Experiment

Friends, don't be surprised with my suggestion yesterday.

Imagine, we need two prerequisites, and one is now at hand: an entirely synthetic (or artificial, if you prefer the term) cell.

If our space scientists manage to find a planet that could support life (in essence, it has water, an atmosphere, and a reasonable surface temperature), it would be logical to put the synthetic life on that planet. Funding prospect seems great with project of this kind. We could achieve two things here: On one hand, we could see how evolution takes place in a real life situation. At the same time we could do away with all synthetic life on earth - which is being strongly protested by many moral purist as soon as the news of an artificial cell is made public.

And, the experiment does not end here. With the whole new planet as a gigantic laboratory, we would expect there are research opportunities for millions of generations of PhD student. One could fulfill the requirement of his thesis by simply inserting some new DNA sequence into one strain of the bacteria, put it back to the planet, and see the function of the gene product. Another may spend his three years by duplicating one gene, make a small mutation in one of the copies, and see the result of differential expression. Many many years later, when the synthetic creatures on that planet has evolved and differentiated into millions of species, one could even study ecology and behavioral science ...