On 12 May 1996, Ken Clements wrote:
> (In 1971, when I was a university student, I proposed a research project that
> involved putting a chloroplast in a frog egg to see if a photosynthetic frog would
> result. Not that I expected much energy to be gathered this way, but I wanted to
> explore the endo symbiosis. My advisor was not amused.)
Too bad. What was his argument against the experiment?
> For the most part, nanochondria would not need to be as numerous. However, they
> would probably need to be about as small (1000 nm long) so as not to bother things
> in the cell. This indicates to me that they would have to do major distributed
> computation in order to have useful effects.
Do mitochondria need distributed computation? No, they just react on local conditions and indirectly cooperate. Of course, having linked nanochondria will be much more versatile.
> Short range acoustic wave
> communication should do the job and provide very large bandwidth as well or single
> electron pipes used as wires could run among them. (This would make anyone a
> walking internet with, perhaps, 10^13 stations.)
It might be hard to make those pipes reliable; normal cells seem to be subject to plenty of shaking and mixing, so they would have to rebuild all the time (like microtubuli?).
> Back on the mechanistic side, nanochondria could be used to xerox yourself. This
> could be carried out many ways. One way is to have the nanochondria linearize you.
Sounds unnnecessarily complex and dangerous (what if a small bird thinks the string is a young spider out flying?). Wouldn't it be simpler just to find the necessary amount of nutrients and melt down over it, forming a kind of chrysalis eventually releasing two copies.
> I suspect that posting this will bring on a flood of negitive comments because when
> the press sees things like this they go nuts demonstrating that we are nuts.
Speculation should never stop because of concerns for what others think or say.
On the other hand, it might be a good idea to separate strict science and speculative science somewhat. Maybe one could add a "wildness rating" to postings as a part of moderation?
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.htmlGCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
[For those interested in serious technical postings only, I maintain a separate mailing list which is a selected subset of the messages. --JoSH]