Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 404 posts

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

#241

Post by nh23423fefe »

paulpauper wrote: post #233
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.

arxiv is suffering from major mission/feature creep. IMHO, it should be limited to math and physics and maybe quantitative finance. There are too many low quality or blog-like papers being published. Maybe it would be better if it was spun off to a different website.

>arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean too many?

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

#242

Post by ducttapecrown »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #231
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100

As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect heuristic, but it's like 99%+.

I love that this was downvoted because it's unlikely that anyone who downvoted it knows what scientific papers are actually typeset with. HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.

This scientist is just older than LaTeX.

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

#243

Post by ajuc »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #89
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,…

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…

So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust?

Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.

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

#244

Post by drewrv »

evanb wrote: post #239
forinti wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

The sun's power density is approximately the same as compost.

Can you elaborate on that or drop a link that explains more?

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

#245

Post by FrustratedMonky »

monkaiju wrote: post #229
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my intention to toss science out the window. All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning. Until they are further defined, researched and proven. Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at first. It also went against god. If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in trees wondering why the sun comes up. How do you…

Did you respond to the intended comment? Seems unrelated to mine

The parent of yours was about God, and you seemed to agree with that one. Seemed related. Weren't you equating someone's proposed theory as hand wavy mysticism, because of a lack of meaning in their lives?

But maybe not. I could me reading too much into it.

Apologies.

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

#246

Post by InitialLastName »

achierius wrote: post #163
mapreduce wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural." Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too? I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural! I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at t…

Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.

To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists?

To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.

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

#247

Post by s1artibartfast »

forinti wrote: post #126
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…

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

The average American also outputs about 125W/kg if you include our technology, and not metabolism.

US Primary energy consumption = 30 Trillion Kwh/ year [1]

30 Trillion Kwh/ year / 8760 hrs = 3.3×10^12 W (watts)

3.3×10^12 W (watts)/ 330million = 10 kW/ person

10 kW/ person / 80kg = 125 W/kg

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

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

#248

Post by lioeters »

bmitc wrote: post #234
lioeters wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> entropy is the process that drives life Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life? , calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy". > In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of therm…

I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely to be accurate. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...

Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.

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

#249

Post by echelon »

forinti wrote: post #126
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…

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

So we really are batteries for the Matrix.

Joking aside, this comparison is really beautiful.

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

#250

Post by creer »

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?

That seems pretty likely - with some chance of hybrid still possible. That is, does AI take off and leave the goop in the dust. Or does AI become an augmentation of the current life forms - in an integrated form which perhaps can be admitted as continuation. The current AI products require quite a bit of compute power - but then augmentation doesn't need to be "on-board" the organic life form.
Post reply on HN