by appearance a peer not only to her daughter but to her grandaughter as well.
But why? Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter? Some age will be the easiest to prolong...but don't count on it being the age that you would most wish to prolong. Going back to our friendly quadruple-lifespan roundworms, they tend to look Quite Old for a very long time. (A very long time for worms. Their lifespan is normally about two weeks, so two months is quite an accomplishment.)
You're assuming that death is postponed but that ageing would continue at the normal rate.
Telomeric renewal is supposed to defeat the Hayflick limit which causes cell lines to die out after about twenty generations. This would prolong the capacity for tissues to renew themselves. In theory, the whole ageing process is slowed. Tissues like skin, cartilage and bone would not deteriorate until much later and a youthful state (both inside and out) would be preserved.
It's likely though that some ageing processes not directly associated with senescence would need separate adjustment. For example puberty may still occur at age 11-14; menopause may still afflict women in their forties; male pattern baldness may still begin in men as young as twenty.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. Some people want a "solid, sleek, core" desktop. These are still available in the form of Ice, black Box, twm etc. Others want a "feature-rich" desktop. With KDE, that is available now too. Nobody is forcing you to use it. Others, like myself, are glad they have the option.
Why do some people find this so hard to understand?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
After seeing the movie I re-read the book and I found a small reference to the weapons. I've just looked again but I can't remember where it was.
I'm not sure the weapons were emphasized in the movies because someone thought hand-to-hand fighting was unlikely. It could have been because some self-important studio exec demanded more special effects (it being a sci-fi move and all).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I do think the spoken word accounts for more than 20-30% of face-to-face communication in most cases; more like 80-90%.
The way the words are spoken can only account for one or two data representing the way the speaker feels about the subject, maybe about 10% in total.
So what are you using for the rest of the 70% non-verbal component you claim? Tuned farting? Hula dancing? Armpit squeaks? Or a combination of these?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Mary Shelley wasn't American, she was English you dumb ass!
Geez, that's so *typical*. Just like Hollywood war movies, where the hero of every battle has to be an American regardless of the historical facts.
I suppose that this Americanocentrism is so pervasive in your media, education establishment etc. that it's virtually inescapable.
I'd like to think that the internet will change this and introduce a more international outlook all round the world. After all, international boundaries don't mean much out here on the net.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Just imagine being one of the guys who announced the 50nm vertical transistor a couple of days ago. They must be feeling pretty sick right now...
;o).
Would anybody be willing to fetch the JPEG image of this new device out of their browser cache and stick it up on the web? All the graphics seem to have been removed from the original site (slashdotted I guess
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
There are plenty of lightweight X desktops around if that's what you want. But KDE does not pretend to be aimed at that type of user. It is a feature-rich environment which really requires modern machine configurations if it is to run at an acceptable speed.
;o)
So, if you have a newish machine then KDE will leverage your hardware better with its rich functionality. But if you have an older machine then you should probably be running Windowmaker or Black Box, or fvwm2 or maybe even twm if you're really squeezed.
Let's not beat up on KDE just because it's too advanced to run on a Sinclair ZX81
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If you want to have KDE access menus you've created for other window managers you should be running SuSE. It contains a utility (called susewm I think) which automatically duplicates *all* menus into *all* configured windowing environments. So no matter which window manager you fire up, you get access to all the desktop menus on the system.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think FUD will eventually just become CCA
How exactly do you pronounce that? Ca-ca?
Er, maybe that's not such a good idea...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If all the self-assembly steps are low-power, I wonder if it will be possible to finally make these logic circuits in a cube form? (Building up the cube layer-by-layer, instead of starting w/raw silicon wafer & eating layers away like we currently do).
It would be very difficult to disperse the heat released during computation if the surface area to volume ratio were that of a cube. The whole thing would need to be permeated with fine capillaries carrying fluid coolant off to a heat exchanger. If miniaturisation is really an issue, I expect it would still be easier to manufacture separate wafers and assemble them around some sort of cooling scaffold.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have heard of this version... Yet all other information I have seen has only indicated the ~2 hour video release, and the three hour television release. Do you have any furthur information on the 27 hour version you mentioned?
He's kidding, you dope. There's no such version.
27 hours, my ass...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The long version also gave me much more appreciation for Kyle MacLachlan (sp?) in the lead role -- who I thought was a lousy choice at first.
I agree (and still do). MacLachlan was physically too tall and broad for the role. Paul was supposed to be of slight build, somewhat nerdish in appearance by todays standards. This was important in order to emphasize the intensity of the transformations he later underwent in becoming a man, a warrior, and a political leader.
However I've read that MacLachlan was a fairly rabid Dune fan and it was he who convinced Lynch to do the film in the first place. I'd guess he intended to play Paul from the very start.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm not really looking forward to the TV miniseries version for the simple reason that it is bound to look cheap compared to Lynch's faithful adaptation which, let's face it, looked great on screen.
