Hi everyone, I am surprised that no one has responded. This is a very interesting subject.
I read about Andrew Crosse in a book called Fads and Fallacies in Science. I was immediately intrigued. Seemed like such a simple and easy experiment to carry out and disprove empirically, instead of trying to prove on the theoretical knowledge of what is and what is not.
Of course I am not claiming that Crosse was, is, actually right, or made a legitimate discovery, as I have no way of knowing. It could all be a massive blunder. As for the confirmation of the discovery by other scientists, well that is just it, its just words on the internet. Using the knowledge and logic that has been ingrained into me by society since childhood, I would say this is all utter nonsense and doesn’t warrant even a ounce of our time, or further discussions. And I suspect that most of the people on this forum feel the same way, otherwise it wouldn’t be so quiet in this thread.
Some thing bugged me about that story and I kept it in the back of my mind. Here is what I think now.
“Artificial life (commonly Alife or alife is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life imitates traditional biology by trying to recreate biological phenomena. The term "artificial life" is often used to specifically refer to soft alife.”
“The creation of synthetic life is a goal of scientists working in the fields of synthetic biology or exploring the origin of life. The term has also been used to describe recent experiments that transferred the chemically synthesized copy of a bacterial genome into a different (but closely related) bacterial host cell. However, the term Synthetic Life is usually associated to the creation of a living system "from scratch", that is from isolated building blocks. This has not yet been achieved.
These efforts are largely independent from the computational simulation of artificial life which is related to the discipline of robotics.”
“In 2010, the team of Craig Venter replaced the genome of a natural cell with a different genome created by gene synthesis creating a new bacterial strain dubbed Mycoplasma laboratorium. In press conferences, Craig Venter described this work as the creation of "Synthetic Life". This statement was widely criticized on the grounds that:
the chemically synthesized genome was an almost 1:1 copy of a naturally occurring genome and
the recipient cell was a naturally occurring bacterium
The Craig Venter Institute maintains the term "synthetic bacterial cell" but they also clarify "...we do not consider this to be “creating life from scratch” but rather we are creating new life out of already existing life using synthetic DNA"
This is us now, what kind of nanotech will we have in a hundred years? What about the past?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vi ... 24&bih=696
Look at all the viruses, see anything suspicious? Well I remember the first time I saw a picture of a virus and how much it looked like a machine, rather than a biological entity. I remember thinking back there, “Looks like a nanonite.” And then I remembered Crosse.
So here are my two cents.
We know that all stories of catastrophic disaster feature a “Golden Age”, powerful beings able to create life, The Garden of Eden.
Atlantis?
Even EU talks about a golden age.
What if the “Golden Age” civilization was more advanced than us? Wouldn't nanotech play a major role in their life. If not altogether replace their technology completely. In fact a civilization relying completely on nano technology would most likely be agrarian, with not a single factory in sight.
Then, BOOM, a massive EM event, no more civilization, the nanonites flounder for millions of years, until we found them and named them “Virus.”
We have yet to “see” a virus directly, who knows maybe it says, core i7 6980x on it.
Now, just maybe Crosse activated one of these nano fossils? Lol.
After all, wouldn't there be trillions of these “Fossils” mixed into the earth? Anyway, that is my take.
I would love to be able to reproduce Crosse's experiments. Or at least try, anyone want to give it a go?
Today is the yesterday of tomorrow.