I was looking at the comments at CNN, and the best comment I saw was: "How dare those scientists spend $8 billion on this project, just to prove that God doesn't exist!"
...
If there were an experiment that could prove the existence or nonexistence of god, it'd be worth $8 TRILLION! Just think:
a) How much money is spent on religon or science every year?
b) How much revenue is lost by people sitting in church/laboratories every day?
c) How much money could be made by turning the Vatican/CERN into an amusement park/MegaChurch?
We need to figure out this experiment. I think it involves firing angels at the head of a pin at a large percentage of the speed of light. I'm not sure how you collimate faith, but if we can solve that problem, we can do this!
Finally this puts forward my hypothesis that life may only require liquids to form (i.e. perhaps it's not necessary to have liquid _water_, but just liquid something).
Diffusion in solids is prohibitively slow. The common molecules that could form information-storing polymers are very, very insoluble in gases. That pretty much leaves liquids. I wouldn't say that life could never evolve without the benefit of liquids, but it could require timescales far longer than the current age of the universe.
I highly recommend the book, "Life Beyond Earth" (the 1980 Gerald Feinberg version!) which discusses some exotic, but maybe not impossible ways that life could evolve (life in liquid hydrogen?)
I myself make no predictions about life in plasmas, Einstein-Bose condensates, non-baryonic matter and so on, since my mother never let me play with them when I was a boy.
Saskatchewan is one of those places where you can watch your dog run away for a couple of weeks.
I've heard every joke, I've heard every word you said. You think there's not a lot going on...but look closer, baby, you're so wrong. And that's why you can stay so long...where there's not a lot going on.
I was working at a small biochemical reagents company about 10 years ago, doing R&D type stuff. As part of the job, each employee had to man the technical support lines for a few hours each week. One of our products was DNA purified from herring sperm, for use in nucleic acid assays. The call went something like:
Caller: Hello, I'm So-and-so from the University of Someplace. I have a question about your product number [some integer], the Herring Sperm DNA.
Me: What would you like to know?
Caller: Well, we want to use it as a blocking agent for a membrane-bound sex typing assay, and we need to know the sex of the fish that it came from.
Me: [long pause]...uh, that would be a male fish. The herring sperm DNA comes from the male fish.
Caller: Okay! Thank you very much.
The other one I recall was somebody asking about the company's purified Streptavidin:
Caller: What's the molecular weight of your Streptavidin in the 10 milligram package?
Me: About 55,000 daltons.
Caller:...great. And what's the molecular weight of your Streptavidin in the 20 milligram package?
Me: [sigh.]
I don't know if one or both of these were pranks, but if not...(shudder)
Even a drug with a simple-looking molecular structure, like aspirin, is the product of dozens of genes, each of which produces an enzyme with a specific catalytic activity. To enzymatically synthesize a drug in your basement, you'd have to 1) figure out the chemical steps needed to synthesize the drug, then 2) calculate the exact 3-dimensional protein structure needed to align the precursor molecules in the right way to catalyze each of those reactions, then 3) synthesize the DNA to make that protein, and then 4) produce that protein in a recombinant organism, and then 5) combine the raw material and all the enzymes in an environment where they would produce the drug. And THEN 6) purify the drug away from all the raw materials, many of which might be toxic.
With the structure of the drug in hand, A smart chemist could design a likely solution to step 1) on paper in an afternoon. But hundreds of the smartest molecular biochemists in the world haven't solved step 2) for all but a tiny subset of possible chemical reactions, even after decades of work. Synthesizing a gene to make a amino acid sequence is second year undergraduate work; figuring out exactly which particular amino acid sequence to make is the real rocket science.
You would be better off trying to synthesize the drug chemically, but without a PhD in chemistry, a well-trained staff and an expensive laboratory behind you, it might take you decades to figure out how. So I can safely say nobody is going to sue you for making an Avastin knock-off at home.
Where have you gone, K. Eric Drexler? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo
If conservation only applies on to the multiverse as a whole,
Which is how I think it would work; I've never been big on beancounter gods who keep track of every bit of mass in the Universe.
things become even trickier. What keeps us from importing all of the infinite Martys to our own universe, or for that matter all of the matter/energy period, until those universes are empty, and ours has infinite mass?
