Breeding Robots In The Slo-Mo Apocalypse

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It’s fine, I’m sure. Nothing to worry about.

(CNN)—The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce — and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

“I was astounded by it,” said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was co-lead author of the new research.

I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, but if I have one, this is it: Stop neglecting The Running Iron Report. The reasons behind this neglect are strange; it seems that as the unraveling Craig Rullman and I saw back in 2014 accelerated into the truly bizarre series of events that dominated 2020 and 2021, we just didn’t really know what to say anymore. I felt like I’d shot my bolt back in March 2020, when I wrote Mattias Tannhuser — Man of the Hour, which marked a definitive turn inward to ward an insular “family.” I didn’t feel like I had anything generative to offer, and we sure don’t need voices that are merely adding to the cacophony. Nobody needs to point to the signs of a slow-motion apocalypse. Were in it, and we know it.

The other day, I saw a post from someone I don’t know who noted that he had been predicting the apocalypse for years, and now was living in it — and trying to create something beautiful there. That inspired me to get back here and get to work. Because The Running Iron Report was originally conceived as a resource for “creating something beautiful” amidst the Crash. Perhaps I might be generous and note that, while we’ve been pretty quiet here, both Craig and I have been laboring to do just that. His film The Outside Circle: A Movie of the Modern West is a beautiful thing. Truly. A labor of love that grew in the telling. I know the blood, toil, tears and sweat that have gone into it, and the result is something to be proud of, and to hang on to. I continue to bang away at FrontierPartisans.com and at The Frontier Partisans Podcast. We have thousands of podcast downloads on 22 episodes, which is gratifying. It pleases me that there are people out there who want to hear these stories.

A startling number of my friends have initiated a news blackout. These are people who ordinarily consider themselves well-informed; they just decided that they had to pull the plug. Mostly, it’s a matter of mental health. The constant drumbeat of doom and the cacophony of conflict gets might wearing, and we all feel it. Then there’s the glaringly obvious fact that agenda-driven media is not in the business of keeping us informed anyway — they’re pushing a narrative.

I don’t think I can go full blackout. I mean, I think I should be paying attention when Skynet becomes self-aware. But, then again, I’m not sure we’d actually know that the machines had taken over until they already had. (Or is that have?) It’s a real dilemma. We really need to be paying attention to the slow-motion apocalypse unfolding around us; there’s as much at stake as there has ever been in more clear-cut, overt crises. Yet the urge for self-preservation compels us to retreat, to turn inward. I like to think that our storytelling provides a torch in darkness, but sometimes I think that that is a rationalization for not taking some other action. What action should that be? I don’t know. I have no wise counsel to give — to myself, much less to others — which contributes to my silence here. But it’s time — past time — to get that figured out. And these pages can be the place where that figuring out gets done.

Be it resolved…

Comments

Doug Kresky says

December 1, 2021 at 9:07 am

Jim, first and foremost we appreciate the work that you and Craig do to put out the RIR, and the film is wonderful! As to the media blackout, I just don’t see an end to that until someone can produce a news report that does not reveal the reporter and editor’s clear bias and attempt to sway versus report. The closest we have out there is the WSJ. Perhaps a like minded group of individuals like yourselves putting together and collaborative national collection of news would mend the blackout. I am unaware of that. Can you recommend? And keep it up!

- Jim Cornelius says
  
  December 2, 2021 at 6:47 am
  
  Thx Doug.
  
David Wrolson says

December 26, 2021 at 8:35 am

I hadn’t looked here for awhile, so I apologize for replying to an older post. Anyway, I found something in C.S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” (Book 1 of his Space Trilogy) that actually brought tears to my eyes because it said what I feel (and am scared of) and it belongs here.

“Weston” is a stand-in for the scientists doing the nanobot reproduction. And don’t forget what Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park-“They were so focused on what they could do, they never asked if they should do it”

»>“And we have also evidence—increasing almost daily—that “Weston,” or the force or forces behind “Weston,” will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one. … The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal. More than this it would be unwise to say.”««

Lewis, C. S.. Out of the Silent Planet: (Space Trilogy, Book One) (The Space Trilogy 1) (pp. 166–167). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

- Jim Cornelius says
  
  December 26, 2021 at 12:42 pm
  
  “The dangers to be feared are … not temporal but eternal.”
  
  Yep.

NAVIGATE

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