“Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete,” suggests the late physicist and author Stephen Hawking in The Sunday Times. “Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. If the human race manages to redesign itself, it will probably spread out and colonize other planets and stars.”
Exciting new research provides a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics — a new approach to one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in science: How does life emerge from inert matter, such as the “primordial soup” of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?
“You can think of these genetic adaptations like footprints from long-extinct dinosaurs preserved in fossilized mud. Even without having access to the viruses themselves, scientists who study prehistoric epidemics will be able to learn about the pathogens that drove them,” says David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who argues in new research that when humans first met Neanderthals, they got infected from unfamiliar Neanderthal viruses, against which they had no immunity.
Life might be relatively frequent in our neighborhood of the Milky Way, if the presence of the basic building blocks needed for synthesis is taken as evidence. Not only were our heavy atoms (carbon and nitrogen for example) made in ancient supernovas, but the ingredients for our multi-atomic genetic molecules ride the winds that blow between the stars, says John C. Mather, a Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Nobel Laureate, about the creation of the universe and the re-cycling of star matter to create the human species.
