US scientist Craig Venter believes he is close to creating synthetic life through artificial genomes, and that this will eventually provide the fuels of the future, he said this morning on BBC radio, after publishing a paper yesterday in Science.
"The entire petrochemical industry including fuels has the potential to be replaced by biology. In fact...the most important issues facing humanity right now is that we're taking billions and billions of gallons of oil and billions of tonnes of coal out of the ground and burning it and putting all that carbon in our atmosphere. And if the population doesn't wake up to the dangers of doing that and if we don't quickly come up with a replacements, we're going to have very serious consequences, not hypothetical ones in science fiction."
"We may not need to use crops (to create biofuels). Biology has the potential for creating unique sources of energy straight from sunlight that may in the future may not need to use crops (and) compete with food production."
"We have cells right now that capture energy from sunlight, and capture CO2 from the environment . Biology has hardly been explored to provide replacements for coal and oil, and we are at the earlier stages of doing that. These give us exciting possibilities for intelligent design to do this in a safe and productive fashion."
(Photo from keetsa.com)
We're doomed, doomed I tells yar. We'd need an awful lot of organisms...