5 ms·

Science fiction can become science fact... you have to try to do it... that's how it becomes fact.

by x5n1 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago
No, that's not how science fiction becomes science. Science fiction is to show what might happen given some assumptions on the state of future science, not what will happen if you try something that you currently don't have the technology for. For instance, Jules Verne wrote about lots of 'impossible' journeys, which made for good science fiction. Trying any of those things before the technology was there would have not led anywhere, it would have wasted time and or killed people. And even when the technology was there it took some pretty hard thinking to make the journeys a successful reality. What you are proposing is so far beyond the current state of the art that it is not science (yet, maybe never will be) but fiction. Trying it will simply not work and won't advance science at all.
- x5n1 11y ago
  I don't know what we're arguing about. That's it's impossible? It's not impossible. All I am saying is we should go in that direction. The rest will follow. The direction is giving language to other species and maybe even intelligence. The way to start to do this is to introduce human variants of certain genes like foxp2 to apes. We have already done it in mice... and keep introducing these differences between humans and apes until we produce an ape human hybrid that has intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=FOXP2 https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=FOXP2 Two amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in chimpanzees,[15] but only one of these two changes is unique to humans.[11] Evidence from genetically manipulated mice[16] and human neuronal cell models[17] suggests that these changes affect the neural functions of FOXP2.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    There is an enormous amount of developmental context to this and simply swapping in some genetic material without a full appreciation for the scope of the problem makes this at present day an impossibility. Hollywood might make you believe it is easy to make dinosaurs and to make planets full of apes rivalling the humans but in cold hard reality this is far from simple. I'm not saying it is impossible per-se, I'm saying that with our current understanding of the matter it is impossible today and simply trying will not advance our understanding much. There are far simpler problems than this that are right now impossible. Yes, FOXP is related to speech, no, activating FOXP does not automatically give you a talking ape, the way genes affect the brain is very complex and poorly understood.
- cactusface 11y ago
  I don't know, he has a point. Science and engineering can go hand in hand. We built the bomb. We broke Enigma. We landed on the moon. We didn't have all the science when we started.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. (Assuming that you define them currently as un-intelligent and without language). It's not quite the same as changing some config bits. Though that doesn't rule out that one day we may be able to do so but for now this is simply (according to my knowledge of the state of the art of genetic engineering) an impossibility. Besides the ethical questions it would raise. Building the bomb, breaking enigma and landing on the moon (and ITER, for that matter) were 'mere matters of engineering' by comparison, at least there we had a good idea of what we needed to achieve and what possible paths there were to that solution. For the atomic bomb, for instance, the Uranium atom had already been split (in 1938), for the moon landings we already had the German V2 rocket and so on. The steps may seem huge but the theoretical underpinnings were firmly in place when the technology moved forward. Usually this alternates, one step is made by science to advance the theory which then can be put to the test and put into practice by engineering and experiment. This may lead to new insight and so on. It's very rare for someone to say 'oh, it would be nice if we could do 'x'' and then to turn up with a complete and solved problem on the next iteration. There's a reason the moonshot and the atomic bomb took several years and very large amounts of money to complete, and in neither case were we 100% sure that we'd achieve them.
    - swombat 11y ago
      No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. And you know this how? Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this? I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach. We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible? Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome into a chimp embryo and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us. No one has sat there and run the years' worth of experiments required to prove whether this is achievable with today's technology. We obviously can't say it's easy but we can't say how hard it is either. The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc). Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.

Science fiction can become science fact... you have to try to do it... that's how it becomes fact.

by x5n1 11y ago

Science fiction can become science fact... you have to try to do it... that's how it becomes fact.

No, that's not how science fiction becomes science. Science fiction is to show what might happen given some assumptions on the state of future science, not what will happen if you try something that you currently don't have the technology for. For instance, Jules Verne wrote about lots of 'impossible' journeys, which made for good science fiction. Trying any of those things before the technology was there would have not led anywhere, it would have wasted time and or killed people. And even when the technology was there it took some pretty hard thinking to make the journeys a successful reality. What you are proposing is so far beyond the current state of the art that it is not science (yet, maybe never will be) but fiction. Trying it will simply not work and won't advance science at all.

x5n1 11y ago
I don't know what we're arguing about. That's it's impossible? It's not impossible. All I am saying is we should go in that direction. The rest will follow. The direction is giving language to other species and maybe even intelligence. The way to start to do this is to introduce human variants of certain genes like foxp2 to apes. We have already done it in mice... and keep introducing these differences between humans and apes until we produce an ape human hybrid that has intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=FOXP2 https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=FOXP2 Two amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in chimpanzees,[15] but only one of these two changes is unique to humans.[11] Evidence from genetically manipulated mice[16] and human neuronal cell models[17] suggests that these changes affect the neural functions of FOXP2.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  There is an enormous amount of developmental context to this and simply swapping in some genetic material without a full appreciation for the scope of the problem makes this at present day an impossibility. Hollywood might make you believe it is easy to make dinosaurs and to make planets full of apes rivalling the humans but in cold hard reality this is far from simple. I'm not saying it is impossible per-se, I'm saying that with our current understanding of the matter it is impossible today and simply trying will not advance our understanding much. There are far simpler problems than this that are right now impossible. Yes, FOXP is related to speech, no, activating FOXP does not automatically give you a talking ape, the way genes affect the brain is very complex and poorly understood.
cactusface 11y ago
I don't know, he has a point. Science and engineering can go hand in hand. We built the bomb. We broke Enigma. We landed on the moon. We didn't have all the science when we started.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. (Assuming that you define them currently as un-intelligent and without language). It's not quite the same as changing some config bits. Though that doesn't rule out that one day we may be able to do so but for now this is simply (according to my knowledge of the state of the art of genetic engineering) an impossibility. Besides the ethical questions it would raise. Building the bomb, breaking enigma and landing on the moon (and ITER, for that matter) were 'mere matters of engineering' by comparison, at least there we had a good idea of what we needed to achieve and what possible paths there were to that solution. For the atomic bomb, for instance, the Uranium atom had already been split (in 1938), for the moon landings we already had the German V2 rocket and so on. The steps may seem huge but the theoretical underpinnings were firmly in place when the technology moved forward. Usually this alternates, one step is made by science to advance the theory which then can be put to the test and put into practice by engineering and experiment. This may lead to new insight and so on. It's very rare for someone to say 'oh, it would be nice if we could do 'x'' and then to turn up with a complete and solved problem on the next iteration. There's a reason the moonshot and the atomic bomb took several years and very large amounts of money to complete, and in neither case were we 100% sure that we'd achieve them.
  - swombat 11y ago
    No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. And you know this how? Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this? I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach. We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible? Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome into a chimp embryo and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us. No one has sat there and run the years' worth of experiments required to prove whether this is achievable with today's technology. We obviously can't say it's easy but we can't say how hard it is either. The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc). Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.