DNAs, RNAs, and now XNAs
When it comes to messing with the backbone—the sugars and phosphates—it gets quite a bit harder to integrate things with actual biological systems. The enzymes that prepare and copy DNA, for example, are structured to work with sugars and phosphates. Having something that’s both chemically and structurally distinct doesn’t always work that well.
Rather than messing with the chemistry, the team behind the new paper decided to fix the enzymes. They started with a DNA copying enzyme, and introduced lots of random mutations, then checked for versions that would latch on to a chemical that was somewhat structurally related to the normal sugar used in DNA. After a couple rounds of this, they had an enzyme that could copy stretches of DNA into pieces of a nucleic acid that contained nothing but this sugar substitute, converting the DNA into an artificial chemical relative.
Using similar procedures, the same enzyme could be adapted to a wide variety of chemicals related to sugars. The authors picked five in total, all with features that were distinct from the normal sugars, like a double bond between carbon atoms, a fluorine replacing an oxygen, and a double-ring structure. Collectively, they termed these DNA/RNA substitutes XNAs.
Animals came from DNAs, plants from RNAs, and now with XNAs, the question of when we’ll meet aliens is finally answered… we don’t have to look to skies, we are making them right here on Earth in our labs. Exciting.
Source: Ars Technica
Lust object.
Manipulating human emotions at will is art… but these guys just might turn it into science. Incredible, Ghost in the shell seemed so far away until now. The future is going to be so much fun.
The future of social networks. The future of our human race.
This realization came to me sometime last year while I was talking about fractals and how the larger fractals are merely composed of scaled-rotated versions of itself (recursion). We can see this in our daily life - something as massive as our solar system is in fact, made of atoms that have the same structure as the solar system - bodies rotating and revolving around a central mass. In simple terms, everything (of course, trees look nothing like atoms but I’ll talk about it another day) in our universe is a mirror image of the most basic elements that it is made of.
The talk (with @praveenvasudev) soon turned to social networks and it struck me that the same fractal behavior applies here too - social networks will evolve to resemble their most basic element. What is the social network’s most basic element? Easy - social networks enable communication and the most basic element of communication is our own nervous system. This leads me to believe that if we map out social networks and all the interconnections, we’ll simply be looking at a mirror image of our own nervous system.
[Image via dapla, which shows the same fractal nature that we talk about in this post, that is inherent to all things in our universe. Here the image compares how galaxies have the same structure as mouse brain neurons.]
What does this mean? This means that social networks are the next step in human evolution - in about 500 years, there will no longer be ‘you’ or ‘they’. There is only one - ‘I’. The entire planet will be one single mind. This is the final stage in the cycle of life, imo. Full circle, or rather, spiral. Life started from a single cell and we are going back to it - a single cell(metaphorically), albeit at a completely different scale. Fractals, once again.
This leads me to other conclusions:
- Privacy will be dead. Everyone is jacked into everyone else 24/7/365. Everyone knows everything about everyone. For instance, your hand holds no secrets from your brain, what your hand knows will be shared with your brain. There is also the concept of ‘relevancy’ which covers how not everything the brain knows will be shared with the hand but I’ll detail it later.
- The future will no longer have corporations of any kind. Why? Corporations, i.e., large groups of people working together, cannot keep up with the rapidly increasing pace of change. We already see it today - there’s more and more startups than ever before as large companies cannot move that fast. As we progress towards ‘One mind’, the change of pace will be so fast that even today’s 3-man and 5-man lean startups can’t keep up as the fastest pace will be set by the 1-man team. Anyone forming a team will lose to the ‘One mind’ ensuring that in the end only the ‘One mind’ survives. That’s how there’ll be no more corporations or even teams, only individuals who have no individuality, communicating and working with billions of other similar individuals who collectively form the ‘One mind’.
- Our currency will be energy.
- No more reproduction. Not sure if we’ll even have limbs and torsos.
If you think about it, we’ve seen similar stuff before but in slightly different and less fantastic flavors - Ghost in the Shell’s Stand Alone Complex phenomenon as well as the humans plugged into The Matrix are the most famous examples I can think of.
There’s more to explore, like how I can log-in/jack-in to someone else’s brain and take over his conscious mind, etc. Again, remember that ‘I’ and ‘someone else’ no longer exist as the entire human race is now one mind, all people are jacked in to each other in the social network and thus there is no more ‘identity’ for anyone anymore - everyone’s one and the same person. But I give up some accuracy here, to make it easier to understand.
I’ll make updates and edits to this post, as I learn more, understand more, discover more and find ways to clarify stuff more. All this sounds too fantastic? Maybe, but so was landing on the moon, a 1000 years ago.
