Artificial Life has arrived

Sometimes concessions need to be made. I said 'on another level of sentience' and really we can argue that but lets be realistic.

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That is life enmos. Does anyone cry because dinosaurs went extinct? by your logic the dinosaurs would still be walking the earth and eating other creatures whenever they felt like it but then eventually they would eradicat their own food supply which is why we should be smarter than the dinosaurs because we can control these things better than any other creature.

 

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You're making no sense, as usual.

 

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that should make sense. nature can be far FAR more cruel than a normal human being is but then i use the word cruel for illustrative purposes because that is just nature.

 

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you put me on an earth like planet and all that is needed are some humans and good bacteria. What else do you think you need?

 

So after 57 years and hundreds of millions of dollars these "designers" have done what is thought to have happened in nature by accident?

That sounds a bit odd. I wonder what the chances are that they could have made this work purely by accident?

 

This "accident"(existence of DNA based cell) of yours took around a billion year to evolve; and only people who think the existence of things happen "suddenly" and/or things come "out of nowhere", or "without any history" can imagine "accidents". Normally, everything has its own evolution process. And this "57 years" too is only one section of "the evolution of human understanding of life". And this 57 years, or previous knowledge has bigger importance for our standing as conscious creatures than what nature has been allowing to exist without any conscious mechanism throughout billions of years.

 

it would be funny if they can grow some eyelashes on them.

-just kidding but that would be very impressive.

 

So what the hell is the point of science and scientific discoveries if they do not contribute to my welfare and happiness??

 

Kidding? Don't be so sure: Things are not always "so serious" among monkeys. This is what humans do with atoms in nano-scale:

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... so some funny guy would fulfil your dream sooner than you expect, why not?

 

I told you, science and its discoveries don't have to sort out the happiness of individual miseries. It is up to these individuals -their intentions or policies- to get something out of them. By the way if the individual is in deepest misery, like deeper than a shit hole; neither science nor art has such a power to fill it. Sad but true...

 

Oh? But still, people should worship science as the highest there is??

 

Science can be done with passion, respect, patience, and with some other motivations or maybe even expectation of getting rich, why not; yet "worshipping" has no place in Science. Worshipping doesn't pay off in scientific terms.

 

Nice pic.

it would still be progress, but man would that freak people out.

 

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HEY!! you posted that threat before me, i was going to post it first!! LOL

 

Read this,from 2002. What's new?

Scientists in the US have, for the first time, fabricated a working copy of a dangerous disease virus from scratch in the lab, using chemicals obtained by mail order and the publicly available knowledge of the virus's code.
Using harmless pieces of DNA they received through the post, researchers at the State University of New York built a synthetic version of the polio virus so like the real thing that it infected mice and made them ill.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/12/research.internationaleducationnews

 

It was copying of a virus. It doesn't qualify as artificial life.

 

This is the most ridiculous assumption I've seen in a while. This is certainly not the case.

What new organism? They took a template bacterium and synthesized a copy of it's genome. M. mycoides has been a research lab staple for decades. There is no "new organism." They even had to insert the genome they created into a cell that already had all the necessary proteins and membranes, so we're not even at the point of building a cell from scratch.

Captain, bacteria do not equal viruses -- synthesizing a bacterial genome from scratch and inserting it into a cell is far more complex a process.

I'm not sure why imaginations are running wild... sure, it's an achievement. But, it also cost $40M to make a single cell -- at that cost it's not exactly practical for much.

 

OK, lets say that the simplest bacterium is 20 times as complex as the simplest virus.
Given that it took 8 years to get from manufacturing the simplest virus to the simplest bacteria, how long will it take to get to an amoeba?

 

I'd guess on the scale of decades before we're able to synthesize a eukaryotic genome from just nucleotides (and have the organism successfully proliferate).

 

hum, sounds like a challenge.