Editing Talk:Science in the Re-imagined Series/Archive 1
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*I have no opinion as to how anything DOES work in this part of the story, mainly because I think that there is no explanation for it other than dramatic license -no matter what RDM says. He studied political sciences, his knowledge of natural science is -as many comments show- quite limited. | *I have no opinion as to how anything DOES work in this part of the story, mainly because I think that there is no explanation for it other than dramatic license -no matter what RDM says. He studied political sciences, his knowledge of natural science is -as many comments show- quite limited. | ||
*Nanomachines aren't technobabble. They are a means to an end that is being heavily pursued by researchers as we write these pages. As the books I linked above show, in parallel to manufacturing obstacles including logistics being solved, people are anticipating possible medical uses and strategies to overcome obstacles in the achieving of the actual effect. They are pure, honest-to-god hard science-fiction, and only in that as of now, our clean room nanotechnology is just in development. | *Nanomachines aren't technobabble. They are a means to an end that is being heavily pursued by researchers as we write these pages. As the books I linked above show, in parallel to manufacturing obstacles including logistics being solved, people are anticipating possible medical uses and strategies to overcome obstacles in the achieving of the actual effect. They are pure, honest-to-god hard science-fiction, and only in that as of now, our clean room nanotechnology is just in development. | ||
*Stem cells have a big advantage: They can do anything a regular cell can do. Stem cells also have a big disadvantage: They can do anything a regular cell can do. From that spectrum of possibilities arrives the problem of regulation. And regulation is a pain. The more your tool can do, the more you have | *Stem cells have a big advantage: They can do anything a regular cell can do. Stem cells also have a big disadvantage: They can do anything a regular cell can do. From that spectrum of possibilities arrives the problem of regulation. And regulation is a pain. The more your tool can do, the more you work you have cut out for you that it does specifically what you want it to do and not something else. Especially in the body, where a whole lot of other signals that the cell is equipped to listen to because it ''is'' a cell, it would be next to impossible to have the cells follow a specific course of action. Nanomachines on the other hand are a)specialists and b)oblivious to the signalling by hormones or other subtance gradients unless specifically designed to respond to them. | ||
*Merovingians comments regarding using DNA like the english alphabet have a couple of problems: As Merovingian states, the english alphabet has 26 letters. The DNA alphabet has four. It's not an issue of the alphabet alone, however, but also of word size. The word size in the English language is variable, meaning a whole lot of different words can be constructed. The DNA word size is fixed at three. This limits the "meaning" to a very limited and defined set of possibilities. Now, of course we could draw up an alternative way of using the same concept, with more letters, or different word sizes. However, the consequence would be that whatever is the outcome of this is less related to us than every single lifeform we know of, from other primates to the "lowliest" bacteria. We could categorically rule out any conception of children, since the sets of genomes would require totally distinct "reading systems". The only viable alternative would be to reduce redundancy, the way amino acids have been added, or added frequency, over the course of evolution. However, redundancy also is a safeguard against effects of mutations -if the mutation doesn't make a difference, then there can be no harmful effect. So if we reduce redundancy, we increase susceptibility to mutations. | *Merovingians comments regarding using DNA like the english alphabet have a couple of problems: As Merovingian states, the english alphabet has 26 letters. The DNA alphabet has four. It's not an issue of the alphabet alone, however, but also of word size. The word size in the English language is variable, meaning a whole lot of different words can be constructed. The DNA word size is fixed at three. This limits the "meaning" to a very limited and defined set of possibilities. Now, of course we could draw up an alternative way of using the same concept, with more letters, or different word sizes. However, the consequence would be that whatever is the outcome of this is less related to us than every single lifeform we know of, from other primates to the "lowliest" bacteria. We could categorically rule out any conception of children, since the sets of genomes would require totally distinct "reading systems". The only viable alternative would be to reduce redundancy, the way amino acids have been added, or added frequency, over the course of evolution. However, redundancy also is a safeguard against effects of mutations -if the mutation doesn't make a difference, then there can be no harmful effect. So if we reduce redundancy, we increase susceptibility to mutations. | ||
*All the mechanisms listed by Merovingian above exist, of course. But they exist as part of a complex network of regulatory mechanisms that makes it practically impossible to say "Well, if we throw this switch, then this, and only this will happen". The effect is illustrated by the fact that most of these mechanisms can also be involved in [[Wikipedia:Carcinogenesis|Carcinogenesis]]. So repercussions of fiddling here are not limited, but can in fact be quite major. This leads to the key problem I am trying to address: | *All the mechanisms listed by Merovingian above exist, of course. But they exist as part of a complex network of regulatory mechanisms that makes it practically impossible to say "Well, if we throw this switch, then this, and only this will happen". The effect is illustrated by the fact that most of these mechanisms can also be involved in [[Wikipedia:Carcinogenesis|Carcinogenesis]]. So repercussions of fiddling here are not limited, but can in fact be quite major. This leads to the key problem I am trying to address: | ||