The aliens that seeded life on Earth are seeing us making baby steps. Expect a visit soon!
I never thought of it this way... who knows, could be a possibility! Oh, this is creepy...
For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
51–60 of 323 posts
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#52> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…
> That is the holy grail? At one end we're creating artificial life , the other we are creating artificial intelligence . We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch. That is absolutely fucking wild. Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as…
Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”
You can’t win
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#53> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…
> That is the holy grail? At one end we're creating artificial life , the other we are creating artificial intelligence . We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch. That is absolutely fucking wild. Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as…
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#54Science News has a more balanced take, with additional quotes from peers.
> Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology. She then sent the 190-page manuscript to journalists, under embargo, even before she had uploaded it to the preprint server bioRxiv, where her colleagues could read and assess it. She says her group will submit it to a new journal soon. “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.
https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-created-spudcell...
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#55> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#56Waiting for lab-grown meat. Hope it comes closer to fruition before my kidneys give out.
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#57“This was where the field had been stuck for some time. Researchers before Adamala had figured out different ways to feed and grow synthetic cells and to replicate their DNA. But cell division is a different beast. A typical cell reorganizes its cytoskeleton — a network of protein fibers that provide structural support — to halve its DNA and split. Synthetic biologists could not figure out how to get their cells to u…
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Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#58Going by people’s reactions to AI, what will our reactions be to artificial humans generated from these methods? Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step.
Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
#59Going by people’s reactions to AI, what will our reactions be to artificial humans generated from these methods? Will they be hated? Killed off? Will they ever be see as legitimate, or just soulless beings, p-zombies.
From cells dividing to human generation there is a single step. Similarly a program that runs on a computer, where its only interactions are strings of numbers is the same as an entity having to interact with the world.
Interesting, we should be able to have LLMs generate full genetic code or Inpaint into existing code that can be installed into a cell as DNA and have it divide out into any custom creature.
We could launch these custom bacteria in stasis to planets around the galaxy and seed life everywhere.