May

21

The Precipice of a New Era

May 21, 2010 by Brandon 4 Comments

God just got a little bit more useless as scientists have announced a stunning, and long anticipated breakthrough. Artificial life.

That may not mean to some what it technically means. No, scientists did not breed some Frankensteinian creature in lab. Instead, they pieced together some DNA to make a synthetic gene sequence, then used it to create a synthetic chromosome, which they then inserted into a host cell. The host cell took that genetic information and began to replicate, creating millions of copies.

Doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, we stand on the precipice of a new era with this discovery. Some people are concerned that we’ve overstepped our boundaries, and again we hear the cries of “Playing God.” But there is no God to play. We do as we will, and true, we must do so cautiously, but we are facing a future where synthetic cells can be created to produce vaccines, to eat cancer, and even create biofuels.

Detractors claim that in the hands of terrorists and the military, deadly new bioweapons can be created using this technology. But let’s face it, we’ve been in the business of killing each other ever since two tribes of sapiens existed. With or without this, we’re going to continue to kill each other through whatever means possible. We might as well surge forward with our technology and glean what benefits we can from it.

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4 Comments so far:

  1. gunsandsuchNo Gravatar on May 25, 2010 10:32 am

    Brando do you lose street cred from your fellow atheists for writing “God” with a capital G?

  2. BrandonNo Gravatar on May 25, 2010 1:01 pm

    Generally when I capitalize the G, I’m referring to the Christian god by name.

    So it’s really no different than capitalizing any other fictional character’s name. Proper nouns are still proper nouns.

  3. gunsandsuchNo Gravatar on May 25, 2010 2:09 pm

    Makes sense

    By the way:

    Breithlá Sona

    //I figured to use your native Gallic

  4. gunsandsuchNo Gravatar on May 25, 2010 2:10 pm

    *Gaelic

What is Fractal Wrongness?

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

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