Modular organism assembly

[Zor]

An science fiction idea i was thinking about.

We have all heard about how they can now grow organs and tissue under medium. As well how they can now can do things such as heart transplants and re-attach lost fingers and even limbs. Could it be possible to grow various bits of an organism (legs, heart, bones, brain and such like) in vats, and then surgically assemble these component bits into a functional organism?

Zor

[Rabid]

A living organism entirely made from spare-parts ?

Maybe if all the spare parts share the same DNA ? Frankly, I don't know... Depend on your technological level,I guess : if you have swarm of nanobots able to surgerize at the scale of a molecule, it'll be easier to do than if you have to use macro-scale surgeon (even roboticized) to do the assembly job.


I reckon, though, that from a purely "utilitarian" standpoint, at this rate it would probably be easier to grow the whole organism at the same time in your vats, and use the spare parts only as a replacement when the originals are damaged - otherwise the amount of surgery needed to functionally connect all your "parts" would be tremendous, as well as the complexity of the operation, far, far above anything we can do today...


If the idea is to build a living weapon (or any kind of modular living organism, for that matter), I think you would be better served by conceiving a basic "chassis" containing all the essential functions (vital organs, central nervous system, basic sensory organs, etc...), on which you would later "plug" the additional bio-equipment you deem necessary (additional sensory organs, additional limbs, bio-weapons, bio-armor, etc...).

[Imperial528]

If you want to keep the whole "make the parts separately" bit, then I would suggest the following:

Vat-grow the various organs and tissues separately, but instead of waiting until they are done to extract them, do it right before they are finished. Then move them to a larger vat to grow them together to form a single organism. You would probably have to do it in stages, like growing together the major physical parts (limbs, back, spine) then put the organs in and finally grow the chest onto it. You would probably have to grow the head as its own whole part though, just due to the sheer complexity.

[Coalition]

The weirder way might be trying to use a multi-injector 3-D printer to try and grow the organism. You have injectors for muscle cells, blood vessel wall cells, bone pieces, nerves, etc. Layering from bottom to top, rather than inside out like 5th Element's Leloo. here

A minor method might be just printing small organs like that then finding a way to start them, such as a heart. You set up the heart in a neutral solution to support it through its growth (so it isn't falling over), and at the end you implant it and give it a jolt, so it hopefully starts beating.

Might be a bit tricky though.

[Rossum]

Depending on the amount of cybernetics you allow in the process, the organism could consist largely of a synthetic frame with various organs built into it. If you want the result to be intelligent I'm pretty sure giving it a robotic brain would be easier to maintain/produce than trying to vat grow an organic brain and hook it up to the rest of it.

What would be the ultimate point of the organism?

If its trying to terraform a planet by growing lots of animals or organisms to populate it then I'm pretty sure it would be easier to have machines mass-produce artificial wombs or cloning tanks and then have the tanks grow the organisms.

An organism requires alot of muscles, bones, and a nervous system all working together to make it move and those systems don't look like they can be easily put together in a foactory. I suppose you could print out a skeleton using ceramics or something and attatch grown muscles to it but I don't know how a nervous system is supposed to interface with all that stuff fresh off the assembly line. I think the result of that would be a semi-healthy organism that doesn't know how to operate its own body and is probably brain dead.

I suppose you could use the above process to build a whole lot of non-sapient wombs (like what was done in the Dune series) and use them to produce full organisms.

Otherwise, if you are trying something like producing a body for a brain-upload then you would probably be best creating something like the Terminator. Basically a cyborg chassis with its own power source and artificial muscles and then covering it with cloned tissues and organs. Depending on the ability to interface the machine to flesh, the resulting cyborg may not be able to feel their skin as well as they did in life... but at least they could move around and would have flesh. If something kills their biological tissue then it wouldn't destroy their mind (unless it destroyed the processor storing it) and they could potentially get new skin grown later. Cyborgs of this nature could have programs installed that simulate things like touch and smell even if they can't interface with their skin directly and could even bear children if they have the right organs built in (though I'm guessing adoption or something else might be a more practical option).

[jollyreaper]

You get into the whole question of whether steel or flesh is "better" for something. In settings with biowank then if your tank is a 20 ton bug that spits acid, it immediately pwns anything made of hardened steel. And I wouldn't see that being true at all.

When you get right down to it, living things are machines and seem to have been pretty well optimized via natural selection. If you want to grow tree skyscraper to live in like on Pandora versus a concrete and steel high-rise, which works better? You might need less resources to grow the tree since it is just working with minerals in the soil and atmospheric gases but it's going to take you 200 years to get a tree-scraper and a year to get an apartment tower.

Now if we take a look at the work being done with robotic assemblies, there was a crazy video showing small flying bots assembling a tower of blocks.

It doesn't take a lot of scifi extrapolation to consider the implications of that and 3D printing and the concept of building "living" structures with small bots crawling through them performing maintenance, cleaning, etc.

My suspicion is that a few hundred or so years in the future, we're not going to see the hard division between metal and meat. It's going to be both more complicated and more subtle than that.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think a modular organism would be possible.

Imagine the sub-surface of some gas giant, slithering in these vast oceans of metallic hydrogen are like quicksilver serpents whose organ systems are composed of living mimetic poly alloy, darting in the liquid metal oceans and dwelling in crystalized reefs and caves of vitrified carbonite, floating or sinking in that flowing metalloscape under a sky encompassed in a storm larger in scope and breadth than the entire Earth.

