Our ancestor’s ‘leaky’ membrane answers big questions in biology

Re:Our ancestor’s ‘leaky’ membrane answers big questions in ... by dredmorbius on Wednesday August 13, 2014 @09:53PM (#8175743)

Possibly. However evolution's been on that for a good long time -- about 3 billion years.

Where humans have succeeded in enhancing certain areas of biological productivity, it's generally come at a cost in other areas, particularly general robustness.

Another possibility would be to come up with an energy cycle _other_ than ATP, though that would be equivalent to coming up with an independent biological foundation, something you might want to think over at length.

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Re:Our ancestor’s ‘leaky’ membrane answers big questions in ... by whocares on Thursday August 14, 2014 @07:37AM (#8176967)

The last time something akin to a new energy cycle happened on earth was when cyanobacteria produced so much free oxygen it accumulated in the atmosphere [0]. This caused a global extinction event and one of the longest ice ages that the planet has known. So yes, we would need to be very careful playing with non-ATP energy cycles...

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

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Re:Our ancestor’s ‘leaky’ membrane answers big questions in ... by dredmorbius on Thursday August 14, 2014 @10:16PM (#8180766)

One of my favorite examples of "whelp, looks like we done fooked over t'environment"

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