Duda Jarek

ok, short question Assume that we can completely remove all viruses, do You think it would result more crop prodution per hectar? The same question with crop/food animal parasites? One another - how You explain positve effects of small amount of radiation? Cell division can produce errors, but when it had to replace damaged one...

The required tool should be available in a few dozens of years (chiral life) Let's focus on a possibility of eliminating some parasite... What would it result in? Here is the list of general parasites positive effect, I can think of... Please expand it and discuss... 1. Population control - when the density of some organisms is growing, it's easier for its parasites to expand - this factor influence stability of the ecosystem. The question is if without it, some specie could dominate its ecological niche? Maybe it could be set that it would be automatically controlled by concurrency, food access,...? Maybe such domination wouldn't be so bad? Maybe without this control factor, ecosystem would achieve different point, which would be stable? 2. Stress increase - the elimination of weak organisms. It improve selection, required to evolution. But after a few billions of years, a few thousand shouldn't be so important... If it would be planned well, evolution shouldn't throw it out from the stable point... Removing of weak organisms, makes place for new too, which probable would have positive influence on the effectiveness of ecosystem, but needs some energy to grow earlier. So the removing of the parasite should make the population older, but I think that it wouldn't affect the effectiveness much...? 3. Stress increase - elimination of weak cells Small amount of radiation can have positive results, perhaps because it helps to remove damaged (weaken) cells, thanks of what there should be smaller probability of cancer... Summarizing - cells are being more frequent replaced - it's energetic cost, but thanks of it, organism should be more healthy and live longer... So reduction of this stress among animals looks positive from our point of view (it increase selection of organisms too), but about people - energy isn't a priority - we should choose it as optimal as possible... There should be many ways of replacing stress from infections. We could eg use radiation - I think we should study this technique precisely. I was thinking about using our immune system - teach him a very delicate autoimmune reaction, but it could be very dangerous. Anyway we would have to give immune system something to do - living in the sterile environment can lead to autoimmune diseases (hygiene hypothesis).

I have to add that I thought mainly about eliminating (micro mainly) organisms that practically only parasitize, not contributing anything positive into the ecosystem, like eg viruses, locust ... We couldn't restrict to system plants + us... soil have to be fertilized, fragments has to be decomposed, some reactions has to be made, plants has to be pollinate, etc, etc ... We need trees too (oxygen), we have different environments, specifications of places... Whereas most of the higher organisms in this moment, instead of farm animals, are rather keepsake of nature, they rather don't influence on our ecosystem... The question eg is, if we can manage with that viruses helps control some populations...

There is a problem - for example we have human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) in our DNA. Before transforming organisms, we should identify any dangerous parts in our introns, virus's capsids, and replace them with something neutral. If not - they can be used as a good start for evolution... I was thinking about projecting ecosystem based on harmony - there are maaaany problems to take under consideration - I've decided to start new thred. Generally - let's say we can manage with most of microorganism, there are some concetps for viruses too, http://virology.wordpress.com/ but they looks a bit hopeless for me...

If we look at our ecosystem - it's one huge domestic war - organisms uses most of energy on competition, fight... It's mainly energy from the cleanest, never ending source - the sun. In the times of threat of energy crisis, overpopulation, one of our hope could be increasing the effectiveness of this changing solar energy into needed sugars, proteins. The other thing is that we are geting closer to the concept of creating completely new ecosystems, like on Mars, where this effectiveness of development of ecosystem is essential for the whole project. I would like to initiate a discussion about the possibility of such increase of effectiveness: is it possible and how much we could increase it? One way I see to do it, is by selection of organisms - to create a very precise ecosystem, in which organisms almost haven't opposite interests. We could replace some organisms with handicapped ones by eg removing sequences coding some proteins too(evolution couldn't repair it quickly) . The tool we could use to remove some organisms, could be chiral life, I've presented in different thread. Let say, we have this Noe's ark to select, modify ... Let's think if it would be possible to such a stable, more effective ecosystem? How to make it make it, so the proportion of organisms would be automatically keep on the appropriate levels? So that evolution, climate differences wouldn't spoil everything...?

why with chiral? Becouse there has been everything made ... a few billions years of evolution, just take what you need... Of course there is possible much more 'perfect' life, in devalopment of which we will make huge steps, not possible while evolution, like exchanging neurons with something based on conductors - with much higher speeds ... But devalopment of it, is unimaginary difficult ... much easier, for the beginning, is to copy (reflect) the nature About overpopulating, population becaming older ... it's already inaviodable social problem... In this way You can say to go back a few hundreds years... Science can give tools to make life easier, longer ... but what do people do with it...? About effectiveness... Look at the ecosystem - it's neverending domestic war, most of energy is 'waste' on competition, fights... And we would like to change it into something closer to harmony, by removing some organisms, so the energy (solar) would be mainly used to production of proteins, sugars and reproduction ...

