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Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

nautil.us

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Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#201

Post by oblib »

dredmorbius wrote: post #165
oblib wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"life on Earth started with a single organism that replicated." I would tend to ponder that life in it's simplest form is not singular and never has been and this is the cause of evolution.

Available evidence suggests that life on Earth has a common ancestor. This doesn't mean it was the only origin of life on Earth, but it is the only surviving line. It also took a few days for complexity to arise. About a trillion of them.

"Available evidence" : that's because we still don't know how to look for it, or what to look for, and the reasons for that are complexity and time.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#202

Post by knome »

chongli wrote: post #173
knome wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never. "I" am a pattern of self awareness. The constituent parts are irrelevant. So long as the parts support the self awareness, "I" am.

So you would have no qualms about stepping into a Star Trek-style transporter, having your pattern scanned, your matter destroyed and recreated at the destination? If so, I would ask: what if the destroy step malfunctioned? There would be two of you. Which one would you be?

Both would consider themselves to be me, as both would be a legitimate continuation of the pattern of consciousness that is me. The divergence would create something of an ethical dilemma in the case of marriage, property ownership, rank, etc. Would both be granted the rank of the original, seeing as they are both a direct continuation of that being?

Seeing as at least one episode of Star Trek dealt with such a thing, I wonder if any ever dealt with the possibility of a single individual with access to a transporter creating a continuous set of copies from the original scan, perhaps saving at intervals and allowing the instantiation of variously youthful or experienced copies to be made. The divergences over time in such a branching consciousness would make for an interesting sci-fi thought experiment, I think.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#204

Post by dredmorbius »

oblib wrote: post #201
dredmorbius wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Available evidence suggests that life on Earth has a common ancestor. This doesn't mean it was the only origin of life on Earth, but it is the only surviving line. It also took a few days for complexity to arise. About a trillion of them.

"Available evidence" : that's because we still don't know how to look for it, or what to look for, and the reasons for that are complexity and time.

Wrong.

"Available evidence", because there are no extant lifeforms which diverge from the known set of amino acids, no prokaryotic life which doesn't have (or at least didn't once have) mitochondria, utilisation of the Krebs Cycle, and numerous other elements.

Again, other variants might have emerged. But they haven't survived, suggesting the extant line out-competed (or possibly out-lucked) any challengers

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