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Saturn moon 'able to support life'

bbc.com

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Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#191

Post by milquetoastaf »

mcbits wrote: post #129
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is in degree, not of kind Everything is a difference of degree. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. There is a difference of kind between a fungus altering its environment through enzymes it produces from its genetic programming and people inventing steam engines.

I think written language is our primary difference. Prehistoric wild humans had spoken language for hundreds of thousands of years, but we didn't have the explosion of "intelligence" until the advent of written language ~5,000 years ago. Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory. This is what I would look for in assessing whether another species has the pote…

>Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory.

You mean like how some species of nut-hiding birds can hide over 20,000 nuts in distinct locations comprising several square miles of territory and then recall precisely where they are when necessary?

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#192

Post by milquetoastaf »

hyperpallium wrote: post #76
milquetoastaf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet, somehow Humans are in a completely different category than all other life. Lol no we are not. We share 98 percent of our DNA with various simians. We share 97 percent of our DNA with mice. Are we the only species to communicate? No. Are we the only species to communicate symbolically ? No. Great Apes use hand gestures. Are we the only species to recognize themselves? No. Plenty of animals do. In fact, even…

You can argue for their intelligence, but they can't argue for yours.

Is argumentation and rhetoric the basis of intelligence?

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#193

Post by milquetoastaf »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #123
milquetoastaf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet, somehow Humans are in a completely different category than all other life. Lol no we are not. We share 98 percent of our DNA with various simians. We share 97 percent of our DNA with mice. Are we the only species to communicate? No. Are we the only species to communicate symbolically ? No. Great Apes use hand gestures. Are we the only species to recognize themselves? No. Plenty of animals do. In fact, even…

We share 50% of our DNA with a banana. That doesn't mean that a banana has all these incredible human characteristics. Stats about "percentage of DNA shared" are meaningless. A very small change in DNA can produce very large changes in the organism - ones fundamental to its nature.

It's the fact that we share the DNA with such diverse amounts of life that matters. You argue that humankind is fundamentally different and exceptional than all other life is to reinforce the hierarchy set forth by Aristotle and offers an outdated pyramidal view of the biosphere. The more we share, the more in common we seem to have. You can't tell me it's meaningless, that's just completely ignoring decades of scientific research.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#194

Post by rojobuffalo »

Swizec wrote: post #31
rojobuffalo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're sharing the planet with several intelligent species at this moment. Maybe a worthwhile distinction would be intelligence sufficient to dominant an entire planetary ecology; or sufficient to intentionally become multi-planetary.

Dominate the planet is tricky too. Corvids for instance are almost as widespread as humans. They don't do greenland and the southern parts of south america. But they happen to be less destructive to their environment than humans so maybe that disqualifies them from the "dominate" part? That said, humans also don't quality for multi-planetary. I like that definition, though.

Good point about corvids. Ants are another example I was thinking about. They actually do engineer ecology on the scale of individual mounds by feeding and growing fungi that they eat. They are spread all over the Earth, and I think they have us beat in terms of biomass. Maybe there could be another definition for a weaker form of intelligence that covers those cases.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#195

Post by kobeya »

nostrademons wrote: post #17
charles-salvia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellular life is much rarer, and life capable of reaching human-level intelligence and beyond is probably absurdly rare, on the level of something like one species per galaxy. It's all worthl…

I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…

Fossilized bone survives 65Myr, but granite buildings and metal tools do not leave even the slightest fingerprints? I'll call BS.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#196

Post by nikolasavic »

herbstein wrote: post #18
nostrademons wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…

Isaac Arthur has a very interesting video that touches on that specific topic, but with a space exploration angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7fLNvpl0c8

I love his channel! I'm surprised it isn't more popular, it has top notch content and regularly scheduled releases.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#197

Post by marmshallow »

smdz wrote: post #178

I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else) I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It loo…

Post from a few months ago: "Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994455

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#198

Post by nnq »

Symmetry wrote: post #169
nnq wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What intuition makes you believe that once you have microbial live + some kind of stability (low levels of ionizing radiation + a decent level of chemical stability, so not too hot), evolution to advanced multicellular organisms is not pretty much the default? I'd be more or less inclined to believe that once you have the first microbes advanced enough to support cell2cell signaling, and some kind of "condensed bluep…

The problem is that basic microbes only resperate over their surfaces so they have big square/cubed law limits on how large they can be and, by extension, on how complex their genomes can be. You need a hopeful monster that can run its metabolism throughout the cell to develop large genomes of the type that can support differentiated cells in multi-cellular creatures.

