![]() whether its content is chemical or informational?” For Grosz, viruses of “both biological and silicon form” (45) are linked by their programming logic. Grosz (1998, 45) asks, does it matter whether viruses “are enacted in carbon or silicon-based form. There are remarkable parallels between biological and computer viruses in terms of how they self-replicate. But this blurring of the biotic and abiotic also finds precedent in the existence of self-reproducing organisms such as viruses. This blurring of boundaries reached new levels in 2010, when geneticist Craig Venter created the first synthetic life-form by building the genome of a bacterium from scratch and coating its DNA with watermarks to trace its descendants. The boundary between life and nonlife, the organic and the inorganic, has become increasingly difficult to draw. ![]() If carbon is the element of biotic life, now widely understood as “a metric of the human” (Whitington 2016), silicon is perhaps the element of machinic life the metric of the robotic, it is the building block of information processing systems. While silicon is inorganic, carbon is elemental of all known organic life-forms and plays a vital role in the metabolic processes of all of these life-forms they use carbon compounds for their metabolic and structural functions, to define and control their genetic code and form. But silicon and carbon have major differences too. ![]() They react and behave in similar ways, and many of the compounds created using carbon or silicon are almost identical. Two nonmetals, they are neighbours in the fourteenth series of the periodic table of chemical elements. Silicon and carbon, both abundant throughout the universe, are chemical kin. ![]()
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