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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

From an engineering perspective, a single bacterium is a state of the art self contained factory. It has thousands or even ten of thousands of feeback circuits each with multiple interweaving depdendencies that somehow works perfectly to adjust inputs/outputs on the fly at extreme efficiency.

Even with all of our technological achievements, we can barely build something at this level of complexity. And to make it so cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction. Yet scoop up a handful of dirt or pour a glass of water and you can get billions of these sophisticated machines in your hand.

Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology. Shame we don't seem to appreciate it enough.

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This is one of the reasons loss of biodiversity and mass extinction are so horrifically depressing, to me. All that marvelous complexity, all the blueprint information for it, all lost forever. Take the axolotl - it does not, seemingly, ever reach senescense, meaning they don't die of old age. Somewhere locked up in that blueprint information could be the key to new therapies or techniques to incorporate this into ourselves. But they are in danger of extinction, existing in a small patch of Mexico City's canals as they do. We lose them, we lose the chance to learn from them. How many undiscovered medicines, therapies, techniques lost forever? We don't even begin to imagine accounting for this particular externality

I once read a quote that I can't find anymore (and neither do I know who said/wrote it), that went something like: "Imagine advanced space-faring aliens land in your backyard and invite you to take a tour in their spaceship. You quickly realize that their technology is millions of years more advanced than our own. That is what studying biology feels like."

I'm no biologist but I liked that quote :)

That quote is from https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/immune-system/

Could have also seen it via https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ which quotes it directly

Thanks!

> Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology.

Our world is exceedingly rare and beautiful.

We lucked into an incredible solar system configuration, and evolution has done some seriously heavy lifting.

The molecular biology of DNA alone -- its biochemistry and enzymatic machinery -- is enough to be its own field.

> Shame we don't seem to appreciate it enough.

The domain experts do. This complexity is very difficult to teach to laypeople and those not interested in science communication. It's so easy to take it all for granted. You have to develop an understanding first in order to appreciate the marvel of biology.

Communication is getting easier, though. I'm sure we'll get there.

The bacteria in dirt don't do what I want, though. that's the great value of man-made machines, they (typically) do what I want (except cars)

Bacteria might not satisfy your immediate wants, but they do what you need

Time to eat some dirt :yum:

Videos of lacrymaria single cell organisms (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lacrymaria+olor&t=ffab&iar=images&...) show how absurdly sophisticated they are, with complex deformation of their membrane, which itself is remarkable.

Most of the HN crowd probably thinks biophilia is backwardsness, unless harnessed in service of technology. Utterly neurotic.

It's not technology. Technology is art, craft, human creation. Natural phenomena can be hard for us humans to understand.

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying with a caveat; I do not think that the concept of technology requires human progenitors.

so with that said, and the addition of 'simulation theory' or some other such never-knowable.. well , maybe it is all technology, we'd just never know.

I think I prefer the grand splendor of natural phenomena, myself. Even as just a think-er it's just a more interesting premise to me.

Who gets to define ‘technology’?’

Clearly no number of pseudonymous accounts on HN can decide anything on behalf of anyone else.

I have a bias towards etymology. Here's the entry for the root τέχνη:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%84%CE%AD%CF%87%CE%BD%CE...

That word is all about human (or other) intelligence and skill. Natural things developed and grew by natural processes, not clever skilful design. It's a different animal.

It's the difference between art and science. Technology is a form of art. Patents use the term "prior art" for a reason.

Are beaver dams not natural then? But technology?

I guess they are beaver technology. Non-human intelligence. It's a philosophical question. Regardless it's not the same kind of "mindless brute force evolution" that led to ATP synthase.

> It's not technology

It’s not. But watching ATP synthase essentially run a turbine [1] looks damn close to what we’d design (and extend).

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrEewYLIQg

We’re getting there

The transistor based direction may be folly, but it will get close. All within 100 years passed vacuum tubes.

Technology? Living cells don't look like the transistor-based technology we have, and we don't understand how cells work to make such broad assumptions. It seems to me that if transistor-based lifeforms exist, they look nothing like the organic lifeforms on our planet.

It doesn't need to be understood by us, let alone contain transistors, to qualify as technology.

That's just intellectual laziness: pretending that what we don't understand isn't any different from what we understand.

> And to make it so cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction.

Don't scientists out there very explicitly avoid building self-replicating systems at any significant scale to avoid the associated risks?

I think they already can create artificial/synthetic lifeforms in a lab - it's just that there are not a lot of use cases that make building a factory worth it, at least so far.

[Upd: I stand corrected - I thought they can, but turns out they can't. Thank y'all.]

We use synthetic biology to modify what is already available in nature and then call it "synthetic lifeforms" but it is like a cheap knockoff of the original with barely functional system.

All of these "synthetic lifeforms" I have seen are usually very gimped and nowhere as robust as a normal bacteria. It is still an ongoing effort to make a real, designed from scratch, comparable bacteria that can match the original. But speaking as someone who worked on these things, I would not expect any major breakthrough soon.

We can’t. You are far overestimating the state of the art.

The only self-replicating thing we can "build" is a modified biological cell and that’s already a tremendous achievement.

No, we cannot already create artificial lifeforms, and the reason we don’t create self-replicating systems is because we don’t know how (unless you mean something like modifying viruses, but that’s not really us doing the hard part).

It would be nice to think that a scientist in command of self-replicating artificial life technology will have the restraint to hold back on deploying it at scale. But if someone comes along and says “hey I made an artificial bacterium that can eat all the CO2 in the atmosphere, want me to replicate it globally?”, someone is going to push the button.

The closest thing I can think of in biology would be https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html and https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.328.5981.958 (same underlying research, two popular science articles). It still depended on many different known biological components, tools, and starting points.

In non-biology, most of the work has been self-assembling, not self-replication. IE, put all the puzzle piecees in a bag, jiggle for long enough, and you get a fully assembled puzzle out.

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot

Realistically, many scientists are working towards fully self-replicating machines. Generally, nobody has been able to articulate a realistic danger that is not highly implausible; we work under the assumption either nothing bad will happen, or we'll be able to stop it well before it's an issue.

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