schizoscience

schizoscience OP t1_iz2a4up wrote

Reply to comment by Mr_Nicotine in Biopunk: Or, what can we reasonably expect out of rock, wood, flesh and bone? by schizoscience

There is a quote from J.B.S. Haldane's Daedalus that I have always liked a lot:

>The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
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>Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow.
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>No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.

So yes, I would definitely agree that there is a certain "yuck factor" that people tend to ascribe to biotechnology. I don't know if it's necessarily because we see bodies as "projections of consciousness," but there is definitely a predisposition to see life as somehow being sacred and inviolable. Still, as Haldane says, we have grown highly accustomed to utilizing the tools of life for a lot of things. Milking a cow, producing wine and beer through fermentation, even agriculture itself...

So if biotechnology proves its usefulness, and is shown to have significant advantages relative to other approaches to achieve specific things, people most likely will get used to it sooner or later in my opinion.

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schizoscience OP t1_iz15hbq wrote

Reply to Biopunk: Or, what can we reasonably expect out of rock, wood, flesh and bone? by schizoscience

Futurism and science fiction have traditionally given comparatively less importance to biotechnology and the biological sciences, preferring instead to focus on other fields such as artificial intelligence and space exploration. In this article, I explore the potential of a "biopunk" world, where the fields that have traditionally constituted the main focus of futurism progress only modestly while the biological sciences and biotechnology progress tremendously. This is not exactly an effort at prediction, but merely an exploration of a distinct set of possibilities. My intent was to explore the limits of what can be achieved relying on life and biological and bio-inspired systems alone. Topics discussed in the article include:

  • Biological nanotechnology (using DNA and proteins as biological nanobots), which I believe to be built on a stronger chemical foundation than the classical "Drexlerian" view of nanotechnology.
  • Organic electronics and biological information processing systems (DNA computing) and others.
  • Potential applications of biotechnologies to architecture and transportation
  • "Conventional" uses of biotechnology (for medicine, food production, etc), discussed more briefly because I wanted to focus on less talked-about ideas.
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