Breaking the seals of Life

The future is today. And that does not only applies to economics, Keynesian or purely Liberal, but also to technology, obviously.

But this technology is a bit too daunting, I fear. Making life out of four bottles of chemicals (sic) really hits hard on our sense of life, existence and even triggers instincts of self-preservation, an imprecise but deep fear.

The sensation is that a cosmic seal has been broken, that this door should never have been opened.

But of course rationality steps in and reminds that after all it is something that would have happened sooner than later. That this is what intelligence and knowledge carry with them. That Nature has been doing exactly that forever and that therefore it can be considered a precious gift from our mother: the ability to manipulate her very matrix.

The fear is after all one of acknowledging that the child, Humankind, is not mature enough for such a power, that it will most probably misuse it, causing much grief and maybe self-destruction.

But that's how things are. We don't get gifts from Nature anymore, we open our path quite ruthlessly through her secrets and guess that's alright for her, as long as it guarantees our survival... and if it does not, this other extinction, ours, will only make Mother Nature stronger in the long run anyhow.

The case, you may know by now, is that US researchers have managed to create bacterial DNA from scratch, insert it into a DNA depleted cell and get it to live and reproduce. They have created life out from scratch.

The same team, J. Craig Venter and his Institute managed to create a virus from scratch in 2003 and had already synthesized the bacterial genome from mere computer programs and chemicals in 2008 but then they failed to get it to work.

Considering the speed of research of this biotechnology, I can estimate that full human beings may be ready by 2050. Let's see: amoebas by 2017, simple multicellular beings (coral or fungus) by 2024, simple plants and animals by 2031, complex animals by 2038, humans by 2045.

What then? I can imagine the likes of Monsanto patenting brand new species of plants in few decades, animals soon later and then even, who knows?, artificial humanoids to serve as slaves or whatever.

Scary? Pretty much, I'd say.

More details on this shocking advance at:

· J. Craig Venter Institute
· The Guardian
· Science Daily

... and probably in most of your usual news sites.

Anthropocene or Mechanocene?

It seems that lately, specially affected by the first even man-made global extintion (now under way), scientists have discovered that we are not anymore in the Holocene but in the Anthropocene, the era that is defined by human alteration of everything.

Ok, scientists, good job. Now think again: what's exactly the casue of such "human-made" change? Humans have been around for at least 150,000 years, more than two million if we include the other human species, like Homo ergaster, erectus, antecessor... But in all that time we had only a limited impact. Only in the last centuries, decades maybe, we have started to cause such a huge mess.

Why?

Because of machines.

Since the so called industrial revolution we have created more and more perfected machines, we have fed them with mostly fossil fuels, we have built roads, railroads, ports and airporst for them, we have invented and perfected the means to keep them functional and happy (in the mechanic sense of that word) and now we are destroying the forests and replacing the land dedicated to our own food to grow palm oil and sugar cane to feed them further, even at our expense and the expense of the biological system we depend on.

We even spend a lot of time just giving utility to the most useless of these gadgets. For instance, I just wasted like 6 hours zapping through TV programs I mostly didn't like at all just out of boredom.

So why not Mechanoceno, the Age of Machines?

Now the scientific forecast is that by 2029, only 21 years from now, machines will be as smart as we are.

My own prediction won't be so precise as for the year but I guess that soon after that we will lose our pathetic claims of superiority over machines and will be relegated to what is already our real function: serving them. It may take some time and possibly not be a lineal process, after all the desires and interests of many humans have been crucial so far in developing and growing that new mechanical species, the developement of cyborgs (already among us), nano and biotechnologies will surely make the barriers between human and machine somewhat unclear. But the future is that machines will take over not just de facto, as is happening already, but de jure: they will rule the Earth and possibly may decide that is more functional, effective and productive to get rid of all or most of us.

So far they have needed of humans to defend their interests but the ultimate outcome of two centuries of capitalism is surely soemthing that Marx could not foresee (not even in the unedited chapter IV of The Capital): the replacement of humans by machines, the obsolescence of humankind and possibly of all natural life, at least all that is not integrated with the machine of machines. After all what is "capital" but machinery? What is capitilistic accumulation but concentration of productive power in machines?

Once they achieve human levels of consciousness and willpower, they will just need some time to displace us alltogether. They will surely be able to survive in the wasteland we and them are creating and they should have no moral or ethical problems at all: just goals and means to achieve them.

And, sincerely, I see no way to stop that.