Reading and Breeding

    After a few billion years, we finally learned how to read. This "paragraph" for example is nothing more than a collection of data with each letter and each space constituting a part of that data. Now if I were to tell you all of the letters and their frequency in this "paragraph' as well as the number of spaces between letters that constitute "words" and the number of words and then cut the paragraph, how long would it take you to unscramble that collection of data and put it in the exact order that is present in this "paragraph"? How long would it take to recreate this paragraph with the limited but precise data available to you? I'm guessing more than nine months

.    And if, in the course of your lifetime, you were able to reconstitute the above paragraph, how long would it take you to make a copy of it compared to how long it took you to unscramble it in the first place? To decode might take years if not decades,  To copy what you have decoded you would have to retype all of the letters in order which would take about a minute as compared to years or maybe decades. If you just hit copy and paste, even the minute would be reduced to a second. Watch this for example:

After a few billion years, we finally learned how to read. This "paragraph" for example is nothing more than a collection of data with each letter and each space part of that data. Now if I were to tell you all of the letters and their frequency in this "paragraph' as well as the number of spaces between letters that constitute "words" and the number of words, how long would it take you to unscramble that collection of data and put it in the exact order that is present in this "paragraph"? How long would it take to recreate this paragraph with the limited but precise data available to you? I'm guessing more than nine months

Boom. There it is. Copied, italicized and pasted in less than a second.

Now if I wanted to be even more obnoxious than I'm already being, I could copy and paste that paragraph maybe 60 times in the amount of time that it took me to type it and a gazillion times in the time that it took me to decode and formulate it in the first place.

That's why it took us all the way to 1970 to sequence DNA,to determine the order of the nucleotide bases of DNA: cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine that which are the programming elements of all life.

If like the jury in the Simpson trial, your eyes are starting to glaze over in the discussion of DNA, let me oversimplify it for all of us.

After we discovered the bases it took billions of dollars of public and private funds to complete the mission: the first, fully sequenced draft of the genes that encode a human being. The first sentence of the first paragraph so to speak. With the ongoing advances in technology, it took only a proverbial minute  and a fraction of the cost to sequence a person's full genome. What used to take years, then months can now be done in a couple of days for a thousand dollars instead of a million.

With this availability at our fingertips, it won't be long until genome.com replaces ancestry.com and everybody will be rushing to get their "sequence". Eventually, it will become a part of the birthing process. A national, international of collection of code will become avialable to compare new borns at birth to the genomes of past and future humans with nucleotidic supplements at hand just in case the very rare Jeff Dahmer or Adolph Hitler sequences emerge.

Along the way, the first impact will be made in singles bars where the ancient opening line "what's your sign" will be replaced by the more accurate and current  "What's your sine" which is an invitation to share cytosine profiles. If the profiles seem intriguing, the next move will be  "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours" which is an invitation to share thymine profiles. If things are moving and matching well the final question will be "do you wanna go the whole nine yards" which is an invitation to share both guanine and adenine and then compare them to others.

"I thought you might have had some Brad Pitt sine" she purrs and he growls back " I knew you had some Joan Didion nine going."

Eventually, they will breed and produce a combination that is very Pittdidion so much in fact that it's code will be duplicated exactly since technolgy has now learned how to copy and paste.

Eventually, they will breed and produce a combination that is very Pittdidion so much in fact that it's code will be duplicated exactly since technolgy has now learned how to copy and paste.

Eventually, they will breed and produce a combination that is very Pittdidion so much in fact that it's code will be duplicated exactly since technolgy has now learned how to copy and paste.

The Pittdidion line will become very popular. The beauty and intelligence of the Pittdidions and their butterfly effect will greatly improve the human condition.

We finally learned how to read and breed.

After a few billion years.