"It is a living species. It is self-replicating. Its only genetic code is what we built into it chemically. Every protein is dictated by that genetic code. This is a new, independent species whose origin was the computer, not some genetic relative."
- J. Craig Venter
May 21, 2010 it was announced that a form of wholly synthetic cellular life has been developed, and this seems to me a good a date as any to mark the beginning of a truly different time in the history of man. The ground has dropped from beneath our feet and we plunge deep into a new business entirely, a place where the old arguments and conceptions of 'life' and what is 'natural' are made wholly irreverent.
The question is not whether we should or should not do a thing, but only whether or not we are able to yet; a matter of technique. If we can do a thing, we must. Such is our 'nature.'
Grey Goo Scenario
"...Even so, some people argue that living goo, or even a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology to create organic replicators, is a more realistic threat than grey goo. Arguing that bacteria are ubiquitous and extraordinarily powerful, Bill Bryson (2003) says that the Earth is “their planet” and that we only exist on it because “they allow us to”. Margulis and Sagan (1995) go further, arguing that all organisms, having descended from bacteria, are in a sense bacteria. Many kinds of bacteria are in fact essential for human life and are found in large quantities in the human digestive tract, in a symbiotic relationship.
Thus a living goo could be a multicellular organism that obtains its raw materials to grow through ecophagy, and then grows through a process of exponential assembly such as cell division.
A more literal biological analogy to grey goo are prions, which have been implicated in such diseases as kuru, Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and fatal familial insomnia. In all of these conditions, an abnormal protein possesses the ability to unfold and refold other normally functioning proteins into copies of itself. Prions are extraordinarily contagious and difficult to destroy, but their relatively sluggish rate of transformation has prevented them from successfully overrunning the biosphere.
Existential Risk
"Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world...
I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."
- Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
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