Posted on 06/07/2007 11:24:50 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
“God has competition.”
Famous Last Words.
Not going to pitch you inside too much, but isn’t our God bigger than DNA?
The scientific method is a gift to the fallen mankind. How man uses it is what differentiates Good from Evil.
The worry is that God is going to go the way of Katrina and the Waves — a couple of fun singles but no staying power. Once we understand DNA well enough to create designer organisms, it’s all over. It’s like the time you were first able to read TV Guide and didn’t need to trust your parents to tell you what’s on.
That would be like people claiming to be Hindus and Buddhists announcing a way to cheat karma.
In that story, the virus with impossible properties was alien. The human error was to inadvertently introduce it into the earth’s atmosphere, while its nature remained unknown. In this case we are contemplating a production of the human intellect, which seems to follow the moral pattern of Cat’s Cradle, even if the novel’s premise was based on simple physics instead of biology.
If they can make ethanol, perhaps they can make crude oil, instead.
Otherwise we wind up with a lot of idle refinery capacity and unemployed refinery and oil industry workers.
Plus we wouldn’t need to modify our vehicles. And finally we could flood the world with our synthetic crude oil, drive the price down, and harm our mortal mideast enemies.
Tinkering with the created order is nothing new. The consequences when it begins to undermine man’s own station are something else. This is like a bunch of untalented hacks taking over Hollywood by force and forcing their own TV programs on everybody.
“It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.”
In the year 2112: “Efforts at defeating the microbe have not worked and crops continue to fail due to the cold climate, lack of CO2, and increased amounts of hydrogen in the atmosphere.”
Even such things as how the microbes in the guts of termites turn otherwise indigestible cellulose into energy for these bugs, is virtually unknown at present. This project sounds like a (pardon the specific religious reference) hail Mary pass. Being able to reproduce on large scale what happens in termite guts is likely going to take much studied research.
Exactly!
And if you’ve got a better product than Hollywood, you can sell it and ruin the competition.
Free markets are ‘da bomb.
Thank God the market for organisms is finally opening up. He’s been at it for a long time with diappointing results.
Anything which could get out and cause mischief like that, should, ethically speaking, be made as controllable as possible. As in vulnerable to dozens of completely different antibiotics.
Think what happens when the sellers become the sold.
Ahhhhh.
You’re thinking we shouldn’t make a big move like that without an exit strategy.
Hmmmm.
I grant you that’s a weighty consideration. But it’s not decisive. Look at Iraq, for example.
I for one would be a mite disappointed to see it work TOO well and find what had been our forests, gardens, and crops reduced to pools of oil where they stand, followed shortly by the suffocation of all breathing animal and human life.
Making ethanol now is cheap because yeast reproduces itself when exposed to sugar. Of course this cellulose "bug" could get loose and eat all our crops and houses, and grass, and forests, and........, well, at least the whole planet could get loaded with the ethanol they produced. We would need a bunch of Coke, or tonic or something though.
The termites do not run on ethanol, they run on sugars. But even the termite gut chemistry is a complex bit of symbiosis that hasn’t been well explicated.
“It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.”
Hmmm. A bug that destroys or “eats” water vapor.
The Christian’s dogma was run over by the Buddist’s karma.
LOL! I’m in the presence of greatness.
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