Presumably nothing, in the same way that we could pile up all the mass in our universe into a galaxy-sized black hole if we were willing to spend the enormous amount of energy needed to do so. Except if you put enough mass in your observable universe, it would Big Crunch you to death. Would the conservation of mass still apply? Would your Deloreans still run?
My guess is that if time travel were possible, it would have to be of the "many worlds" variety, where you don't actually travel to a different time in the same physical universe, but to an alternate universe where the year happens to be 1985, or 2015, or whenever. This way, you can shuffle as many Deloreans across as many timelines as you want, as long as the mass/energy of ALL the universes combined remains the same. Sort of a conservation law that works across the entire multiverse, in other words.
Massive droughts happen; fertilizer and pesticide costs will greatly increase as oil prices increase; the profit margins for growing plants for ethanol may be fairly small; farmers will be under even stronger economic pressure than today to maximize output; modern farming techniques are highly energy intensive; expecting farmers to extract more energy from more land with less inputs, and not recognizing the possibility of large-scale erosion, particularly as average temperatures rise and rain patterns grow more sporadic, seems short-sighted. Or hadn't you realized this?
Slashdot Mirror
I was looking at the comments at CNN, and the best comment I saw was: "How dare those scientists spend $8 billion on this project, just to prove that God doesn't exist!"
...
If there were an experiment that could prove the existence or nonexistence of god, it'd be worth $8 TRILLION! Just think:
a) How much money is spent on religon or science every year?
b) How much revenue is lost by people sitting in church/laboratories every day?
c) How much money could be made by turning the Vatican/CERN into an amusement park/MegaChurch?
We need to figure out this experiment. I think it involves firing angels at the head of a pin at a large percentage of the speed of light.
I'm not sure how you collimate faith, but if we can solve that problem, we can do this!
America a long time ago gave up of the "land of free and home of brave" motto
Remember, the last line of the national anthem isn't a motto, it's a question:
"O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?"
Every generation has to ask themselves the question; every generation has to work to make the answer "yes".
My old Geo Metro had three crumple zones! Between the front and rear bumpers, between the left and right doors, and between the roof and tires.
Viruses. The plural of virus is viruses.
I think Captain Kirk blew up an android by asking it this question once. I'd hate to see the same thing happen to our internets.
I'm saaaad...that I'm drowning.
Franklin did critical X-ray crystallography of DNA; she neither discovered deoxyribonucleic acid, nor showed that it was the genetic material.
If they kill 100 or 1,000 our innocent civilians, you think we should respond by killing thousands or tens of thousands of innocent their civilians?
A google search for "civilian casualties iraq" suggests that the United States already has.
I would mod you up, but my points were all eaten by a hungry shark.
That is correct. Sometimes the problem is a skull.
Finally this puts forward my hypothesis that life may only require liquids to form (i.e. perhaps it's not necessary to have liquid _water_, but just liquid something).
Diffusion in solids is prohibitively slow. The common molecules that could form information-storing polymers are very, very insoluble in gases. That pretty much leaves liquids. I wouldn't say that life could never evolve without the benefit of liquids, but it could require timescales far longer than the current age of the universe.
I highly recommend the book, "Life Beyond Earth" (the 1980 Gerald Feinberg version!) which discusses some exotic, but maybe not impossible ways that life could evolve (life in liquid hydrogen?)
I myself make no predictions about life in plasmas, Einstein-Bose condensates, non-baryonic matter and so on, since my mother never let me play with them when I was a boy.
"Hey, don't look at me! I brought the regular matter."
"Gentlemen, we will harness the power...of antimatter!!!"
...
"I said, we will harness...the power...of ANTIMATTER!"
...
"Okay, whose job was it to bring the #$*@ antimatter???"
Saskatchewan is one of those places where you can watch your dog run away for a couple of weeks.
I've heard every joke, I've heard every word you said.
You think there's not a lot going on...but look closer, baby, you're so wrong.
And that's why you can stay so long...where there's not a lot going on.
