Saturday, May 17, 2008

Life 2.0













Do not to be mistaken. This is not about the cyberworld called Second Life. It's a scientific development I saw at the National Geographic channel lately. Just zapping around, I paused my remote controlled activity (there's not much life in me to be discovered this late at night....) at a documentary about the everlasting challenge to explain the origin of life. The question was: "How did life start?". The answer surprised me...

The beginning of life is hard to explain. So in the end, as you may have expected, the documentary did not answer the question itself, but ended up with another point of view. A number of researchers being interviewed, claimed that within a lifetime men will be able to create life. Now that the full strains of human DNA are becoming more clear, and almost all the elements necessary to create life are known, the question is no longer 'how did life start?', but 'how can we start life?'. A new life form can (and will) be created by men. Still unknowing what kind of life we will be able to create, we find ourselves racing against the clock. What will be the first life from ready to take over our place: "Life 2.0" or a massive invasion of bio-chipped computers?

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