121–130 of 212 posts
This is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever…
The fact that there is something, just something can drive me crazy. Why is there something and not just nothing.
I feel the same way you do. It drives me even crazier that more people don't feel this way.
This is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever…
I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is ba…
If Jeremy England’s hypothesis is true, then life shouldn’t be unique but rather inevitable, as life in general would be the way for matter to better dissipate heat, and better turn low entropy into high entropy.
In fact, if you watch what life is doing in terms of physics, then it’s obvious that all it does is consume low entropy (stored chemical energy, heat from heat baths), and dissipates it around very efficiently.
Even we, humans are more and more good at it: we take hydrocarbons chemical energy and turn it into work and heat. It’s not enough for us, we now consume energy stored in atomic bonds, and turn it into work and heat. We capture concentrated sunlight and also turn it into work and heat, etc.
Essentially, we are doing what we are supposed to do as a function of physical matter: we produce more entropy.
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The universe is about 15 billion years old, and chemistry didn't start with the formation of Earth.
Chemistry in earth certainly started with the formation of earth. Are you suggesting that abiogenesis didn’t start on earth, but self-replicating molecules started evolving in earths protoplanetary disc? Serious question, haven’t encountered that theory before. It’s kinda panspermia-lite.
Presumably like your parent, I believed this was a discussion about the probability that life has originated elsewhere in the galaxy / universe, independently of life on Earth.
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I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments. We don’t yet have confidence about the exact mechanism on Earth but based on those experiments it’s likely (& generally currently accepted as the most likely…
>>>I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments. Did I miss some big announcements? Where has anyone created life from inorganic material reactions in a highly controlled environment? Serious question, n…
Unless life originated directly at the formation of the universe and panspermia is how life got to this planet, the only logical explanation is that life somehow emerges from “nothing”. We don’t know the exact mechanism and it seems much more likely that life originates on a planet rather than in space & arriving at a planet. The “intelligent” panspermia explanation (i.e. aliens seeding life throughout the universe to preserve it) would still require an inorganic origin for life.
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This is what I referred to as "speculation" in the literature for life's origins on Earth. This speculation is a good first theoretical stab... or it might not be. Until life is created from inorganic matter in a laboratory (enabling us subsequently to estimate how rare or not it might be elsewhere in the observable universe), we should substantially dial back our confidence from "life is likely extremely plentiful t…
I agree that we are limited to "speculating" due to n=1. However, personally my sense is that simple life is more likely to be ubiquitous than not. This is informed by the fact that currently there is no evidence that conditions on early Earth were particularly unique in comparison to first principles modelling of rocky planet atmospheres**. This coupled with the relative speed with which simple life emerged points t…
And if “out of nothing” is the baseline condition, the most likely explanation is that it happens where there’s a lot of energy to sustain it while not enough to kill it, which means planets at the boundary of thermal activity (since we need something more direct than photosynthesis which is a relatively complex capability that came late in Earth’s cycle as far as we know).
This is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever…
I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is ba…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is ba…
I would turn this argument around and say if life elsewhere is more likely, than it should be more likely that life from beyond has found us. If the likelihood of life elsewhere is so high that it has to be true, to me it would also be true that life should have found us by now
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same way you do. It drives me even crazier that more people don't feel this way.
The simple answer is the controversial answer. Life needs something to spark it from nothing to something. That's more evidence of a demiurge than anything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple answer is the controversial answer. Life needs something to spark it from nothing to something. That's more evidence of a demiurge than anything else.
What made the demiurge?