And knowing's half the battle.
I was working at a small biochemical reagents company about 10 years ago, doing R&D type stuff. As part of the job, each employee had to man the technical support lines for a few hours each week. One of our products was DNA purified from herring sperm, for use in nucleic acid assays. The call went something like:
...uh, that would be a male fish. The herring sperm DNA comes from the male fish.
...great. And what's the molecular weight of your Streptavidin in the 20 milligram package?
Caller: Hello, I'm So-and-so from the University of Someplace. I have a question about your product number [some integer], the Herring Sperm DNA.
Me: What would you like to know?
Caller: Well, we want to use it as a blocking agent for a membrane-bound sex typing assay, and we need to know the sex of the fish that it came from.
Me: [long pause]
Caller: Okay! Thank you very much.
The other one I recall was somebody asking about the company's purified Streptavidin:
Caller: What's the molecular weight of your Streptavidin in the 10 milligram package?
Me: About 55,000 daltons.
Caller:
Me: [sigh.]
I don't know if one or both of these were pranks, but if not...(shudder)
Bah! I'm a scientist, and it just so happens I have mail-order degrees in both Scientology AND Scientonomy!
Oops, my bad. You're right, they would be easier to make through molecular biology.
Even a drug with a simple-looking molecular structure, like aspirin, is the product of dozens of genes, each of which produces an enzyme with a specific catalytic activity. To enzymatically synthesize a drug in your basement, you'd have to 1) figure out the chemical steps needed to synthesize the drug, then 2) calculate the exact 3-dimensional protein structure needed to align the precursor molecules in the right way to catalyze each of those reactions, then 3) synthesize the DNA to make that protein, and then 4) produce that protein in a recombinant organism, and then 5) combine the raw material and all the enzymes in an environment where they would produce the drug. And THEN 6) purify the drug away from all the raw materials, many of which might be toxic.
With the structure of the drug in hand, A smart chemist could design a likely solution to step 1) on paper in an afternoon. But hundreds of the smartest molecular biochemists in the world haven't solved step 2) for all but a tiny subset of possible chemical reactions, even after decades of work. Synthesizing a gene to make a amino acid sequence is second year undergraduate work; figuring out exactly which particular amino acid sequence to make is the real rocket science.
You would be better off trying to synthesize the drug chemically, but without a PhD in chemistry, a well-trained staff and an expensive laboratory behind you, it might take you decades to figure out how. So I can safely say nobody is going to sue you for making an Avastin knock-off at home.
Where have you gone, K. Eric Drexler? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo
If conservation only applies on to the multiverse as a whole,
Which is how I think it would work; I've never been big on beancounter gods who keep track of every bit of mass in the Universe.
things become even trickier. What keeps us from importing all of the infinite Martys to our own universe, or for that matter all of the matter/energy period, until those universes are empty, and ours has infinite mass?
Presumably nothing, in the same way that we could pile up all the mass in our universe into a galaxy-sized black hole if we were willing to spend the enormous amount of energy needed to do so. Except if you put enough mass in your observable universe, it would Big Crunch you to death. Would the conservation of mass still apply? Would your Deloreans still run?
My guess is that if time travel were possible, it would have to be of the "many worlds" variety, where you don't actually travel to a different time in the same physical universe, but to an alternate universe where the year happens to be 1985, or 2015, or whenever. This way, you can shuffle as many Deloreans across as many timelines as you want, as long as the mass/energy of ALL the universes combined remains the same. Sort of a conservation law that works across the entire multiverse, in other words.
You misspelled 'Roto Rootizzle'.
Massive droughts happen; fertilizer and pesticide costs will greatly increase as oil prices increase; the profit margins for growing plants for ethanol may be fairly small; farmers will be under even stronger economic pressure than today to maximize output; modern farming techniques are highly energy intensive; expecting farmers to extract more energy from more land with less inputs, and not recognizing the possibility of large-scale erosion, particularly as average temperatures rise and rain patterns grow more sporadic, seems short-sighted. Or hadn't you realized this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_bowl
...how do you say "still twenty years from now" in Chinese?