Default Scientists create a living organism

[SunnyD]

Technically, we still wouldn't be gods. A god is something supernatural. We'd just be another life form, capable of screwing with lower life forms on a level they couldn't comprehend.

"Hmm, this doesn't look right. I think I'll change the gravitational constant of this new universe.......and reverse its effects, while I'm at it."
Meanwhile, many trillions of star systems instantly disintegrate, despite the desperate prayers of many more trillions of briefly terrified inhabitants. Oops. Oh well, format & reinstall.

Now I feel like watching "The Farnsworth Parabox."

What's to say that's not what a god is? There's no reason to call a god a god period. Supernatural powers are all in the eye of the beholder. We humans know how to wield electricity and throw radiant beams of light capable of disintegrating things. Sure in a technological world this sounds like a dynamo and a laser, but to someone who has never seen these devices this is surely the work supernatural forces! You must be a god.

This is exactly the point.

Agree, but it's not really necessary to call anything god.

It's not really necessary to call anything alive either. But we do.

 

[tynopik]

So what's false about 100% artificial DNA recreating itself, splitting, and reproducing new cells with that same 100% artificial DNA?

because dna is just one part of a living organism

they still had to use an existing cell

wake me when they can create a complete cell from scratch

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The 100% artificial thing they created is reproducing itself at will on its own, which is the very definition of life.

So does that mean that all the robots we have in factories producing other robots are now alive?

So what's false about 100% artificial DNA recreating itself, splitting, and reproducing new cells with that same 100% artificial DNA?

Because it's not really artificial. We know about all the coding sequences in the genome, but we are still clueless about the non-coding sequences; we have no idea what to take out or what we can safely put in, because we have no idea what a lot of the DNA does. We're just following someone else's instructions. This is aside from the fact that we didn't actually create the cell the DNA was inserted into, either. So all the polymerases, ribosomes, nucleotides, and tRNA were already there; we didn't create any of those. We didn't create any of the cytoskeleton. We didn't create the cell membrane or the cell wall. Nor did we create any of the enzymes that, after the moment of DNA insertion, actually allowed the cell to produce enough energy to actually reproduce, rather than just sit there and slowly degrade. Until we can do that, we have a long way to go before we can actually say we created 'life'.