Talk:Synthetic life

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Definition of Synthetic Life

Is there a distinction between life that is entirely synthetic versus life that has come into existence by use of biological materials and synthetic means? It seems to me that the UK group has made the later. The cellular machinery and membrane belonged to a naturally occurring organism. Only its chromosome and thereby DNA is synthetic. While this DNA will change the cell into a new organism, making it the first synthetic species, I think it is misleading to call this synthetic life. It is my understanding that there is a project to develop the first fully synthetic cell by producing the proteins, lipid belayed, and organelles as well as genetic material from "scratch" by means of advanced organic chemistry. But I may have just been confused with the UK group's work. I make this distinction not out of an argument for the "natural vitality" theory but rather to demonstrate the practical differences. If we achieve truly synthetic life, we will have much more creative freedom and fewer functional limitations on engineering custom life forms than with synthetically created life that requires the parts of other organisms for their genesis. So maybe that distinction should be made in this article. Goodleh 00:05, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, there's a potentially huge grey area between biological and synthetic life. If you make a cell out of material that's been generated by genetically modified bacteria, for instance, is it synthetic or biological? It's more of a philosophical question than anything else. Can anyone find any references that talk about this? That would be the best way to address this ambiguity. --Numsgil 01:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wet alife merge

Please discuss.

I do not see justification for a seperate article. The most pressing form of synthetic life is wet alife.

Nanobots, Self replicating machines and Artificial intelligence are distinct concepts. Wet alife appears to be synthetic life without any other context.--ZayZayEM (talk) 06:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Wet alife is synthetic life that's otherwise identical in nature to biological life. That is, the stuff that wet alife makes is a subset of the stuff that could be considered alive, and created by artificial means. Synthetic life is the broader term for anything that could be considered alive, whether it's in silicon, in vitro, or some weird combination of the two. The two ideas are definately distinct. --Numsgil (talk) 00:47, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Calling a simulator system "artificial life" does not vest it with life. Still I agree with the merge, and please find some references to go with it. BatteryIncluded (talk) 02:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

That's entirely what this page is (or should be) about. The definition of life as presently accepted entirely denies something like a computer program from being considered "alive". But there's certainly a motif in science fiction about life forms which are in silico (that is, computer based instead of biologically based). The article shouldn't (and doesn't, hoepfully) make any claims about what is and is not alive, or could be alive. Rather, it discusses (hopefully with some links in the future, I know it's rather Spartan) the different attitudes and ideas about this sort of thing in science and fiction. At the moment, it has a strong slant towards wet alife, because there are lots of links about current research you can find pretty easily, but the in silico stuff has to go somewhere, becuase it sure doesn't belong in the Artificial life article, which is where it was originally. Which is why this page exists at all. If we want to make the wet alife article a link to a section in this article, or move the wet alife content in to the actual wet alife article, I'd be fine with that. But the two concepts are different. You can't just merge the two pages. --Numsgil (talk) 08:12, 13 April 2008 (UTC)