TWICE IN ONE LIFETIME

I’m not a scientist nor a man of transcendent intellect, yet, in my lifetime, I find my convictions about the future coming true.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet on this Blog, but when I was a young man in my teen's, I was following the rocket sled rides of Colonel Stapp. Life magazine printed photos of his face distorted by wind and acceleration. I was fascinated and also began to read about high altitude experiments and rocket powered flights to the edge of space. I took in the flawed movie, Destination Moon, with wide open mouth. By the time, I graduated from high school in 1955, I was certain that we’d soon be flying to the Moon.

Then I joined the Navy and went to Fleet Sonar School in Key West, Florida in 1956, and I recall telling my mates about how I believed we’d soon be on the Moon. It was Bible-belt southern accents which laughed at me in those days just as they laugh today when I speak of creating life in a test tube. Yet, I’m as certain that humankind will be creating life from inanimate chemicals sometime within the next 50 years as I was of space flight in 1955. It may well happen before I die, depending how much longer I have to live.

E.O. Wilson mentions in his book, CONSILIENCE, that scientists have been charged with finding “cures for cancer, genetic disease and viral infection”, and he affirms, strongly, that they will succeed because they are well-funded and motivated to succeed. They will succeed. The irony is that in order to cure these genetic malfunctions, science must come to grip with the basics of life. They’ll be dealing with the origins of life in order to save those lives. They’ll know how to make the inanimate animate.

On page 91 of CONSILIENCE, Wilson notes the relative simplicity of making life compared to the theory of relativity, “Putting a living cell together will be a Moon shot, not an Einsteinian revolution of space and time.”

Also on page 91, Wilson sees, “[Biologists] have refined reductionism into a high art and begun to achieve partial synthesis at the level of molecule and organelle. Even if complete cells and organisms are still beyond them, they know they can reconstruct some of the elements one at a time. They foresee no need for overarching grand explanations as a prerequisite for creating artificial life. An organism is a machine, and the laws of physics and chemistry, most believe, are enough to do the job, given sufficient time and research funding.”

On page 93, Wilson notes, “Scientists foresee early solutions to the self-assembly of finished cells into tissue and whole multicellular organism.”

This is the strange part. Those who see the modern future and the creation of life are as far beyond their god-fearing counterparts as those few who knew that the Earth circled the Sun in Galileo’s time. And here’s another insight. In a humble way, in order to fully embrace the future, humankind must take the god mantle onto its own shoulders. Those still in the thrall of god/kings can never be free enough of their self-imposed fears and limitations to walk into the ever uncertain future. Almost universally except for a few exceptions, in order to even comprehend science and live in the future, one must be agnostic or atheist.
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"I like life. It's something to do." —Ronnie Shakes (Who is Ronnie Shakes?)