Artificial Life, Creating Life from Scratch, Are You Ready?

Imagine being able to go to your fertility doctor and with just a few computer key strokes, you will be able to choose and select how you want your new baby to be.

By manipulating some genes in the baby’s DNA, you will be able to select whether you want your baby to be super smart, athletic, cancer free (of course), non-smoker and drug free, you will be even able to select the shape, size, race, gender and color of your baby, even probably sexual orientation or perhaps an asexual baby.

Imagine having a blue, green or glowing baby, a child that glows in the dark.

Silly but it might be true.

CNN.com reports that in just 3 to 10 years, scientists are getting closer to creating life from scratch. “Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

“And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.” Reports CNN.com.

Now, if that can really happen; I have a few questions. Will everything about our life style as we know it, change? Will school and education be the same? Will there be the Olympics games? If so, who and what athletes will be able to compete in these games if every athlete is a man-made and has the ability to super-perform almost any kind of athletic sports?

So, then it’s true as portrayed in the movies such as The Matrix and Demolition Man, that; life, as we live it today, will soon be yesterday? Forget about the sex, for real. Who’s going to want to be involved in slobbering and exchanging slimy bodily fluids, just as Lt. Lenina Huxley explains it to John Spartan in the Demolition Man?

Lastly and most importantly, will these man-made beings live forever or when they die, if they will, where will their souls go, if they will have souls?

The Google Phone Insanity, the Apple iPhone Craze

Google this, Google that, iPod here, iPhone there; that’s all you hear and read about these days. Everywhere I turn, the Internet, print newspapers, TV news; Google and Apple are everywhere. It’s like they’re the only companies in the world.

I mean, I like Google and Apple and everything or “almost” everything they stand for, but dannnnk… don’t people have anything else to talk or write about? Yahoo barely gets any media attention, Microsoft is long gone and forgotten, GE and most other brick and mortal companies are yesterday.

All you hear and read about is Facebook this, Digg that, and a bunch of social networking sites, which most of them have no business model and when the Bubble 2.0 hits, and it will, most of these so called Web 2.0 social networking sites will not survive.

So, what’s really going on here? I love Google and Yahoo equally for search; and I regularly use the Google Analytics and the Yahoo Small Business and these are some of their cool products that these companies offer, and I love them for it. No, I am not an investor in either.

As for Apple, I still have not bought the iPod for myself, I bought it for my daughter, nor have I bought the iPhone. I just don’t use Apple’s products that much, well, I have an iTunes installed on my PCs and have purchased many songs on iTunes, but that’s mostly it.

I am not a graphic artist, so I don’t use any of the Apple’s laptops or Macs. I like their sleek and elegant design, even for the iPhone and iPod, I am just not yet and perhaps not going to indulge myself in any of its tools anytime soon. Well, maybe I will get an iPhone as soon as they lower the price :).

Microsoft, although it has stopped being innovative, I still like its products, not still, I like its products, well, it’s not like I have a choice.

I am not and have never been a fan of the Netscape browser, and I don’t use it often although I have it installed on my PCs, I use it rarely but only when IE start acting up, which happens often. Well, I used to use the Netscape browser before there was Internet Explorer.

As for the Firefox browser, I see it as something that is; it’s like taking a real glass of juice and replaces it with a cool-aid. It is like a diluted IE, yes I know they copied IE from the Mosaic (Netscape) browser, or whatever that might be, that doesn’t make sense I know.

I’d like to one day just browse the Internet, read the news, but without seeing any Google or Apple stuff. Can that really happen, just one day, reading the news at CNNMoney.com or Business2.0, or any other news or blogs without reading anything about Google or iPhone?

There’re many cool new or other companies out there that writers can spend some of their time writing about instead of just focusing on these two particular companies.