Just thought I'd quickly drop in and leave this tidbit of information and a link to an interesting TedTalk.
"[A]s science continues to reveal how life works, we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not [is] actually created by complex interacting molecular machines. These microscopic machines are as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch, but instead of being run on gears and springs, are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry. Our understanding of the precise coiling and uncoiling of the DNA molecule, or the way that one molecule can literally walk almost robotically along the tightrope of another molecule, continue to show us again and again, this molecular clockwork is real and pervasive.
Now what's most unsettling to me about this is that we didn't build these machines. As someone originally trained as an engineer, I've got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this. As the most clever species on the planet, we kind of like to think of ourselves as the builders of the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe. We invented written language and the printing press. We cured polio and sent a man to the moon. Heck, we even took savage beasts and turned them into kittens, and then built a global communications network to share pictures of them. That's pretty impressive.
And yet when I look through a microscope at a humble bacterium -- by the way its ancestors were on the planet a billion years ago, billions of years ago -- I still wonder how it really works. Because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we've ever built. It is biological gears and springs, but they fill rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscope landscape that's bustling with activity.
On the one hand it's extremely well organized, but on the other hand the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well-organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel that I've stumbled onto an alternate landscape of technology that's built by an engineer a million times smarter than me. The more that I search for principles beyond the ones we've already learned, the more I am overwhelmed with the feeling that this stuff was built by aliens.
OK, not literally. I don't literally mean that I think little green men and women came down to the earth and seeded life here a billion years ago. What we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years. But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved.
What if life has good engineering principles and we just haven't figured them out yet? Could studying biology give us the ability to extract new engineering principles that maybe then we could use to solve the world's intractable problems? Our experiments only give us glimpses into what happens in these tiny spaces, but what happens there has huge implication for the future, in the 21st century, and beyond."
"[A]s science continues to reveal how life works, we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not [is] actually created by complex interacting molecular machines. These microscopic machines are as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch, but instead of being run on gears and springs, are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry. Our understanding of the precise coiling and uncoiling of the DNA molecule, or the way that one molecule can literally walk almost robotically along the tightrope of another molecule, continue to show us again and again, this molecular clockwork is real and pervasive.
Now what's most unsettling to me about this is that we didn't build these machines. As someone originally trained as an engineer, I've got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this. As the most clever species on the planet, we kind of like to think of ourselves as the builders of the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe. We invented written language and the printing press. We cured polio and sent a man to the moon. Heck, we even took savage beasts and turned them into kittens, and then built a global communications network to share pictures of them. That's pretty impressive.
And yet when I look through a microscope at a humble bacterium -- by the way its ancestors were on the planet a billion years ago, billions of years ago -- I still wonder how it really works. Because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we've ever built. It is biological gears and springs, but they fill rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscope landscape that's bustling with activity.
On the one hand it's extremely well organized, but on the other hand the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well-organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel that I've stumbled onto an alternate landscape of technology that's built by an engineer a million times smarter than me. The more that I search for principles beyond the ones we've already learned, the more I am overwhelmed with the feeling that this stuff was built by aliens.
OK, not literally. I don't literally mean that I think little green men and women came down to the earth and seeded life here a billion years ago. What we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years. But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved.
What if life has good engineering principles and we just haven't figured them out yet? Could studying biology give us the ability to extract new engineering principles that maybe then we could use to solve the world's intractable problems? Our experiments only give us glimpses into what happens in these tiny spaces, but what happens there has huge implication for the future, in the 21st century, and beyond."
