While the question of just how non-living chemical reactions can result in a living
cell is still unanswered, another avenue of exploring the concept of abiogenesis is progressing,
and holds potentials above and beyond merely understanding the process in which abiogenesis
occurs.
This is the concept of synthetic life, and this field offers the possibility that while
we may never meet an alien in space, we may defacto meet something like one in a laboratory
here on earth.
And we may do that very soon.
In 2010 the world’s first synthetic life form was created, though that may have been
an overstatement.
It wasn’t created from scratch, but rather was a kind of parts microorganism made from
new manufacture DNA and bits of other microbes.
It’s probably better to term it an artificial species.
What the scientists did was created a completely new and artificial genetic code and then inject
it into a preexistent cell.
This was actually a bit dangerous, because what if such a thing happened to escape into
the environment?
And it was even encoded with markers just in case it did, and we’d know it.
The value of this work was enormous, number one it can help answer the question of the
minimum number of genes needed for viable life to function on, and it can also open
up the door for the novel manufacture of vaccines, chemicals and so on by artificial species
designed to synthesize them.
It also opens the way for creating truly artificial life that cannot have come to be solely by
nature itself, whether on an alien planet or here.
Imagine improved life over what nature itself exhibits.
I can imagine the pandora’s box this video will open in the comments, but the reality
is that life as we know it on earth is not perfectly designed.
A fine example of this is the most common carbohydrate on earth and humans.
While we may have amazing brains for this world, we don’t have amazing digestive systems
and we can’t digest cellulose, in other words, we can’t eat wood despite the ability
both being of great evolutionary advantage if we could, and there being a host of organisms
on this world including the termite that can.
A termite in a forest does not go hungry, but a human can, especially in winter.
But there are others.
We can’t drink the vast majority of water on this world because it’s sea water.
We can’t survive long in Antarctica without a coat and so on, we only have what we needed
to continue to reproduce, but we are not optimal creatures for our environment other than our
ability to create technology to get past the problems that our deficiencies create, such
as a need for central heating in our homes, which is something that all animals when in
their natural habitat don’t need.
Rabbits do not start fires for warmth, nor do temperature sensitive crocodiles fashion
jackets and stylish cold weather gear out of their prey.
Rather life makes do and everything lives within their respective environments, except
us, we no longer live in a gorge in Africa because we can invent and move outward.
But the reality is, most of us live in climates or areas that are entirely dependent on technology
to be liveable.
Without the central heating, or before that fire, we’d have a problem in cold climates
given that we’re a warm climate species.
But genetically speaking, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to alter ourselves so we could
by adding enough hair and some natural anti-freeze, which some life on earth actually has actually
developed.
It’s been said that for us to truly colonize a place like Mars, we will need to alter our
genetics to be more suited to that planet, given that in nature we’re only suited for
a small fraction of our own garden world, much less Mars.
We may actually have to go so far with this that the altered humans bred to live on Mars
would no longer be homo sapiens sapiens, but a new subspecies, entirely created artificially.
While a true, unambiguous case of the creation of artificial life from scratch has yet to
come along.
Work on protocells, non-living precursors to cells is ongoing.
But we have created artificial cells that do not exist in nature, but it might be more
correct to term them artificially altered cells.
As to the former, that’s usually termed synthetic life rather than artificial, and
would involve an organism made from the ground up that could capture energy, contain information
storing capabilities, and the other hallmarks of a living cell.
We’re not there yet, and it probably lies in the distant future.
And there’s another option, a cell so synthetic that it’s made entirely from non-biological
materials that nature may or may not use, meaning a kind of synthetic microbial robot,
at least of sorts.
This blurs a line with nanotechnology, but would still mimic a living cell’s function
and design, just perhaps with better materials than nature provides.
The other top down approach has been achieved by the 2010 cell.
However more recent work in this area.
In 2016 scientists were able to edit the genome of a microorganism that had 482 genes naturally,
but they were able to remove 100 of those and streamline its DNA.
The organism saw an improved growth rate to its wild counterpart, and subsequently it
was also done for E. Coli.
Even further was the creation of an artificial cell of sorts by emptying a cell membrane
of its DNA, but leaving other components and inserting completely artificially created
DNA.
This organism was of particular interest because it’s actually able to replicate.
This may be the first instance of a truly self-replicating piece of von Neumann style
technology produced by humans.
