> Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales.

Also known as the fallacy of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

How does it affect religious ideas per se? its something many religious people long to find https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-a...

> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish

I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.

You if believe creating life will end religion then you're wrong.

We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.

So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.

(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?

Nah. The natural pivot is from “we have never observed abiogenesis” to “see? Life required a creator.”

You can’t win

Not really. AI isn't intelligent by any stretch. To make that claims requires ignorance of what constitutes "intelligence", especially the most essential element of intelligence, viz., intensionality. LLMs or expert system or whatever absolutely lack intensionality by definition because computation is by definition a purely syntactic process.

> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place

I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you speak of "religious" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).

> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth are the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)

I might in some sense agree with you but check your wording: creationism... we recreated life... see where I'm going?

That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity

Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Wait you think creating life disapproves creationism?

I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…

It seems like this cell barely evolves, because the system they built for duplicating the DNA makes very few errors.

Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production.

For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...

It's desirable to have some kind of simple base to start from that is an easy-to-configure platform to deploy any kind of metabolic machinery.

Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!

This is more like it

https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...

but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"

It seems that eventually you could build much more flexible and powerful if you build from scratch. Hacking existing cells is a shortcut but longer term we may get grey goo.

To your aside: No, in this abstract sense Holy Grails are just a boon, a desirable piece of knowledge, achievement, that sort of thing.

> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels

A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.

I agree with your conclusion. We start by enslaving certain classes of humans like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. Anyone with more than $1B gets the collar. Populism is a helluva drug.