The people who criticised the movie generally weren't those who'd read (and understood) the book. It has to be realised that because of the intospective nature of the story, without a constant stream of voiceover narration the movie would never be able to explain itself. To a large extent the novel was quite self-consciously about what people think but don't say out loud, and parts of it were even more abstract. Consequently any un-narrated movie adaptation had to be less directly representational and rather more interpretational or else it would simply fail to capture any of the flavour of the original. In that sense I feel Lynch certainly succeeded. The movie is clearly the child of the book in a way that most screenplays fail to be.
For those who would maintain that this "art-house" style of production is pretentious or irrelevant, I'd like to remind them of Kubrick's wonderful 2001: A Space Odyssey whch also employed imagery rather than dialogue to build atmosphere and convey abstract ideas. Lynch is hardly less skilled than Kubrick in the use of imagery.
Finally: You mentioned the weirding modules...actually the weirding modules were present in the original novel but occupied such a small amount of the text that they are easy to forget. Since most of the text was lost in transposing to the screen, the few bits of technology that appear tend to stand out in the film.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The German company SAP have already announced a Linux port of their R/3 ERP system. SAP's products are widely used in the US and here in Europe.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The system where the user is harnessed up to stand on a platform consisting of a number of freely-rotating trackballs: this was demonstrated in the 1994 movie "Disclosure" starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
KDE 1.x on top of X does seem to want a lot of memory though it isn't so bad if you can avoid using Netscape.
Since they rewrote it and dropped CORBA, KDE 2.0 is supposed to be faster and less bloated. Besides, the spec of an entry level PC these days is double what it was a year ago (and we all knew that's how it goes, year on year so there's no point bitching about it).
With regard to the Win95-esque features: that's what people want, by and large, so it's appropriate to support them. For myself, I detest Windows, but only largely because of the bugs and instability. If it worked as it was supposed to it would be a reasonably good desktop platform. I do quite like the right-click context menu particularly, it saves a lot of unnecessary mouse movement and IMO should be used even more extensively that it is now.
Anyway, what's the alternative? Has anyone yet come up with a GUI paradigm that isn't solidly based on Xerox Parc WIMPS idea? I haven't seen one.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If they get it doing CSS and HTML4 properly then they'll be my friend for life :)
Isn't that a QT issue rather than a KDE issue? I got the idea that the HTML rendering was done within a QT component (but what do *I* know).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
DNA can actually be a nasty poison since it easily becomes airborne, and can be taken up by your human cells in vitro. Presumably it could also be taken up by a living body through mucous membranes for example if inhaled.
If there was enough DNA floating around in the environment, who knows how much of it might end up integrated randomly into your own DNA. Since it'd be "junk" DNA designed for structural rather than genetic properties it wouldn't code for anything specific, but random insertion of arbitrary DNA strings into your genome is genetic damage pure and simple.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I've never been one to criticize Red Hat for their corporate aspirations, but I have to say I'm not too happy about the likely outcomes from this new arrangement.
In the first place, Szulik said in March that he wouldn't want to see the LSB being used by other Linux vendors with less market share to catch up with Red Hat. With him now firmly installed in the driver's seat, it now seems unlikely that Red Hat will be making any concessions towards compatibility standards for Linux, and as an inevitable consequence there will be no change in the trend towards distribution-specific software releases. That's fine if you're a Red Hat user, of course.
In the second place everybody knows that these days corporate control rests with the CEO; the position of chairman is often little more than a sinecure. Moving Young (and his Open-Source outlook along with him) into this figurehead position necessarily makes him rather peripheral to the daily decision-making process.
However before he departs for his higher plane of existence as chairman, he leaves us with a warning, referring to their current policy of acquisition: "We intend to scale this business as quickly as we can to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us".
First comes gcc maintainers Cygnus - a done deal by all accounts - and next, perhaps, Linuxcare - their primary competitor in the support market. And plenty of money available thereafter, no doubt, for further shopping sprees.
Marvellous. Now Red Hat is swallowing up all who come before them. Hmmm...now where have we seen this strategy employed before?
I remember seeing a little while ago a piece of satire predicting that a couple of decades into the new millennium, Red Hat are the subject of an Anti-Trust investigation, with a much-reduced Microsoft among the plaintiffs. It was just internet humour and it did seem funny at the time. But it's beginning to look like prophecy now. Are we about to replace one tyrant with another?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
An alien-human hybrid is certainly unlikely but not because of the reason you've given.
;o)
The "primordial soup" experiments proposed independently by Oparin and Haldane 70 years ago and conducted over the last 50 years by Miller, Ponnamperuma and many others did prove one thing. Just about any aqueous mixture of dissolved gases including Carbon and Nitrogen, energized by just about any energy source including heat, UV light or electrical discharge, will result in the chemicals that are employed as the building blocks of biochemistry on this planet.
Amino acids, sugars, lipids, purines and pyrimidines have all been synthesized under a wide range of conditions including those currently thought to have prevailed on this planet around the time the first life forms appeared.
When such a mixture is allowed to react for a longer period of time, peptides, polysaccharides, phospholipids, nucleotides and even nucleosides are formed. Under hospitable conditions which allow the concentration of the reactants, such as in the presence of the correct catalysts (quite prosaic substances such as clay will do) these have been encouraged in the lab to form short proteins, complex sugars, and even short ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acid chains.
