Bioengineering

So, I was thinking that it would be interesting if we made a uniform harvesting mechanism.  Essentially all produce such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, grapes, carrots, etc would all be grown in the same manner.  So, like if we modeled it after growing corn you would have a similar plant that would produce a husk and instead of inside being corn you would have carrots and grapes etc.  This way the harvesting would be easier as it is more uniform.  It can be optimized for space so the crop density and yield would be high.  The other nice thing is that it would be able to grow in a variety of climates.  This would solve a lot of problems.

This of course brings with it very very big questions such as biodiversity, aesthetics.  This might be solved by creating new biodiversity by not having it grow exactly the same, but in the general pod like structure.

This also makes me wonder about growing meat and tissue in plants.  Both plants and animals are organic matter.  That is a bit weird, but why can’t we customize the bark or shell of a plant to produce more complex structures?  Essentially bioengineering is awesome and scary and will produce some really cool things hopefully.

These things seem like things we’d like to take with us to other planets.

Cells

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century-is-about-to-change-medicine-forever-2015-2 a rather long but interesting article about the DNA editing tool CRISPR.  This tool was not created, rather it was found.  Microbes (or whatever they are called) have been using this to defend against invasion for a long time.  The way the article makes it out to be that there exists a war at the micro scale being waged constantly.  The combatants aren’t dumb either.  They have a memory, they have tools, they communicate, they learn!  It is truly amazing.  What kind of mechanisms do they have to cooperate?  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22999189 discusses this and this article talks about how cancer cells cooperate and even have free riders.  In order combat the cancer they change the code of the dna to make it so that there are more free riders so the tumor dies.  Cellular organization is very elegant.

This is interesting.  In the future this could be a way to hack a MAS that may be built on similar principles.  The fact is that we try to avoid freeriders but if the system is flooded with them the system will decay.