From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@idiom.com)
Date: Fri Nov 12 1999 - 13:30:57 MST
Philip Witham writes:
> Yes, but the premise of the discussion, here, is that the Earth is
> becoming immanently uninhabitable (post assembler) in who knows
> how many ways, else why leave in such a rush? So: given not much
> choice, would you bet that we can't figure it out? With Advanced
> nanotech to pry into the minuscule eco-details and also to manipulate
> them?
I don't think we should wait around for advanced nanotech before
we start trying to understand our biosphere and how to replicate
it. I'm puzzled and frustrated that so few biosphere closures
have been funded so far. If we take the defeatist attitude that
the Earth will be uninhabitable soon regardless of what actions
we take to try to prevent this outcome (which is not my
inclination), then we certainly ought to be trying to understand
the "proven technology", as Crocker puts it, that has sustained
us so far. We have zero experience in maintaining viable
societies over the long term in space, just as we have zero
experience in reanimation from cryostasis or mind uploading. It
would be foolish to destroy (or fail to study) our current life
support systems before their replacements have been developed
and *tested*.
Also, in re Bradbury's objections to Crocker's biological
traditionalism, the human genome was not designed, and it was
certainly not designed with any goals of readability or maintainability
in mind. It is growing clearer that our genome is completely riddled
with every computer programmer's nightmare: multifunction code
passages. Tweak this neurotransmitter which has this benevolent
effect, and you will find that the tweak also causes two or three
malignant changes in function, as well as four or five neutral ones
and perhaps one other unexpected improvement. No matter how well
we understand gene expression and ontogeny, the multipurpose use
of most of the sophisticated molecules in our body will make tweaking
the design extremely difficult for human engineers. Granted,
machine assistance may make the problems tractable, but I think
its too soon to make specific confident predictions about the
ultimate capabilities of human genetic engineering and how soon we
will be able to migrate ourselves out of the local optimum of human
function into some better, but posthuman, design. If you think
the planet will become uninhabitable very soon, then we need to
start figuring out how to make primate societies and the biospheres
that support them viable in space. We may not be able to change
ourselves as fast as we would like.
-- arkuat
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