Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Lahnger
I was reading about how one of the synthetic self-replicating organisms they're trying to create is a little "bacteria-like" being that would eat oil slicks in the ocean and then die out after a limited life cycle. Sounds pretty sensible to me.
Oh, and I take issue with the statement "Just look how we've messed everything up with everything else we've made" How have artificial hearts harmed the world? The Polio vaccine? Yo-yo's? Broadway plays? Poetry? Windmills? Table Tennis? Beer? And I could go on and on and on ...
You my friend, need to not let the very real negative things that man has done obscure your vision of the good things man has done ... and the wondrous.
Here's a completely different science fact to make you happy. When the Apollo missions were landing on the moon, they left a mirror on the surface. They now can measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon to a degree of accuracy they could not achieve before ... by bouncing a light off of that mirror and measuring how long it takes to come back to Earth. And that is how we now know that the Moon is moving 1.5 inches away from the Earth each year!
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Sorry I should have worded that better:
Just look at all the other things we've messed up.
DNA is one of the most complex things known to man, and we are still having trouble mastering simpler things. Imagine if that oil slick consuming bacteria is botched in some way and instead of stopping at oil in the oceans it continues onto all the other oil it can gain access to, I'm not sure exactly how that bacteria would work but it is possible. It took years to develop the bacteria used to produce somthing as simple as insullin.
Look at all the problems that arose when we discovered radioactivity and jumped all over it, we ended up with a bunch of people having to be burried in lead caskets, and a radioactive cookbook.