To create a stable ecosystem, we would have to transform a large part of ours. We would do it to reduce maximally competitiveness, aggressiveness - to maximize its effectiveness by harmony. Of course there will be many empty, profitable ecological niches and organisms would want to evolve to use them. But... 1. I cannot imagine that viruses would be needed - they wouldn't be transformed at all - they would have to evolve from zero, like free DNA. But last time it evolved pararelly with its victims, now organisms have very advanced specific/non-specyfic defensive systems ... 2. We would need many kinds of microorganisms. Symbiotic ones rather wouldn't need have aggressive mechanisms - they would have evolve them from zero. The problem would be with eg. saprotroph, but without viruses, evolution should be much slower and we humans can make it much more difficult for them. 3. Higher organism would need enormous large time to evolve... And if we would have new large problem, we can reverse again. There are some problems with living in sterile environment. There is the hygiene hypothesis that it can lead to autoimmune diseases. We would have to weaken the immune system or give it something else to do, learn it good responses. The other thing is that small amounts of stress (like radiation or infections) is positive - it eg. helps to get rid of damaged - weak cells. But I think we will understand better this mechanisms and learn to use them more effective artificially. Maybe transformation of our ecosytem would be to expensive, but in some time we would need to create completly new ecosystem eg. on Mars, and its effectiveness will be veeery important...

About finding the way by pathogens... Evolution is a process of finding local fitness maximum by small steps... Let say that a virus get into chiral cell ... what next? Bacterias would eg need normal sugars... Chiral enviroment would be hostile for them, there is no way that eg virus could just transform naturally into chiral form. They would have to evolve from zero. Or by sabotage... but then we could easier controll their population, and they couldn't reach actual level. The danger I've found is that eg unicell which is able to photosynthesis wouldn't have many natural enemies ... it could evolve...dominate our enviroment. Very important priniple for the beginning would be: from chlorophyll organisms we can transform only plants which population can be controlled! About problems of sterile life... there is quite sensful 'hygiene hypothesis', that it would increase susceptibility to allergic diseases. But I think we would be able to manage with it...? About symbiotic organisms... Of course finally it would be needed to transform large part of our enviroment. We could start with eg ecoli and use them as a factories on the beginnig. Plants... and finally maybe human... Question if such chiral cell would function normally? I've found an article arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0507/0507347.pdf which says in abstract that corrections for P-symmetry would be 10^-17(...?). I could'n find more pricise formulation, but this number suggests that it would be many orders of magnitude smaller than thermal noise. It could be essential in symmetry breaking, but not in funtioning. We humans like to show our power and it's rather unavoidable that some day, we would be able to create a new life (what is the whole talking about nanorobots?) ... I think we will start with chiral... They could give us not only health, but I think they could allow us to increase efficiency of our ecosystems, of the most clean and powerful source of energy - sun.

A while ago I thought about some concept, which should which should allow us, to get rid of all unwanted life. This is – by becoming incompatible. Previously I thought that we could do it by changing the language which encodes nucleotide triples into amino acids (be replacing eg tRNA), but it could result in enormous number of problems with gene regulation. I’ve just found the “safe” way – take mirror reflection! If we replace left-handed amino acids with right-handed, we would get mirror reflections of natural proteins. Analogically we could get chiral DNA, sugars, etc. on which new enzymes would work perfectly. Finally we would get normally functioning mirror reflection of natural organism, on which natural viruses couldn’t interact. We know, that there is a small violation of such symmetry (P), but it shouldn’t change the biochemistry. Such organism would have to be feed with reflected food, produced eg by reflected plants, which use to production symmetric (not chiral) molecules and unpolarized light. In such world natural hostile organisms, if wouldn’t be translated by a terrorist organization, wouldn’t have chance to transform into chiral versions. They could evolve from zero, but we would have many thousands years of peace. How to make it? We can imagine synthesis of every molecule, such reflected zygote is made of. The problem is to create the correct structure of membranes with specific concentrations … fill it with life… What with actual trends in nano-engineering should become possible in at most 50 years, I think. Then we could slowly transform our ecosystems. In that way we could get rid of any plagues. But if in such sterile environment, we would have perfect health? Maybe stresses created by small infections can, like small amounts of radiation, have positive long term influence…? What do You think about this concept?