> You need a hopeful monster that can run its metabolism throughout the cell to develop large genomes of the type that can support differentiated cells in multi-cellular creatures

There are a quite a few creatures sitting at the boundary between unicellular and multicellular like colonial algae (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox) and hydra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus) - I call this one "at the boundary" because you cans simply cut a piece of an adult and have the pieces heal intro 2 live adults, so "being multicellular" happened before having proper genomic mechanisms for encoding body plan and body plan related cell differentiation for this organism, for example, information pattern is all emergent based on relative position of cells - there are experiments to prove this, it's not all inference from what I said above). So there's no missing link here, you can have a pretty smooth continuum from unicellular to "proper multicellular" (like body plan with cell types differentiation encoded in genome so it can "boot up" from just one fertilized cell). Also yeasts and unicellular algae have pretty huge genomes with tons of redundancy / duplication / room to spare / room to accommodate multiple cloned copies etc..

Yeah, biologists do like to point out that there are "very clear differences" between the organisms I mentioned above, and that they are clearly separate things, because they do love their beloved classifications of things :) (god forbid one puts an organism on wrong shelf of their library)... but if you look at things more computationally/informationally, there's a lot of flexibility and no clear gaps/boundaries "down at the bottom of the tree of life"... really can't see anything that evolution would have a problem searching through, no big ridges to block gradient descent in this problem space (like there are before proper-unicellular-life-with-genetic code, despite all "RNA world" theories... that's why I'd be more inclined to think that there may be planets with life supporting condition where microbial life has not had the chance to start yet despite the requirements being there... rather than life "getting stuck" at the microbial stage)

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#199

Post by vkreso »

vidarh wrote: post #152
aleksei wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but I posit that this is a very human point of view. Once you've cracked the energy needs for interstellar travel, what's the point of raising a war campaign light years away (especially if you need generation ships to attack)? Furthermore, it doesn't seem very intelligent to me that all capable species just hunker down in their own gravity well to die off unnoticed and without having explored the u…

They wouldn't need generation ships. You "just" need sufficient tech to put engines on a suitable astroid and accelerate it to a decent fraction of c; it only needs enough logic to fine tune the path. An invasion force is horribly inefficient vs. just slamming a lot of mass at someone at high enough speed. And it only takes one massively paranoid, xenophobic species lobbing big rocks at people to ruin the entire neig…

> They wouldn't need generation ships. You "just" need sufficient tech to put engines on a suitable astroid and accelerate it to a decent fraction of c; it only needs enough logic to fine tune the path. An invasion force is horribly inefficient vs. just slamming a lot of mass at someone at high enough speed.

I misplaced a link and the name of an author of a sci-fi novel in which space battles are much more science based than the usual laser-tag shoot off. I'll dig through my bookmarks and hopefully post the name in the reply when I get to my pc..

I think there was also a reddit thread about it sometimes in the past.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#200

Post by mcbits »

milquetoastaf wrote: post #191
mcbits wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think written language is our primary difference. Prehistoric wild humans had spoken language for hundreds of thousands of years, but we didn't have the explosion of "intelligence" until the advent of written language ~5,000 years ago. Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory. This is what I would look for in assessing whether another species has the pote…

>Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory. You mean like how some species of nut-hiding birds can hide over 20,000 nuts in distinct locations comprising several square miles of territory and then recall precisely where they are when necessary?

That points to a well developed individual memory. I don't think they're using the locations of nuts to encode knowledge for each other and future generations. (If they are, that's tremendous.)

But imagine if the birds also carved symbols into tree trunks and taught their friends how to interpret the symbols to find hidden caches of nuts, or to share techniques for building more durable nests, etc.

Written language allows us to store, access, and share information beyond our individual memory limits. It is sort of a collective memory as well as an expansion of individual memory. I can write down the locations of 21,000 nuts, and I can hand that book off to you.

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