TransExoSpermia

The Fermi Paradox has been a puzzling question for 50 years now and many answers have been given as to why it is that it seems that we are alone in the silence of a Galaxy teeming with not just stars but stars with billion of planets that can support life like our own.

In the past I've explained that the likely possibility is that we are one of a few species evolved sufficiently in intelligence to be able to ponder and soon engage the task of physically leaving our solar system. A great filter exists which has made it incredibly difficult for life forms to evolve to our present level until this time in galactic history. This idea mirrors the Universal concept of anthropomorphism which states that we exist at all because if the Universal constants were any different we simply wouldn't and that there is no actual "fine tuning" to the Universe. I propose the same is true about Galactic evolution and that we may be among the first set of civilizations that have survived long enough to actually figure out ways to leave our home planet. Later, I proposed the idea of a Fermi Silence as a means of explaining why any of the current civilizations in the galaxy that may be at our level may not be aware of one another potentially due to the differing nature of their communications technologies.

Yet here we are steeped in silence, the results of the Kepler Exoplanet survey has provided us an embarrassment of riches in terms of data on the likely percentages and types of systems that exist in our galaxy and the results show clearly that there are likely hundreds of billions of planets that are suitable to support our kind of life forms...not just human life forms but various forms of life.

The interesting question of evolution of life in the Galaxy often assumes that different systems would likely emerge and evolve life forms along convergent traits but this assumes that the probability of starting life is high enough that across a couple hundred billion experiments more than one positive outcome could emerge....even with 13 billion years of trial time across systems in the Galaxy. What if this is it and we are indeed the first system with any complex life above bacteria??

Another intriguing possibility about the future is that our imprint on the Galaxy will be not just to explore it but maybe to seed it with not just our species but advanced genetically modified versions of many of our home planet species.

There is no reason to think that once we can perform interstellar travel that we would be doing so as "human 1.0" especially given the radical advances we have achieved just in the last few years of being able to fundamentally adjust our biology to suit our desires. The recent invention of technologies for in vivo genetic modification (CrispR- Cas9) will be more than just a boon for cosmetic and genetic repair...they will also allow targeted upgrades to our physiology. I told some hypothetical stories along these lines in my articles on the life of Afusa O'Reilly, but Afusa being a super mortal is still fundamentally human...what happens when we upgrade the genetics of other animals?

A recent article proposes this as an ethical question but when we are out exploring the galaxy a likely strategy for ensuring that life (regardless of type) persists would be to engineer from all of the animal kingdom super intelligent strains that may find a larger percentage of discovered exoplanet viable and leave them to seed the planet with "dna" baring life even if it isn't human life.

One could imagine what would result in deep time as evolution continues to evolve these seeded species across the spectrum of animal forms on these far flung systems? They may end up evolving into locally adapted and superior species, they will become dominant species and may if they avoid the same mistakes as we will also emerge technology and leave their systems to discover life out there...only to find that there is a common origin...by then lost to time, our original species long evolved away to other forms or entirely extinct....yet our gift to populate the Galaxy with varied forms of intelligent animals that evolved into superior intelligence replaying the cycle of our search Eons before.

I find this idea that we, humanity are the pioneers of the spread of life in a trans planetary exo spermia of our constitutive elements...not unlike what was used as a premise in the recent Alien prequel "Prometheus". Are we the first "Engineers" of our galaxy?

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic ...

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage. It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2 ...

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert...

sent2null space

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