Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
nationalgeographic.com
Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
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Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#2Probably because news articles don't use his name in their headlines
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#3Probably because news articles don't use his name in their headlines
Still laughing. Thanks!
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#4If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#5Considering that the first proto-computers were not programmable, I can't help but be skeptical that the first life needed genetic material.
Certainly there were lipid membranes. Maybe there were spontaneous proteins, maybe there was purely-catalytic RNA.
I guess it's also a matter of line drawing. I'm OK with calling crystals life, for example. One should feel bad about breaking up big ones the same as one should feel bad about killing 150 year old lobsters.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#6If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
It would certainly be called reverse engineering.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#7If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
I don't think so.
Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered.
I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#8If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
I don't think so. Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered. I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
hypothetical hyper-vegans must always bootstrap from source, because vendored binaries that exceed the size of small small genomes is heterotrophy.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#9If someone figures out how to create life, the theological and ethical consequences will be insane.
I don't think so. Primitive proto-life has little moral value, just as vegans eat plants, hypothetical super-vegans only eat blue-green bacteria, and hypothetical hyper-vegans have a 500 year deadline to be electrically powered. I don't believe in a hard barrier between life and non life, so any discrete moral function would be non-computable, and therefore I reject it outright.
>I don't think so [...] and therefore I reject it outright
That's not a problem. There can be insane theological and ethical consequences for everyone else.
Re: Tibor Gánti's ideas about the origins of life
#10Considering that the first proto-computers were not programmable, I can't help but be skeptical that the first life needed genetic material. Certainly there were lipid membranes. Maybe there were spontaneous proteins, maybe there was purely-catalytic RNA. I guess it's also a matter of line drawing. I'm OK with calling crystals life, for example. One should feel bad about breaking up big ones the same as one should fe…
I think you've got a minority opinion calling crystals "alive," although it does jibe with one definition of life that I heard: "any self-sustaining system that reduces internal entropy."