The Human Sapienome with the French touch
For Drew Endy
This is episode 21 of The French Tech Comedy by DNA cowgirl.
Episode 1: The Science of Sakura
Episode 2: Lost in Telomere Translation
Episode 3: Feel Flee to Donate
Episode 4: Pasteurising Tech With the French Touch
Episode 5: The Newborn Symphony Project
Episode 6: The Unknown 9% of the Human Genome
Episode 7: The Apple Tech Specs Conference
Episode 8: religA.I.on
Episode 9: Hiroshima is Japan’s World Trade Center
Episode 10: Mao’s Robots
Episode 11: Zazen in the Shinkansen
Episode 12: The Last (French) Samurai
Episode 13: To Humanity and Beyond
Episode 14: The Music of Genomic Origami
Episode 15: Direct-to-consumer Ikigami Genetics
Episode 16: Underground Science
Episode 17: Gene Karaoke Groove
Episode 18: The Osaka Forever-Young Army
Episode 19: The Toilet Slippers
Episode 20: Ichi Efu
“ — The human microbiome in the sky and the skybiome…
The shirt of the future will be made by methane-eating bacteria…
One billion uncharacterized genes… 500,000 proteins we know nothing about (what they do in the organism, the way they work)…
Biology potentially supports truly distributed technology, as everyone has access to living things…
Our upcoming colonies in space? Our bacteria, the final frontier…
Maybe one day we will upload and download prayers and love in (via) our microbiome?…
To store the human sapienome you need 10 exp 22 bytes…
If you are a fruit fly, the microbiome tells you who to have sex with. The commensal bacteria is playing a role in the mating preference of Drosophila melanogaster. Have a dating-oriented modification of your microbiome, to optimize your romance and sex life!…”
“ — We should upload human minds on Stephen Hawking’s interstellar mission; This is how humans might finally reach another star system. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking announced the Breakthrough Starshot initiative last year, a $100 million program to develop technologies for small robotic nanoprobes and light beams with the power to accelerate to 20 percent of the speed of light. That’s fast enough to reach the nearest star system within a generation.” (Source)
Koba the Japanese manga artist was sitting in a meeting with members of the French Tech group. He’d heard that the biggest French expatriate community could be found here, in Singapore. Ideas for his sci-fi “French Tech” project, manga style, were pouring in, like dry corn flakes in an empty bowl. Only, the connection between the modified or enhanced microbiome and downloading (or uploading, actually) your mind was missing… From wetware human bodies to software minds, and the microbiome, and gene editing tool CRISPR in between? The ingredients to colonize space — or reach out to the stars:
- Sentient, human-like Artificial Intelligence;
- Human mind uploads, and;
- Powerful nanocomputers and/or quantum computers able to run consciousness within the size, weight, and power of a StarChip (or a swarm of StarChips).
Will cloning in the future mean copying somebody’s mind to sent it (him/her) to the stars? Will I be able to store my mind in my DNA? And then, send it into space? Noah’s ark on a microchip, reaching out to the stars, or some asteroid… But before that, why don’t we start with kidneys, and their “cloning”, made of silicon? A bionic organ or device that would use the same technology that makes the chips that power your laptop and smartphone? Stacks of carefully designed silicon nanopore filters would combine with live kidney cells grown in a bioreactor. The bundle would be enclosed in a body-friendly box and connected to a patient’s circulatory system and bladder — no external tubing required.
“Every week, two million people across the world will sit for hours, hooked up to a whirring, blinking, blood-cleaning dialysis machine. Their alternatives: Find a kidney transplant or die.
In the US, dialysis is a roughly 40-billion-dollar business keeping 468,000 people with end-stage renal disease alive. The process is far from perfect, but that hasn’t hindered the industry’s growth. That’s thanks to a federally mandated Medicare entitlement that guarantees any American who needs dialysis — regardless of age or financial status — can get it, and get it paid for. (…)” (Source)
Before reaching out to the stars/planets/asteroids, maybe we should start coping with diabetes, high blood pressure, and some forms of cancers, all of those causing kidney damage and impairing the organs’ ability to function?
The human kidney, the final frontier — for now.
Koba felt like the HUMAN SAPIENOME PROJECT was born…
Yuki liked the medical aspect of the project. Yet, if you were to download into a body (or bodies?!), what choice(s) would she be able to afford?
But what if Nono, the last (French) samurai, ended up looking like this, for some reason?…
He looked so unhappy…
What if she ended up working in this… body? And kept fighting with Nono the samurai? No game no life, really?…
Uploading your mind into some kind of a microchip (wet lab like DNA, or dry lab like A.I., or a combination of both) seemed like no big deal, compared to downloading into bodies. The shirt of the future will be made by methane-eating bacteria. Cool. But the downloading aspects needed to be carefully studied. New avenues for fashion were opening up, not only for kimonos made of bioengineered spider silk or shirts made by certain kinds of bioengineered bacteria. French know-how and expertise in fashion were needed. And after all, there was hope for Yuki, the Japanese geisha working in tech… Biofashion. The science and art of designing all the human beings; not only what they would be wearing…
“ — Yes. Sapienome is definitely better than cyborg,” she thought.
Catherine Coste
MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28x1–2 certified
Member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist Regina Holliday
