Study finds our galaxy may be full of dead alien civilisations

Over a long enough timespan all improbable events become certainties, and several billion years is a pretty long time.

Over a long enough timespan the heat-death of the Universe is a certainty, but as it's impossible to reach absolute zero in a finite number of steps and there's the cardinality of the continuum between

0.000000000......1 degree above absolute zero and zero once protons decay the universe "forgets" where it was, and some infinitesimal value above absolute zero becomes the new Big Bang initial-temperature. And the Universe is reborn...

Anyway, that's a ways off and these windshield wipers on my car won't forget they're worn out better get on it

The math that I've seen says that DNA could not evolve from soup anywhere in the universe in millions of trillions of years.

Basically, it takes DNA to make DNA.

--

John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

** There is a similar case for doubting evolution theory. The rate of new, successful species appearing on earth exceeds math prediction by about 10,000 times.

It's as if some great hand were guiding it....

...... Phil

:

alien civilisations, though there's a strong possibility most of them are a lready dead.

now....

Actually, life on earth seems likely to have started off with RNA - and so me viruses (including Covid-19) still rely on a string of RNA to encode the ir genome.

Ribozymes are RNA-based enzymes. We haven't known about them for all that long - the idea first cropped up in 1967, the name was coined in 1982 and t heir discovery earned a Noble prize in 1989.

"RNA can also act as a hereditary molecule, which encouraged Walter Gilbert to propose that in the distant past, the cell used RNA as both the genetic material and the structural and catalytic molecule rather than dividing th ese functions between DNA and protein as they are today; this hypothesis is known as the "RNA world hypothesis" of the origin of life."

The math about DNA taking a long time to evolve from primordial soup might look more promising if you worked through the RNA world hypothesis.

RNA might be the biological germanium, and DNA the biological silicon.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Or perhaps whoever did the math left out something important, like the guys who calculated the probability of life starting off with DNA, when it looks more likely that it started off with RNA - which is more versatile, if less reliable.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Saturday, 26 December 2020 at 13:21:20 UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnol ogy.com wrote: ...

...

Of course we could be just extremely lucky and it happened in the first ten minutes.

Statistics are not very meaningful for single occurrences.

?Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patent ly absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calcula ted that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.?

- Terry Pratchett.

=========================

en minutes.

** Probability and statistics are not the same thing.

No stats are possible with single events, but the chances of a rare event a re calculable, given sufficient factors are taken into account.

ntly absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calcu lated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.?

** Hardly credible source.

..... Phil

:

alien civilisations, though there's a strong possibility most of them are a lready dead.

now....

Or something else. RNA is clearly a potential precursor. Minerals have be en proposed as a precursor to that.

How life as we know began may never be explained unless we find some traces of something before the type of life forms we are familiar with. Since we don't know what that might be it can be hard to find. Doesn't mean it isn 't there.

I recall religious folk arguing that evolution is impossible by considering an analogy of poking at a watch with a screwdriver. This is rather the sa me way. Life today is the result of many, many billions of experiments on DNA and RNA randomization, but not from scratch, rather from the prior star ting point. This creates a trail of many small changes over the many milli ons and billions of years. The fact that we don't have a track record of t he first 10% or 20% of that history doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Clearly DNA was not a direct result of the big bang in the same way as the microwave background. Your argument is basically stating there had to be n o egg because that would have required a chicken.

--

Rick C. 

-++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Some lucky ones might be seeding the galaxy with DNA/ RNA... or some such. Or maybe it develops in space first.. ala Fred Hoyle.

But I don't believe anyone's estimate for something that seems so unlikely. We must be impossible. :^)

George H.

Nah, I think there are plenty of RNA or some type of protein as early 'memory' theories. (I took a small 'origin of life' seminar in college... that was in the 80's, fun stuff, but no one had/has any idea how it started.) George H.

** Arguments based on an example are false, but an example maybe used illustrate a point.

Arguing from one example to prove something about another dissimilar one is idiocy.

Arguing without the benefit of actual facts is insane.

...... Phil

It's possible that life originated somewhere billions of years ago, by a self-organizing path that's more easily incremental than DNA. That life form, after some millions or billions of years, invented us as a science project, or just for fun.

You and me, being alive now, is basically impossible.

--

John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

Grin... Mueller's rule number 5; If it happens, then it's possible.

George H.

A random check shows them still available in 1996

Page 73 (611)

Jump forward to 2000 and I don't see any.

I still have some CRT monitors but they are no longer in use.

I rarely watch TV these days but other members of the household do. It's been about 6 months since I was forced to move the Sony Trinitron to make way for the Samsung high definition. The brightness and contrast adjustments on the Samsung don't seem to do anything like what I think they should do. I can either have crushed whites or black level too low.

ts.

rediction by about 10,000 times.

guys who calculated the probability

d off with RNA - which is more versatile,

ustrate a point.

As I just did.

is idiocy.

Where's the argument? It's easy enough to point to the idiocy of imagining that life started off using DNA for the genetic code - and there's no real reason to imagine that carbon-based life is the only form of life possible, just because it's the only one we happen to know about. When people use ma thematical models to to make assertions about the likely rate of evolutiona ry development, there's quite a lot of room for imperfections in their mode ls, and modelling the wrong process is a pretty popular source of imperfect ion.

But extremely popular.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bill Sloman wrote: =================

** You had no point - just muddied the water with BS.

** You fake point derived solely from a non similar examples. I ** You said it - Mr BS.

..... Phil

It can't be zero. Earth does exist, and it has got living creatures.

More recent books on the possible origins of life - written by molecular biologists - do see the self-organising path through RNA to DNA plus RNA as more likely than one starting with just DNA.

Not a necessary hypothesis and not a particularly useful hypothesis either (unless you are trying to sneak "creation science" into a biology course.

It's difficult to argue that anything that actually exists is impossible.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Nope, just unlikely. After all, that's only happened for a few decades, and for millennia, it wasn't the case.

If you flip a coin a few hundred times... what the results are, is a very unlikely sequence. But that's because all sequences are unlikely and get unlikelier with every added flip. None of the sequences is impossible, let alone 'basically impossible', whatever that means.