Within a medical context, things sometimes called artificial cells are already developed,
but they aren’t cells in the living sense, but mimic some functions of cells in order
to deliver drugs.
There is a bright future for the further development of these technologies in everything from pain
management to pancreatic cancer, one of the most notoriously difficult to treat forms.
So the science of the cell goes both ways, in nature it allows us to understand life
and diseases like cancer, but can also be turned into treatments for diseases on a microscopic
scale.
But the idea of creating entirely artificial DNA has implications far beyond microorganisms.
That technology allows for custom genomes that can do all sorts of things.
You could make entire animals that don’t exist in nature, think carrot trees, microzebras,
the rhinocat and other abominations.
This also would hold profound possibilities for deextinction.
One reason we can’t easily bring back species of dinosaur is because the DNA is gone.
DNA has trouble lasting a hundred years in a specimen, asking for it out of a 66 plus
million year old fossilized dinosaur bone is a step too far and the information left
in the birds is incomplete.
But that’s not to say tissue can’t survive, in recent years a number of reports of surviving
dinosaur soft tissue being found in dissolved fossils have been made.
But if you have a sufficiently complete understanding of DNA, its function, and how the information
contained creates a complete organism, you could probably reconstruct a dinosaur’s
genome and perhaps even create one from scratch in the far future.
3d printing out a velociraptor may not be something anyone ever does, but it might give
us insight in modeling alien life and what it might be like.
Also within this work we are likely to find insights into how abiogenesis occurred, and
we may have a clue from an obscure mysterious experiment done a long time ago.
In the 1950’s researchers in India were working with synthesizing amino acids using
sunlight as the energy source.
By 1963, they were working with a complex chemical soup under constant agitation in
sunlight and something surprising happened.
Within the mixture microscopic spherules formed that showed some of the functions of life,
in fact it was initially reported as life and as an artificial abiogenesis.
Scientists were skeptical of this, and it cast a pall on the research, and it’s since
been shown that they were not alive, but they were something close to it, and were clearly
related to life in some way.
Called Jeewanu, which is sanskrit for particles of life, these spherules can more accurately
be called a protocell rather than a proper cell.
They resemble life in that they have amino acids, sugars, the building blocks of DNA,
phospholipids, carbohydrates and even a semi-permeable membrane.
They were even reported to reproduce by budding, but couldn’t be cultured like microorganisms.
This has interesting implications in that other experiments such as the famous miller-urey
experiment required a strong energy source like electricity to simulate lightning in
early earth’s atmosphere, but in this experiment seemingly far more than the building blocks
of life were achieved simply by using sunlight, though one wonders about the strength of the
sun’s light during abiogenesis compared to today, which was something on the order
of 30 percent weaker.
This report would show that you can get close to life with the right chemicals and some
sunlight, and if the path from protocells to actual cells can be identified, then there’s
one method for abiogenesis, and on its face it seems straightforward and we could then
speculate comfortably that the universe must teem with microbial life.
Some followup work has been done on these experiments, in 2013 another team repeated
the work and found that the Jeewanu protocells do indeed occur and in that experiment showed
RNA like material in the protocells, which ticks a box for the RNA world hypothesis.
In this case abiogenesis occurs in sunlight straightforwardly with the right chemicals
and that then sets the stage for the development of RNA inside protocells, which eventually
leads to DNA and life arises.
While this would answer the question of abiogenesis, it also has somewhat spooky implications.
If it’s so easy, then why the great silence?
It gets worse if we detect independent abiogensis of microbial life on Mars, Venus, Enceladus,
Europa or anywhere else in the solar system.
If it’s so easy, then where are the aliens as Enrico Fermi famously asked.
It could be so simple as a great filter, a fine candidate being the leap from prokaryotic
to eukaryotic life having taken so long on earth, over a billion years.
It may be a great filter that makes complex life rare.
But recent work seems to suggest that it’s actually not that hard of a filter, so there
is another possibility.
It’s a great filter that lies in front of all technologically advanced civilizations.
That something we will do in the future causes our extinction, or even the extinction of
all life on our world.
It may even be something we do not foresee, a mistake waiting for us and all civilizations
in the galaxy where some advanced technology in the future takes a path that no one foresaw
and extinction comes upon us without us ever seeing it coming.
Food for thought indeed.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently sleepy from editing
my own audio!
Yes it even happens to me and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book
retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular in depth explorations into the interesting,
weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we sleeep.