Comments by "roidroid" (@roidroid) on "The radical possibilities of man-made DNA | Floyd E. Romesberg" video.

  1. re: The Q&A at the end. Just want to correct something: Evolution does not at all suggest that life out there in the universe would be using DNA with 4 or 6 letters. This is not a new thing. When TED owner Chris walks onstage to ask this question after the talk, he seems to think this is some kinda change to how we understand life & evolution. IT'S NOT. This is not a change. Infact, science already had a robust understanding of evolution long before we had even discovered Chromosomes or DNA (let alone that it has 4 letters). All that evolution suggests on the matter is that if there's other naturally occuring life out there in the universe, it must have evolved, and to be able to evolve it must have some form of data storage . It likely won't be DNA like ours, it might not even be stored inside cells, it just has to be some way to store/edit/copy information . That's it. And the very end Floyd suggests that we may find life out there that doesn't even have DNA (by which i think he means it won't have a way of storing data at all). That's pretty dubious, if we ever found something like that then we probably wouldn't categorize it as "life". There are many things on earth that already fit that bill, many chemical reactions (eg: sped-up footage of metals rusting) do look & act very much like they're alive in some way, but they aren't. The main reason we know they're not alive is because there is no data storage at play, there is thus no way for it to evolve. At it's base level, "life" is really just a specific sub-category of chemistry, it's chemistry that has a way of storing/editing/copying data . All chemistry isn't life. If chemistry doesn't do this - it's not life. That's not to say it's automatically unimportant & not worthy of protection & respect. It might be it's own new category of chemistry. (ps: "DNA" is just shorthand for the chemical name Deoxyribonucleic Acid, the chemical our biology uses to store our genetic information. But since alien biology would likely store it's genetic information using other chemicals, we wouldn't call it "DNA", it'll have a different name)
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