Artificial Life May Be Possible Within Ten Years

CapedOpossum writes "According to an article from a few weeks back on CNN, researchers in the field of genetics and biology think that we may be able to artificially create life within the next decade. From the article: 'Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of 'wet artificial life. "It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could run amok, but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.'"

Cylons

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cylons were created by man...

Life imitates Sid Meier

[Tackhead]

"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"
- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang (The Human Hive), Dynamics of Mind

I'm on lunch break, as you can tell.

[ChrisMounce]

So, when will we start seeing legislation for warnings on food? If this takes off, I can see companies making stuff like pseudo-cows and pseudo-chickens that are cheaper to breed in the long term.

I suppose they'll start out with plant-like forms of life for simplicity. Strangely, eating artificial plants wouldn't bother me as much as artificial animals.

Self destruction

[Reality Master 101]

One of the answers to the Fermi Paradox [wikipedia.org] that is often thrown around is the idea that intelligent life tends to destroy itself after a short amount of time. Normally, people think this means huge wars, but I actually have pondered a different theory. As technology advances, more and more power is put into the hands of relatively small groups, and then ultimately to individuals.

I've wondered if perhaps there was some sort of energy-conversion technology that we don't know about yet (such as an easy way to create antimatter), but once discovered, it puts too much power available too easily. Basically, a single nutcase then creates a doomsday bomb, and that's it. If that were possible, and assuming it was relatively undetectable, it would be inevitable that life would be destroyed. You simply can't stop determined crazy people.

On the other hand, things like this make me wonder about biological weapons. As this technology matures, it will get easier and easier, and be available cheaper and cheaper to create artificial lifeforms. You see it on the Internet... script kiddies have an immense amount of power to destroy property. Once biolife is cheap and easy, and you get a human-hating nut who *wants* to destroy humanity, how can you stop it?

It won't be war that kills everyone, it'll be the lone Unibomber type.

Re:Self destruction

[Tackhead]

> On the other hand, things like this make me wonder about biological weapons. As this technology matures, it will get easier and easier, and be available cheaper and cheaper to create artificial lifeforms. You see it on the Internet... script kiddies have an immense amount of power to destroy property. Once biolife is cheap and easy, and you get a human-hating nut who *wants* to destroy humanity, how can you stop it?
>
> It won't be war that kills everyone, it'll be the lone Unibomber type.

Greg Egan's The Moral Virologist [eidolon.net] indirectly addresses your point, and is one of the most fascinating short stories you'll ever read.

Re:Self destruction

[Kjella]

Once biolife is cheap and easy, and you get a human-hating nut who *wants* to destroy humanity, how can you stop it?

Biolife and bioweapons is sorta like saying "I got a cow, now how do I make a bioweapon out of it". If you were the serious nutty kind, go into hazardous disease research until you get your hands on a nasty strain of ebola, mix it up with some airborn virus (this is not extremely hard, and doesn't require artifical life it's more like a transplant), produce a decent quantity then show up early for your flight and sit at the int'l airport infecting everyone passing by for some hours. It'll be in most major cities of the world before shit hits the fan, and paniced fleeing infected will spread it everywhere else. Of course, that assumes you really want to kill everyone, not Al-Quaida "destroy the infidels" everyone but literally everyone. People like that just don't do that though.... they don't act rationally and longterm make up plans, they're the kind that build up and snap. In short, those sane enough to be capable aren't insane enough to actually want to kill *everyone*.

Re:Uh.

[Dachannien]

You don't need a reliable method of killing off the ones you don't want. All you need is a little bit of selection pressure. In fact, too much pressure can be detrimental to evolution, as it can strip the population of diversity. A good method would probably be to vary the strength of selection pressures over time, to allow the population to diverge and then occasionally cull the low performers.

Re:correct me if i'm wrong, but

[im_thatoneguy]

They're attempting to manufacture a cell.

Cloning is nothing more than tricking a cell to do what it's already designed to do. You aren't creating anything, the cell is creating another cell.

It's the difference between going to a Frys buying a motherboard, processor, case etc and assembling it at home vs mining ore, refining, designing, building a fabrication unit printing circuits and assembling that.

Replace my Mitochondria!

[StCredZero]

If we can make new ones that can replace the ones that are already there with broken-down mtDNA, then this brings us closer to extended lifespans!

http://methuselahfoundation.org/index.php?pagename =mitosens [methuselahfoundation.org]

Oppositely handed

[kanweg]

Let's hope they create life from oppositely handed aminoacids (OK, they may use glycine ;-) ) and oppositely winding DNA. That should keep us and the environment fairly safe.

Bert

Re:Why is this funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I see the joke "I, for one, welcome our new 'insert entity here' overlords!" used all the time in slashdot. Is this a reference to something? Why do people think this is funny? What am I missing that makes this something worth laughing about? I'm not trying to flame the author, I'm just trying to understand why this is considered funny, and gets such a high slashdot score in any of its regurgitations.