A school of these quicksilver eels undulating through this surreal world, to feed on the deposits of silica they spread out into a dozen mercurial snakes to look for sustenance, but when they encounter predators like filter-feeding skywhales with hungry helium-stomachs or sleek obsidian-feathered jovian stormhawks diving into the depths of the gas giant to hunt for these slithering steel snakes, the school of quicksilver eels end up flowing into one another as a defense mechanism, oozing into one greater liquid metal python to constrict their wouldbe skywhale or stormhawk predators.

Some of the individual mercury snakes when subsumed into this greater boa constrictor would transmute into specialized organs through intense metabolic processes, turning into the musculature needed for strength, or hardening into rudimentary skeletal systems, or transforming themselves into enlarged sensory organelles - combining essentially into a greater organism to fight these predators that would be larger and more powerful than an individual mercury-snake on its own.

Maybe this transmutative recombinative process would be really metabolismically intense and after surviving, the python dissolves back into its constituent serpents to escape, or if they are lucky and if they kill the predator, they can all feed on the felled beast. The predators, when wrestling these pythons, would have to try and exhaust the snake until it melts back into its individual constituent creatures so the predator can eat them one by one, or the predators would hunt down isolated serpents far away from large groups so it can't combine with other snakes to form the pythons or something.

The reproductive processes of these mercury serpents would involve similar feats of combining into a greater pythonic organism, in some kind of orgy, where they use their extra mass - from excess consumed foods - to transmute little silvery snakelings that will slither and ooze out of the writhing poly alloy anaconda and swim into the jovian oceans of the gas giant.

EDIT:

Yes. These liquid snakes combine... into a solid snake!

[lordofchange13]

With decent SciFi tech you could attach spare organs/limbs/digits to your self no ploblem, and maybe even create a body-horror crime against nature when science goes a bit to far. Why did everyone go form the OP to trying to make some sort of organic Grey Goo creature?

[Shroom Man 777]

Because Marie Shelley already did it five thousand years ago.

And also,



i just do eyes, j'j'... just eyes... just genetic design, just eyes

you nexus, huh? i design your eyes.




he say you brade runna

tell him i'm retired

[lordofchange13]

The best route any Scientist can take in this project would be to get the best parts of various species of animals and combine them into a (for the moment dead) creature and then take some of Herbert West's Re-animator serum and bring the perfect being to life!

[Shroom Man 777]

The best route any Scientist can take in this project would be to get the best parts of various species of animals and combine them into a (for the moment dead) creature and then take some of Herbert West's Re-animator serum and bring the perfect being to life!

[lordofchange13]

Was going for something more like this

[Shroom Man 777]

Rob Schneider versus Deformagrotesquetitude. May the best worst hideoustrosity win.

[lordofchange13]

Schneider would win hands down! Have you seen the chest hair he has in that movie?

[Shroom Man 777]

His chest hairs were practically modular organisms in themselves.


ANYWAY. Back to the LIQUID metal SNAAAAKES that combine into a much larger and much SOLIDer SNAAAAKE.

Maybe one of their natural predators in the metallic hydrogen oceans of Jovian worlds, living on the vitrified ferric reefs, could be chromium crustaceans. Metallic exoskeletons and naturally occurring carbon nanotubule tendons and ligaments allow them to survive in the harsh pressures of the undersea, and their musculature system is hydraulic-like, and they have mercurial liquids for blood, and for their hydraulic muscles, or something.

Anyway, these would try to ambush the liquid metal snakes, trying to hunt down individual serpents rather than risking taking on a group of them that have turned into a giant python. In these depths, they probably can't see, so their sensory apparatuses are probably based on magnetism. Instead of eyes, they have magnetic organoids to perceive a metallic world. Some prey species could evolve non-magnetic anatomies in an attempt to camouflage themselves. Yeah.

Maybe some of the chrome crustacean species have evolved to be so huge that they can take on not just liquid metal snakes, but the combined solid snakes. These enormous crustaceans could be bipedal, and their mouthparts could be evolved to crush prey tissues, and are composed of interlocking rotating metal slabs that resemble... METAL GEARS.

CAN'T BE!!!

[The Yosemite Bear]

Why did I read the title as Modular ORGASM formation... Sci Fi sex toys?

[Shroom Man 777]

The sensation of modulizing organs could be orgasmic to organ modulizers.

Imagine a singularity transhuman post-organ, a post-genital. A convertible.

Its default condition is that of a post-uterus. But with a press of a button or a mimetic-mentallo-command, this uteus can prolapse and envaginate and turn inside out and come out of the vagina. And then through the use of artificial smooth musculature composed of ultra-light ultra-fine yet ultra-strong carbon nanotubule buckyball synthetic aperture striations lining the submucosal epithelium of the uterus's interior (which is now inside-outed), the prolapsed uterus can harden and rigidify and assume a phallic shape, while sensory tissues on the inside-now-outside can be activated so that it can be used in stabbing and penetrative purposes for copulation. Of course, this would be a pure entertainment organoid device, it would not be reproductive or excretory (the urethra comes separate from the convertible uterus), but this modular organoid module would only be attached for these kinds of pleasurable occasions where a multirole swinger-wing variable geometry genital superiority capacity for maximum tactico-strategic flexibility is required.

The convertible post-cock reverts back into a uterus by sinking into, and inside of, the scrotum through a pneumatic double-action mechanism.