Difference between revisions of "DesignWorkshop2011"

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(Costume & Short Story Workshop)
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=== 2012 by [[Biswajith Manimaran]] ===
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Slaves. Again after sixty-five years of independence we were slaves, albeit this time, everyone was a slave. The events that led to this are sundry and interweave in strange ways; most are lost to historians’ blindness. The most notable was the inception of the iGEM competition in 2004: a synthetic biology competition aimed at undergraduate students all over the world. In three years there were a total of fifty-four teams participating, each searching for ways to improve the world. One team (which shall go unnamed lest they be hunted down and stoned to death) worked on engineering bacteria that could detect the presence of heavy metals in water. The project was a partial success but was abandoned when the monetary feasibility of the biosensors came into question. What happened over the next few days is unclear, however, it is safe to say that the remnants of the projects were negligently disposed (almost definitely into a lake or river). The happenings of the next couple of years are even less clear and it this point it is barely safe to theorize. Yet theorize we must. The bacteria, once in an open water body, began to reproduce rapidly – as is a common habit amongst microbes – and continue seeking out heavy metals. Certain radioactive isotopes of Plumbium and other heavy metals are present in almost all our planet’s waters, although in concentrations too small to have an appreciable effect on lifeforms of any kind. The genetically modified microbes gathered these isotopes and brought them together until the local concentration of these isotopes had increased by several orders of ten. Of course, it was still not high enough for us humans to take note of. The concentrated radiation and high reproduction rates, along with communication methods such as quorem sensing quickly developed a community of microbes around the world. Individually the microbes were nothing, together they were unstoppable. They possessed an intelligence borne of accelerated evolution induced by the radiation. Unlike the intelligence that we are familiar with theirs was non-centralized allowing them to form a global metabeing. The worst (sorry to depart from objective nature) part of all this is that there can be no revolution. All life is dependent on these microbes. To destroy them is to destroy all life on Earth. The Mayans were not wrong, just misinterpreted. 2012 did not mark the apocalypse, just the end of the human era. 5 x 10^30 organisms of over a dozen million species all coming together to form one massive supercreature; It was inevitable that we would be enslaved.

Revision as of 07:20, 5 September 2011

Introduction

This page documents the art/design workshop run by Zack Denfeld and Cathrine Kramer with Yashas Shetty and the ArtScienceBangalore iGEM 2011 team.

Costume & Short Story Workshop

Put images and short stories here.

2012 by Biswajith Manimaran

Slaves. Again after sixty-five years of independence we were slaves, albeit this time, everyone was a slave. The events that led to this are sundry and interweave in strange ways; most are lost to historians’ blindness. The most notable was the inception of the iGEM competition in 2004: a synthetic biology competition aimed at undergraduate students all over the world. In three years there were a total of fifty-four teams participating, each searching for ways to improve the world. One team (which shall go unnamed lest they be hunted down and stoned to death) worked on engineering bacteria that could detect the presence of heavy metals in water. The project was a partial success but was abandoned when the monetary feasibility of the biosensors came into question. What happened over the next few days is unclear, however, it is safe to say that the remnants of the projects were negligently disposed (almost definitely into a lake or river). The happenings of the next couple of years are even less clear and it this point it is barely safe to theorize. Yet theorize we must. The bacteria, once in an open water body, began to reproduce rapidly – as is a common habit amongst microbes – and continue seeking out heavy metals. Certain radioactive isotopes of Plumbium and other heavy metals are present in almost all our planet’s waters, although in concentrations too small to have an appreciable effect on lifeforms of any kind. The genetically modified microbes gathered these isotopes and brought them together until the local concentration of these isotopes had increased by several orders of ten. Of course, it was still not high enough for us humans to take note of. The concentrated radiation and high reproduction rates, along with communication methods such as quorem sensing quickly developed a community of microbes around the world. Individually the microbes were nothing, together they were unstoppable. They possessed an intelligence borne of accelerated evolution induced by the radiation. Unlike the intelligence that we are familiar with theirs was non-centralized allowing them to form a global metabeing. The worst (sorry to depart from objective nature) part of all this is that there can be no revolution. All life is dependent on these microbes. To destroy them is to destroy all life on Earth. The Mayans were not wrong, just misinterpreted. 2012 did not mark the apocalypse, just the end of the human era. 5 x 10^30 organisms of over a dozen million species all coming together to form one massive supercreature; It was inevitable that we would be enslaved.