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> 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 signif

> 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.]

tomohelix 2y ago
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.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
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.
jl6 2y ago
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.
dekhn 2y ago
The closest thing I can think of in biology would be https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html and https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.328.5981.958 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 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.

tomohelix 2y ago

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.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

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.

jl6 2y ago

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.

dekhn 2y ago

The closest thing I can think of in biology would be https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/21cell.html and https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.328.5981.958 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 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.