Almost certainly not. The genome is not the only information you need. You also need the gestation environment. It’s kind of like trying to compile gcc from source without a working gcc.
The Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro, including GCC, starting at around 512 bytes of machine code, plus all the source code. I think they have had some success already:
The signed shim itself is orders of magnitude larger than 512 bytes, not to mention the firmware that starts shim.
I don't think the Bootstrappable Builds folks are interested in touching proprietary software/firmware, so it is likely they would not be using UEFI or similar.
While I appreciate the analogy, like others have pointed out, it's kind of broken as gcc is designed to be buildable by other C compilers, or at least, it's not impossible to bootstrap from a simpler C compiler.
A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.
We have no idea how the artificial womb should look like.
It's basically the idea that we want to bake a cake, we have the recipe but don't know the kind of oven we need, nor the temperature, and only have a vague idea of how the result should look like.
We may get a cake by trial and error, but it's not guaranteed.
That is a fetus brought to term, between an embryo and a fetus there is a lot of conceptual space. This premature fetuses are basically fully formed creatures but small, we have no idea how to do the first part.
Also again: we're doing this looking at a working plan, it's different from guessing how one for an extinct animal may look like.
No idea what you're talking about. You said yourself it's non-trivial and we aren't there yet. So "some day it might be possible" seems reasonable, not "almost certainly not".
Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.
>dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass
I think you two are at a philosophical impasse - staticassertion is something of an optimist about technology with the viewpoint that anything that actually exists a working replica can be built of it with enough data as to how the thing actually works (perhaps requiring extensive years of research) and enough money and time to do the replication.
Your perspective seems to that the time to research, and the money and time to replicate are unknown variables of such potential size that we cannot know if we would ever make the investment to have it come to pass.
I personally suppose that as time goes on an artificial womb will become a more alluring prospect because of problems like this that it would help solve and as such the money and time required would be at found. But I am also an optimist about technological progress - although a pessimist about climate change so my assumption is based on us solving something I don't think will be solved.
I don't know why that's semantically important, but there you are, for posterity.
> when your confident statement
Yeah I'm literally quoting you. So if you're saying that it will "almost certainly not" happen "some day", so be it, but you followed that up with "yet" and "non trivial" as opposed to "never" and "impossible".
Instead of artificial womb, I'd imagine a natural womb of its closest extant relative may suffice. Sort of like how a horse can gestate a zebra embryo, but imagine the zebra was extinct.
A lot of things were non-trivial to invent, what’s your point?
From the way technology advances over time, someone will figure it out eventually, and when they do the announcement won’t be met with audible gasps, but rather a shrug of the shoulders and a passing comment of “Huh, so they figured that out.”
