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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Depends on the criteria of "out-designing". If they are something evolution had never any reason to optimize for (e.g. lots of tasty-for-humans meat fast), I don't see why not.
I think "from the bottom up" is the hard criterion. We can fiddle with the knobs evolution has produced, but it doesn't sound like we have the insight to replace basic building blocks like mitochondria and [dr]na.
Well, how deep is your bottom? You said "made of the same sorts of organic materials as normal species", so did you just mean carbon-based chemistry? something that depends on slow room-temperature reactions in liquids and gels?
You want something different, but not too different (like a metal-based robot), so what's the Goldilocks distance from plain old regular life?
I think my Goldilocks range is along the lines of 'probably made of proteins and lipids and such; preferable edible or at least biodegradable by ordinary bacteria (I don't know what this requires); a human non-biologist without tools could mistake it for normal'.
But it's pretty interesting to think about possibilities at other ranges, too.