ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
jasper76 wrote:BeAfraid wrote:One of the qualifications of "Life" is that it be Self-Replicating, and produce a metabolism that drives the replication.
Says who?
Self-replication would certainly be a helpful characteristic to help us determine diagnostically whether something is "alive", but its possible to conceive of a lifeform that does not replicate itself.
Says biologists?
Self-replications is most definitely
one of the characteristics of life, but not the only one. Right now, there are seven key characteristics that can be used to judge whether something is considered life: homeostasis, metabolism, organization (the cell), growth, reproduction, adaptation, and response to stimuli. What can and can't be considered "life" is sometimes ambiguous. Viruses carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection (all things that are checks in the "life" column) but they lack things like cellular structure. They exist in a gray area between life and inanimate and are sometimes just considered replicators.
As to your second point... it is
highly speculative to conceive of an organism that does not replicate (either sexually or asexually). Simple viruses have been manufactured from non-living material by scientists, but like I mentioned above, viruses are not considered living organisms. Reproduction is pretty much a fundamental feature of life.
That would be me among that population (Biologists - although I am a Computational & Systems Biologist).
But, yes:
Says Biologists.
MB Automatically Appended Next Post: As for Synthetic Life, we (Biologists), have different qualifications/criterion for Synthetic Life.
Among those criteria are that some form of replication must exist, whether mediated, or self-replicating.
For instance, Craig Venter has created E. coli that produce specific substances, but they cannot "Self-Replicate" without catalytic mediator (a chemical that
must be present at very high levels before the bacteria can reproduce.
He could just as easily have make it such that they could not reproduce at all, and that any new forms of that bacteria would need to be created from scratch (as he made the original strains).
And, yes, we have things like Data, on Star Trek, or Weyoun, Again: Star Trek. These Life Forms both have mediated forms of Reproduction.
It should also be pointed out that Star Trek has a particular bias against certain technologies (biology especially) because of Roddenberry's experiences with the Nazis, in WWII (which is why it took DS9 to get even one character with genetic modifications). Anything that trod upon humanity's supposed "perfection" as he already existed, and hinted that we could be improved upon was forbidden from Star Trek until well after Roddenberry's death, because of a population that would associate it with the Third Reich's "Master Race"
The New Star Trek is introducing new Characters to address these biases (i.e. "Transhuman" Characters).
And, hopefully (given who I know is consulting on the show), they will address the issue of Eugenics, to illustrate there is a difference between the Third Reich's assumptions that they are, or have, the necessary genetics for a "Master Race," and the Genetic or Biological Optimization of a person (all kinds of things in us are poorly "Engineered" - how it hurts to use that word).
Everything in the human body can be improved upon, one way or another. Some things sooner than later.
Our eyes represent the most obvious thing that can be improved.
Put a reflective surface behind the retina that can be polarized to differing frequencies, and then flip the rods and cones (Retina) so that we no longer have a blind-spot where the optic nerve has to pass through it, and you have a combination of a spectral filter, telescopic/microscopic vision (only up to about 5x with the polarization method, which could create Fresnel lenses behind the retina). But the inclusion of the right kind of setup, and we could have up to 100X magnification, or telescopic vision (it would require moving the retina to the side of the eye to do this, though - you would need to look at the later generation of spy-satellites to see how they increased their focal length without having an extremely long lens by bouncing the light around inside of a sphere).
But that is just
ONE example of where our biology could be optimized (my own research is into the digestive tract, and the Enteric Nervous System).
Putting our brain someplace safer than our skull would be another really obvious improvement to our design.
But... There are all manner of criteria for Synthetic Life that essentially match the criteria for evolved biological life.
MB Automatically Appended Next Post: And...
I would agree that Scootypuff Jr. wasn't being aggressive.
The "I am not a Scientist" line is used too often by Trolls in the USA (like our Politicians) to sew dissent, confuse, and otherwise foment doubt in areas where there
IS NONE to the actual Scientists (aside from the typical Scientists' refusal to commit to absolutes, that is - but the younger Scientists tend to be less shy about using absolutes when confronting this sort of trolling - whether that will be for good or ill will be seen).
MB
