The Edge Annual Question - 2009 "WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?"

[urkotic]

I like these annual opportunities for folks with big brains to hold forth. The topic this year is "What Will Change Everything?" - or more descriptively: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Read many many responses here.

New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.
And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.
Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.
Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn't want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.
Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.

 

[trilithium]

What I think will change everything in a big hurry is Bee's, or lack there of. If we can't figure out what is killing all the bee's worldwide we're in for a hell of a ride very very soon.

 

[Kevin Daly]

I like these annual opportunities for folks with big brains to hold forth. The topic this year is "What Will Change Everything?" - or more descriptively: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Read many many responses here.

Venter is an attention whore. Given how little we know about the the species that exist already and the fine details of their interactions (witness the disappearing bees), creating new forms of life has to be a candidate for Not Particularly Bright Idea. Not to mention the er, practical side of intellectual masturbation.

I hope someone does make it back to the Moon before too long, because apart from the coolness of it I'd like to see a monument to the human race erected there with the words "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" to sum up the way we've approached everything.