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Comment by undersuit | Hacker News Reader

>Thirty years and 75,000 generations — it’s a drop in the evolutionary bucket. So I would guess that if we could come back — in one million years or whatever, the bacteria probably would have extremely reduced genomes. That’s a reason to keep it going.

Can't speed up nature, though I wonder if we could add something to the medium that increases the chance of deletions.

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> I wonder if we could add something to the medium that increases the chance of deletions

The bacteria beat you to it: Several strains developed elevated mutation rates, already back in the 90s (https://doi.org/10.1038/42701).

>Can't speed up nature

If you are moving at the speed of light, then it would happen faster to you. So couldn't we just do the opposite of that?

Kinda? Taking the experiment outside of earth`s (and the sun`s, I guess) gravity well would have the effect you have in mind. But the impact would not be particularly pronounced considering the magnitude of the curvatures we are experiencing.

Just go a little faster than light and conduct the experiment in the past.

Can't speed up nature

We can, with computers. Well, maybe not today, not at the atomic level, but quite possible in a few decades.

So… we can’t?

We can't today, but maybe in the future.

So we can’t

That's pretty weird position.

Eg I can fly to Hong Kong. Not today, because I haven't booked a flight and it's getting late, but probably in the next few days, if I really wanted to. You'd say that I "can't"?

It is currently feasible for anyone, with the right resources, to fly to Hong Kong.

It is not currently feasible for anyone to speed up or simulate nature in silico.

These are quite different positions, the idea that you would equivocate them frankly is bizarre

People working in labs today must be speeding up nature significantly on a daily basis. Perform lots of concurrent experiments, apply different environmental stresses, provide different nutrition, cross different variants you find useful, automate all the processes and tests. I think the project referenced seems to be deliberately not doing that, to observe the natural speed of change.

> We can, with computers.

Lenski and his colleagues have been working on that too, with the Avida platform (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01568). Although that was 20 years ago and I haven't heard much from it lately, so I don't know how active this still is.

You could just increase the population and thereby the overall number of mutations tried.

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