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Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

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Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#111

Post by 1970-01-01 »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #50
1970-01-01 wrote: post #44

Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.

So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say beyond our ability to reach. What’s the next step beyond arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?

The next step is arguing about communications. Do you trust the unforgiving universe to respond kindly? Is it a dark forest trap?

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#112

Post by pfdietz »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #9

I think life is going to be quite common as it seems it just requires liquid water and an extremely common type of rock in order to form alkaline hydro-thermic vents. It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after the formation of the Earth. The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took billions of years. So complex life may be rare.

The smallest independent system we know of that is capable of Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms. How do you bridge the gap between "waste and rocks" and this system?

Water and rocks may be necessary, but you have no evidence they are sufficient.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#113

Post by jyounker »

mjburgess wrote: post #3

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program with many many many academic papers behind it.

He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to provide guidance for those coming after him.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#114

Post by simiones »

asow92 wrote: post #77
simiones wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because birds are not humans. To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".

> "not created by geological processes" Did life begin with the geological process of protein chains forming in geothermal vents? I don't know, but it begs whether it is natural or not.

It's perfectly consistent that the origin of life itself can be a geological process but that the products of life itself are a separate category.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#115

Post by pfdietz »

TravisCooper wrote: post #21

If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking. However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. Entropy is increasing.

Oh look, another person utterly mangling the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics.

Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#116

Post by pizza »

mrkstu wrote: post #91
jmcqk6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of s…

Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.

You might really like the short book What is Life? by Schrödinger, it delves into exactly that.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#117

Post by simiones »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #83
simiones wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"unnatural" or "artificial" have a very clear meaning: made by the intervention of humans in ways outside our base anatomical functions (so excluding babys or spilled blood). This intervention can be mechanical (Stonehenge), or biological (breeding animals to become more useful to humans), or chemical (synthesizing oil from plastic), or a complex combination of all of them (whisky); it is also transitive: anything cr…

Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial. By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

> By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

Agreed.

> Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial.

This doesn't follow in any way, not with the definition I gave, or with any definition I have ever heard. How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?

I've told you my definition (anything created by a human that is not an anatomical/physiological process of that human), and by my definition it is very clearly artificial (iMacs are created by humans, and they are not a bodily secretion of humans).

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#118

Post by digging »

throwaway143829 wrote: post #26
ta8645 wrote: post #5

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order" after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd guess we will never understand that level of intelligence, unless AI augments our brains somehow.

> unless AI augments our brains somehow

Frankly, the more I think about AI, the less sense it makes to me that biological, single-body humans have any place in the future. As soon as we can digitize our minds, why wouldn't people begin to do so? Bodies could be inhabited at will, and death will be a thing of the past as we're able to store backups. I'm sure some will refuse and be left behind, just as we have Amish communities today, with a similar level of influence on civilization. And in the case of digital people, I think it's likely they'll share in the intellectual advancements of AI, if such a distinction even exists.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#119

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#120

Post by tivert »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying.

I think that's a biased take. Complex life may be better at exploiting a more table environment, but too much disruption can kill it. "Less complex" life seems able to adapt more quickly to more extreme changes (e.g. the much greater diversity of bacterial metabolism). Extinction events are inevitable, and environmental disruption will inevitably become more and more challenging until everything dies (though it may take a billion years), and during that time I think the trend will be for complexity to decrease.

So ultimately, I think you're overgeneralizing one phase.

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