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Life on Earth evolved histones, nuclei, chromosomes, and all the crazy eukaryotic infrastructure instead of altering genetic chemistry, suggesting that doing so

Life on Earth evolved histones, nuclei, chromosomes, and all the crazy eukaryotic infrastructure instead of altering genetic chemistry, suggesting that doing so would be an even taller order. Each emergence of life probably only gets one roll of this die. While I'm sure a chemistry exists that supports vertical scaling 1000x beyond our own, it's not unreasonable to speculate that such genetic chemistry could be rare. Energetics and thermodynamics are absolutely capable of imposing harsh boundaries. How long has our battery technology been stuck at this order of magnitude? How long have internal combustion and explosives been stuck at this order of magnitude? A long time, and that's with an enormous number of very clever and motivated people chipping away at the problem. There's a reason why I chose distributed systems in my analogy: it proves that information science and engineering are not immune to the "difficulty barrier" problem. Vertical scaling hit a soft limit in the software industry long before it enabled the largest cloud-scale applications we see today. The transition from vertical to horizontal scaling was painful, but not nearly as painful as it would have been to wait for vertical scaling to catch up. We'd still be waiting.

enkid 6y ago
> While I'm sure a chemistry exists that supports vertical scaling 1000x beyond our own, it's not unreasonable to speculate that such genetic chemistry could be rare. This is what I'm talking about. Your making an assumption and straight up saying it's an assumption, but not providing any evidence that this assumption is true. You make another analogy which may or may not apply. I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm not saying that you're right. I'm saying there is no possible way any of us can know at this point.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  This entire field is speculative and nobody argued otherwise. Quite the opposite: I bent over backwards to redundantly state it over and over again. More than I should have, and now I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered if it didn't prevent me from being ignored. The "you can't prove it" objection must be checked at the door for the sake of keeping the speculation interesting. Nobody is arguing that you should walk through the door. It's probably more respectable to refuse, on the whole. Once you walk through the door, though, complaining about proof is a bit silly, like walking into a speakeasy, ordering a drink, and complaining that they have served you illegal alcohol. It's not wrong, but it's also not helpful.

enkid 6y ago

> While I'm sure a chemistry exists that supports vertical scaling 1000x beyond our own, it's not unreasonable to speculate that such genetic chemistry could be rare. This is what I'm talking about. Your making an assumption and straight up saying it's an assumption, but not providing any evidence that this assumption is true. You make another analogy which may or may not apply. I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm not saying that you're right. I'm saying there is no possible way any of us can know at this point.

jjoonathan 6y ago
This entire field is speculative and nobody argued otherwise. Quite the opposite: I bent over backwards to redundantly state it over and over again. More than I should have, and now I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered if it didn't prevent me from being ignored. The "you can't prove it" objection must be checked at the door for the sake of keeping the speculation interesting. Nobody is arguing that you should walk through the door. It's probably more respectable to refuse, on the whole. Once you walk through the door, though, complaining about proof is a bit silly, like walking into a speakeasy, ordering a drink, and complaining that they have served you illegal alcohol. It's not wrong, but it's also not helpful.