From yesterday’s list of links, I particularly want to call attention to the rotifer link. This press release is interesting because it shows how animals can survive even when they are exact genetic copies of one another. Instead of outcompeting parasites through mutation, they run away by going into cryptobiosis. I predict that a form of asexual multicellular synthetic life will be created by 2030 that can defend against parasites through aggressive defense, say silica spines, so that running away isn’t even necessary. These organisms will just sit around and reproduce. The primary method to get rid of them at first will be dessication, but this will eventually prove useless as they disperse too widely to target.

What many humans don’t realize is that we are surrounded by quintillions of organisms with very little genetic diversity that dominate us in terms of biomass and persistence. They are the status quo — we are the aberration. These are organisms that have survived every mass extinction. Culprits include the tardigrades (which can survive outer space), nematodes (absolutely ubiquitous; it is estimated there are between 1018 (one quintillion) and 1021 (one sextillion) nematodes worldwide, and they are crawling all over you right now), chaetognaths (considered useful models of basal bilaterans, there are a lot of them in the oceans, really a lot), and so on.

The only reason that these organisms aren’t ripping us all to shreds right now is because there have been no synthetic biologists to push them out of evolutionary minima and give them more sensible strategies for total domination. Sorry to be alarmist, but I studied evolutionary biology for a couple years and that is my opinion. Evolution is terribly poor at transversing local minima to reach a global optima, and that is really the only saving grace for fragile macroscale multicellular agglomerations like ourselves. Interesting and low-energy-cost evolutionary innovations are rarely combined because they require several working parts to come together which are maladaptive individually but adaptive in cooperation.

The reason why rotifers are interesting is that their lack of genetic diversity makes them a good model for self-replicating machines. The ability to switch into a dormant, armored state (cryptobiosis) seems characteristic of a variety of small organisms, and we can expect this ability to be exploited to the fullest by human-engineered microscale replicators. The ability to distribute many of these replicators across a wide area will eventually create a “viral load” scenario analogous to the one faced by aging humans — so many diverse beings build up in our body that the workload faced the immune system to combat nascent infections eventually becomes prohibitive and the system breaks down.

Some scientists have laughed at the idea that human-engineered organisms could dominate microbes that have evolved for billions of years, but I find this ridiculous. Human-engineered artifacts have already outperformed everything created by evolution in terms of energy density, speed, mass, acceleration, local dominance, and so on. The key point is that evolution is radically dumb (but it has many trials available) and humans are very smart. Let’s discuss some of the ways to engineer microorganisms that cannot be defeated by the legacy biota.

1. Broad-spectrum biocides: natural organisms use a variety of biocides, but observe that humans have created thousands of highly effective synthetic antibiotics and biocides that evolution never discovered even after four billion years of experimentation.

2. Phage-immune bacteria, for instance bacteria that use genetic programs incompatible with malicious code injection by phages. Phages are the main bacteria-curtailing force on the planet and we depend on them for our survival.

3. Bacteria specifically engineered for immunity to broad-spectrum antibiotics which produce and secrete these antibiotics as a biofilm. There is even the possibility of release-and-shield, where microbes release the biocide then shield themselves from it for long enough for the competitors to be defeated, at which point the shield is raised.

4. Sucking them in: microorganisms could coat themselves in a gel shield which absorbs and dissolves both nutrients, phages, and rival microbes. For instance, the extracellular matrix of animal tissues is much stronger than the slime layer used by bacteria. Cooperative colonial bacteria could create stronger extracellular shields depending on how well-established the colonial region is, devoting stronger shields to the colonial center and weaker shields to the exploratory fringes.

5. Incubation-then-release: many evolutionary minima involve colonial organisms that are evolutionarily strong in larger colonies but evolutionarily weak in small colonies. By sterilizing a large area, filling it with nutrients, and allowing a founder population to develop (a “mega petri dish”), an important evolutionary minima could be hopped.

6. Quorum computing: evolution has developed a variety of means for microbes to communicate with one another on a crude level: quorum sensing. One of the interesting evolutionary innovations of the last billion years was to produce multicellular organisms that survive against many uncooperative microbes. By creating microbial superorganisms that effectively cooperate and compute using biocomputation, it may be possible to beat multicellular life at its own game by creating “organisms” miles across that effectively cooperate to defeat all rivals. This is definitely not a near-term risk but it could be a risk within the lifetimes of many alive today, given no singleton that guards us at a low level.

7. The last point in particular opens up a very large space for experimentation. For a colony that knows how to differentiate its perimeter members from interior members, it can activate all sorts of interesting genes in the perimeter members to make life miserable for organisms next to them. Bacteria already do this in a rudimentary way with quorum sensing. As long as a suitable barrier can be erected, the production of a variety of poisons is possible and safe for the majority of the colony.

Even natural selection in hospitals is enough to create killer bacteria immune to many antibiotics. What about bacteria specifically engineered by smart humans for reproduction and survival?