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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?

#61

Post by simiones »

mavili wrote: post #24
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.

Should be so common, right? Yet we're struggling to find any form of life. Not complex, just anything that lives.

I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment.

That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it were universal.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by master-lincoln »

AIorNot wrote: post #51
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.

[flagged]

You do not seem to address the parent comment at all. Why use the reply button instead of starting a new top level comment thread?

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

#64

Post by asow92 »

simiones wrote: post #52
GoldenRacer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of human intervention is required? When I cook food, human intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill marks to be unnatural or synthetic.

I think the line is typically drawn at any human intervention. I doubt many humans consider steaks to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.

That's exactly what's being—albeit atypically—advocated for here: That even steaks are a naturally occurring byproduct of humans and cows because humans and cows naturally exist.

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

#65

Post by simiones »

asow92 wrote: post #58
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…

When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?

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".

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

#66

Post by dmd »

AIorNot wrote: post #51
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.

[flagged]

Please stop doing this. "Novelty" accounts are not welcome on HN, and chatgpt-made posts even less so.

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

#67

Post by delichon »

hamburga wrote: post #27

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity…

Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life?

I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".

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

#68

Post by wharvle »

basil-rash wrote: post #14
asow92 wrote: post #6

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.

That’s one of those revelations that only sounds profound when everyone involved is really stoned. Outside of that, everyone knows the meaning of “unnatural” and we all get that the colloquial meaning and a strict etymological analysis don’t quite align.

The deeper insight is that every definition of a word breaks down when you try to pin it precisely and in some absolute, universal-context sense to an exact meaning. That doesn’t mean they can’t be very, very useful.

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

#70

Post by gus_massa »

tobbe2064 wrote: post #35

This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe. I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know wh…

"Darwinian evolution is not a sufficient theory of life (claremont.org)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692

I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional protein is so long.

Also, they are generating the protein using a "random dice" instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using "branch and prune" to find a longer and more efficient one.

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