Yeah, great point! So to be fair to them, they were not doing tests that hinged on it having a specific codon scheme or amino acid. Like, they weren’t sequencing the samples—it was 1969, they couldn’t do that. They were putting it in nutrient-rich media or plants or animals or etc and seeing what happened. So maybe in such a case the coloration change would have been detected in, I don’t know, the water of the shrimp tank. But as you say it could well have been too late at that point, if an organism grew in seawater.
Yeah. I was thinking that none of the shrimps would die because the ‘green goo’ bioweapon isn’t harming anything. It’s just doing better than anything that could evolve naturally.
Evolution is a hill climbing algorithm that is only able to search places nearby in the possibility space to existing living organisms. Mostly it can only even ‘check’ 1 codon mutation at a time places, though with redundant genes it is possible to explore a bit deeper than that.
Evolution also has the limitation that it can’t make any major changes to the way a cell works if the changes will reduce fitness significantly. So it’s stuck at a local minima, and the codon encoding limits restrict all life on earth to within a limited region of the possibility space.
An organism from another planet could be better or worse, I’m not sure what the odds are. I want to say 50% but anthropic principle may mean that life on earth ‘rolled high’ for fitness in order to eventually discover mammals.
Also another way to think of green goo is it might only be 1-10% more efficient than earth life. It’s more efficient because maybe it has access to amino acids that allow for better ribosomes or chloroplasts or just a cell wall that earth enzymes cannot digest. It can’t be that much more efficient, it’s still operating in the same environment collecting energy slowly via photosynthesis, there is only so much energy and materials dissolved in seawater available.
This is why it would take so long to consume the planet, and it is possible to stop it. Synthetic herbicides could exploit the fact that the alien plant uses different biochemistry, so humans could just try candidate molecules until they find one that works. That would have been possible in 1969.
Also because the tiny plant is only a little bit more efficient, it would need a day or so of time to double under a light source—you wouldn’t see anything without waiting for weeks.
Yeah, great point! So to be fair to them, they were not doing tests that hinged on it having a specific codon scheme or amino acid. Like, they weren’t sequencing the samples—it was 1969, they couldn’t do that. They were putting it in nutrient-rich media or plants or animals or etc and seeing what happened. So maybe in such a case the coloration change would have been detected in, I don’t know, the water of the shrimp tank. But as you say it could well have been too late at that point, if an organism grew in seawater.
Yeah. I was thinking that none of the shrimps would die because the ‘green goo’ bioweapon isn’t harming anything. It’s just doing better than anything that could evolve naturally.
Evolution is a hill climbing algorithm that is only able to search places nearby in the possibility space to existing living organisms. Mostly it can only even ‘check’ 1 codon mutation at a time places, though with redundant genes it is possible to explore a bit deeper than that.
Evolution also has the limitation that it can’t make any major changes to the way a cell works if the changes will reduce fitness significantly. So it’s stuck at a local minima, and the codon encoding limits restrict all life on earth to within a limited region of the possibility space.
An organism from another planet could be better or worse, I’m not sure what the odds are. I want to say 50% but anthropic principle may mean that life on earth ‘rolled high’ for fitness in order to eventually discover mammals.
Also another way to think of green goo is it might only be 1-10% more efficient than earth life. It’s more efficient because maybe it has access to amino acids that allow for better ribosomes or chloroplasts or just a cell wall that earth enzymes cannot digest. It can’t be that much more efficient, it’s still operating in the same environment collecting energy slowly via photosynthesis, there is only so much energy and materials dissolved in seawater available.
This is why it would take so long to consume the planet, and it is possible to stop it. Synthetic herbicides could exploit the fact that the alien plant uses different biochemistry, so humans could just try candidate molecules until they find one that works. That would have been possible in 1969.
Also because the tiny plant is only a little bit more efficient, it would need a day or so of time to double under a light source—you wouldn’t see anything without waiting for weeks.