Life Without Walls
Posted on | February 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
Being an avid SF reader inundated with ideas of the singularity, of alternate planes and modes of existence, I frequently skip over seemingly more mundane cognitive shifts that, doubled-back upon, actually dig really, really deep into our preconceptions. For example, dwelling on the fact that potentially 63% of the total mass in the Universe might lie in the hidden sectors, with a mere 12% of it being actual atoms, and the totality of mass in the Universe is a mere 28% of its total contents (the rest being that dreamily mysterious dark energy stuff), one might think that we are ever so focused on finding non-terrestrial human-comprehensible chemical life in a rather puny segment of the potentiality. There are suggestions that, in these deliberations, scale, or even level of complexity might be used as an extra dimension, not merely as another version of “distance” but an actual dimension to be inhabited by life. There are also imagined worlds filled with life lying within substrates of varied levels of abstraction and “embeddedness” – from Egan’s wang carpet wavefront to Rucker’s denizens of mathematical sub-scaffolding of reality as we know it.
Of course, discussions on just what life is don’t seem to be drawing to a conclusion, but on this issue, I am of the opinion that “when we see it, we’ll know”, and even if we go for a stricter definition, I think the working collection of properties can be named pretty easily: replexity, fidelity, evolvability… either way you go, it’s a finite set of verifiable properties.
Stepping back a bit from the wild imaginarium of frontier thinkers and popping back into reality, an interesting bubble that got popped for me today was the idea of life having to deal with discrete packages of… living stuff. To be more specific – cells. I was pretty tightly locked into a mindset where imagining life of any kind involved thinking of discrete self-enclosed packages of replication, but of course, there is no a priori reason for this other than our being preconditioned by the fact that all life as we know it is cell-based, discrete in nature, with the primordial soup being a mere precursor for “life proper”. However, even as we speak there are people looking into ways to create in vitro artificial chemical life free from this constraint, based on the knowledge that although “… life-as-we-know-it requires membranous cellular compartments, but it can passage through an unencapsulated protoplast form (Kim et al. 2001), and any process for splitting and pooling the “soup” would suffice theoretically (e.g., rock cavities [Robinson 2005], tidal pools, and billabongs).” [source]
Apart from that wonderful word – and oh how “billabong” just bounces around the mouth – the real kicker is that these self-replicating sludgy soups are on a steady path to becoming reality right now, and having actual applications in our everyday lives – the chief among those being aimed at right now are pollution remediation and synthesis of drugs and plastics and, hey, why not, production of a sustainable replacement for naphta. Kickstart a sun-lit pool of sploogie into self replication, add the necessary base ingredients, and just sieve off that A-life diesel.
Hoping, all the while, that we don’t spill some where we shouldn’t and accidentally kick off a ßehemoth scenario, leaving us with no blade of grass. That is, unless it happens all on its own anyway.
Comments
2 Responses to “Life Without Walls”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to our feed
About
Written in minutes and fact-checked in seconds via Google. May contain unsafe levels of self-righteousness. Past cleverness is no guarantee of future results.
Search
Flickr
Twittery
- the perfect storm. #
- happily arrived at a mostly Teutonic nudie camp near Punta Kriza. Tent up, food ready, Dalmatian music playing. World, I'm dead for you. #
- on the road again, to Cres. Hit Lovran & Ika on the way... what a trip down memory lane - I remember *everything*. Squee! #
- naked under clear blue skies, by the crystal blue waters in Kamenjak nature park at the tip of Istria. Nearest neighbors-50m to either side. #
- through hail to a sunny afternoon in Rovinj. It's beautiful, but I remember almost nothing-what I do curiously shrank during the last 25yrs #
Taggery
astronomy bebel gilberto borders boundaries brasil causality City cognition concert cthulhu democracy emergence entropy festival first post forro in the dark fruška gora futility global warming greg egan hammertime human nature imf Internet kosovo life Living Dead marrow moon museum night paradigm shift particle physics perception protest realpolitik reinstall religion Science sf short films System tres courts virtual vs. actual wordpress world bank
February 13th, 2010 @ 00:53
Damn, you zoom from macro to microstuff in a paragraf. This is more in the vein of your previous blaaaag post, but comes in nicely to complement the tone…
And the death of grass scenario was nicely used recently in “Pump Six” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Has a nice corporate doom ring to it: all crops have died from a “mysterious” bug everybody knows was engineered, and the main sources of food are sterile, trademarked and copyrighted gm plants designed to steer the bug away. Plus the global warming, some natural disasters, some economical ones, bit of war, an you have a winning story. :)
February 16th, 2010 @ 11:38
Well, the Ug#99 stem rust does have a hint of “US Military-Industrial Complex” conspiratorium to it, and I am looking at some exponential disease propagation charts that paint a pretty grim picture of food production, transport and provision for the relatively near future. Fun times! :-)