It's quite possible that other simple organic molecules could be used to build persistent metabolising structures - and implement a genetic code thus enabling reproduction - but don't forget it took a very long time for the first lief to evolve. There would have been ample opportunity for other chemical systems to establish themselves. The fact that RNA and DNA alone have inherited the Earth with no known exceptions tends to suggest that it is by far the most efficient method. If there were any organisms based on another system they have perished without leaving any descendants. Presumably they were eaten by, or out-reproduced by, their nucleic acid counterparts.
Of course it's possible that on other planets the general nucleic acid structure may be the same but that different bases may be employed. However the same argument applies. What was to stop these alternative genetic alphabets appearing here? They probably did appear alongside the familiar one, but couldn't compete.
In any case the genetic alphabet on Earth is bigger than most people realise. Most high-school students know that the DNA code is written with the bases Guanine, Adenine, cytosine and Thymine, and RNA is written in the same code except that Thymine is replaced by Uracil (the other difference is that in DNA each moeity of the sugar phosphate backbone is missing an oxygen atom). This is, however, an oversimplification. There are other purines and pyrimidines present in the RNA and DNA found in living terrestrial organisms. Mostly these are formed by the addition of some small radical (eg by methylation). Any variations must be quite small because nucleic acid's stability is due entirely to the geometry of the molecule. If one of these bases is replaced by something else too different even in one small spot then the two strands of the helix will unravel spontaneously. It's been proposed that the variations that do exist are precisely for this purpose, eg. methylating a specific base in order to unwind the helix at that location, thus exposing a particular gene to polymerase and thereby "switching on" that gene.
To sum up: given that these chemicals are spontaneously produced under a wide range of simple conditions, even on laboratory timescales, and that no other analogous systems have survived on Earth over geological timescales, it's a good bet that if life evolves on other planets with a chemistry anywhere near similar to Earth's, it will employ RNA or DNA or something almost identical.
Of course, there's a world of difference even between a squid and a whale from the same planet. And eukaryotic chromosomes contain more than just DNA; the familiar blobby "X" shapes you see on photomicrographs are formed as the DNA helix winds in a very complex way around scaffold proteins called histones, and although DNA polymerases from any source ought to work, the enzymes and cell structures supporting mitotic and meiotic division are particular to the chromosomal structure itself.
Thus, on a chromosomal level, cellular reproductive machinery has a much larger number of elements than the genetic code, and a much less regular structure. Earth eukaryotes are far far less likely to be similar to their extraterrestrial analogues on this level. Certainly any differences would make even a single hybrid cell unviable (it wouldn't be able to undergo division).
Even if this weren't so, and an alien species had evolved a perfectly human-compatible chromosome structure, there is the matter of the precise number and size of the chromosomes. If they didn't match up exactly a hybrid might still be created artificially. But even then, the resulting organism would have two completely independent sets of metabolic pathways present. The opportunities for these complex biochemical systems to interfere with each other would be numerous to say the least. It's highly likely that a significant proportion of these interactions would be deleterious.
So, even though aliens are likely to have DNA, there will be no alien-terrestrial hybrids. Sorry Mr Spock (and Mr Worf), but you can't exist.
PS. I apologise for the length of this posting but there's been a lot of groundless speculation and it seemed a good idea to inject some relevant information into the debate. Congratulations to the few who had the patience to read this far. I bet those of you who did are all biochem geeks anyway
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hah! Tell me about it...I used to weigh 140lbs, now at 36 I weigh 182lbs. It's not muscle, either :o(
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
you mean "sh*t flies downhill"
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Q11 was a semi-philosophical question, a bit like the one John McCarthy set his students: how does the man who can heal anything with just one touch dispose himself so that the maximum utility is achieved?
In this type of question, certain common-sense practical considerations are left out of the picture in order to reduce the problem to its essentials and get straight to the heart of the matter.
IMHO Q11 should be interpreted as a sort of simplified metaphor. He's really asking how this kind of technology, in its most ideal state, could be used to benefit people who are barely hanging onto the very bottom rung of existence.
Given that we've barely begun to explore the real possibilities offered by the internet, and that a meaningful answer to the question may well be possible, it's one of the most important questions that has ever been asked.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I kinda like it. I might even get some clothes in this colour.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
But why? Why wouldn't she look 75? Along with her daughter and grand-daughter? Some age will be the easiest to prolong...but don't count on it being the age that you would most wish to prolong. Going back to our friendly quadruple-lifespan roundworms, they tend to look Quite Old for a very long time. (A very long time for worms. Their lifespan is normally about two weeks, so two months is quite an accomplishment.)
You're assuming that death is postponed but that ageing would continue at the normal rate.
Telomeric renewal is supposed to defeat the Hayflick limit which causes cell lines to die out after about twenty generations. This would prolong the capacity for tissues to renew themselves. In theory, the whole ageing process is slowed. Tissues like skin, cartilage and bone would not deteriorate until much later and a youthful state (both inside and out) would be preserved.
It's likely though that some ageing processes not directly associated with senescence would need separate adjustment. For example puberty may still occur at age 11-14; menopause may still afflict women in their forties; male pattern baldness may still begin in men as young as twenty.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction