A tiny universe in a bottle reveals clues to the origin of life

Asteroid and meteorites get quite hot (or at least their outsides do) when they go through the atmosphere on their way down to earth. There's not a lot of organic chemistry that would survive that.

The sun now emits quite a lot of hard ultra violet light and a certain amount higher energy radiation which doesn't make it through the earth's atmopshere.

The earth seems to have had a molten rock surface early in its career, and that wouldn't have been all that receptive either.

It is an interesting area of study, but getting the results down to earth may be tricky.

The mystery of life isn't ingredients, it's structure.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid spake the secret code <113irfo$fa0j$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

And this has what, exactly, to do with electronics design?

Not "science." Not "interesting." Not "contains a glass tube." Not "somebody somewhere used an instrument that had electrons in it." What does copy/pasting a university press release about a hyped-up origin-of-life experiment from a PhD student have to do with designing electronics?

This is sci.electronics.design, not sci.random-press-release-pastebin. If there is an electronics angle, state it. What circuit? What instrumentation? What detector? What vacuum control? What measurement problem? What design tradeoff? What failure mode? What schematic question? Anything?

Last week it was Chinese rocket cheerleading with a pointless little "bye bye Elon" garnish, as if sci.electronics.design needed another geopolitical fortune cookie from the Ministry of Copy/Paste. Now it is cosmic dust in a bottle, because apparently anything with a ScienceDaily headline and enough shiny nouns qualifies as electronics design after it has passed through your newsreader.

You are not starting a technical discussion. You are flyposting headlines. That is not contribution, it is RSS with a pulse.

Try this next time: before pasting the press release, identify the actual electronics design issue you want discussed. If you cannot find one, that is the clue that the article belongs somewhere else, preferably in the same drawer as the rocket propaganda and the Elon reflex.

What are you designing now?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Could you with your wisdom elaborate a bit on that?

He is too stupid to see the opportunity to design the high voltage stuff for it. Electronics is not a subject into itself it is always about applications. Peepholes like him will never be able to solve problems with electronics. And he never did! And likely never will! Beep

But the ingredients have structure. DNA was labelled the golden helix because it has a spiral structure.

Surprisingly they do survive Earth entry. The outer fused heat damaged skin is generally not that thick. They are also not very hot when they reach the ground but may disintegrate due to air pressure when they reach the thicker atmosphere generating a shower of pebbles.

One such meteorite shower hit Paris just after their Academy of Sciences had declared in a report that "nothing" ever fell from the sky!

Obviously stony and pure iron ones usually stay together in big lumps.

Carbonaceous chondrites like the one that fell in the UK during Covid end up with an outer hard crust that is well toasty but the innermost parts are virtually pristine provided that nobody touches them. This wasn't the one I recall but it is in the news now and will do as an example:

It is still thought that during the early phases of the solar system and after the Earth had a mostly solid surface that the seas we now have were at least in part a result of cometary bombardment (dirty snowballs) and steam/CO2/SO2/N2 escaping from the core by vulcanism.

The balance between the two mechanisms is not clear. Both have certainly played a part. Extreme vulcanism can significantly affect climate, and has done in recorded history 1816 Tambora and 1883 Krakatoa.

john larkin snipped-for-privacy@glen--canyon.com spake the secret code snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com thusly:

I've got several projects in the works, some of which are "slow burn" and some are moving faster:

- LED blinky light employee name badge for a local Mom & Pop burger chain

- 6805 SBC project to play around with making an 80s 8-bit SBC from some parts that were donated:

- Tektronix 401x storage tube terminal "printer". The printer for this thing was really not what you'd expect. The printer essentially puts the terminal into a slave mode and drives the tube's electron beam with scanning ramps generated by the printer. The terminal would report back a voltage ("target signal") representing the charge stored on the tube at the position of the scanning ramps. The printer would take this analog signal and use it to print on silver halide paper. While the printer units can be found, the paper is unobtainium at this point and even if you did find some, it would be 40+ years old at this point and likely the active chemicals are no longer very responsive. So the idea was to make a circuit that pretends it's the printer: start the handshake with the terminal to put it in slave mode, generate the scan ramps, digitize the return target signal and generate a grayscale image. Many vintage compy folks still have these terminals and the idea of getting a "hardcopy" of the screen image would be nifty.

Other projects, too, but they're mostly of the repair, refurbish, or reverse-engineer variety for vintage computing gear.

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid spake the secret code <113kcnk$v32v$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

So the electronics angle was so obvious that you forgot to mention it until after someone asked, and even then the answer was "high voltage stuff" waved around like a dead flashlight.

Brilliant. Truly the design insight of the age.

What high voltage stuff, Jan? Supply topology? Regulation? Arc control? Current limit? Electrode geometry? Insulation? Leakage? Vacuum feedthroughs? Measurement front end? Noise rejection? Safety interlock? Failure mode? Anything that might be recognized by adult mammals as an electronics design topic?

No. You pasted a press release, got asked what it had to do with sci.electronics.design, and then retrofitted "high voltage" onto it after the fact, the way a child tapes cardboard fins to a shoe box and announces that it was always a spacecraft.

"Electronics is always about applications" is not a magic spell that turns every ScienceDaily headline into an on-topic design discussion. By that standard, recipes are electronics because ovens have thermostats, astronomy is electronics because telescopes have sensors, and your newsreader dribble is electronics because somewhere, tragically, a keyboard was involved.

The issue is not that applications are irrelevant. The issue is that you did not discuss one. You did not ask a design question. You did not identify a circuit problem. You did not bring a schematic, parameter, measurement, constraint, or tradeoff. You brought cargo-cult headline paste and then called everyone else stupid when the little offering bowl did not fill with applause.

You are not doing applications engineering. You are doing RSS burlesque. You skim a shiny headline, dump it into the group, and then pretend the missing technical discussion is everyone else's failure of imagination.

Beep indeed. That is the noise the truck makes while backing over what is left of your point.

You can't shake up a bucket of parts and get a radar. Or digitize thermal noise into bytes and get a word processor program.

The reproduction of a DNA-based cell requires the incredible complexity of a DNA-based cell.

That didn't evolve by incremental trial and error from a mud puddle with a few organic compounds mixed in. Nothing works until it all works.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

So you are a creationist - or perhaps just too stupid to understand the concept of incremental evolution.

We've told you more than once that DNA was the second generation recording mechanism - there are traces of the original RNA-based scheme around, including a bunch of RNA-based viruses.

The fact that nobody has yet been able to flesh out the way it might of worked says a lot about the complexity of the process, and the limitations of the way we've so far tackled the question of how it might have worked.

Richard Dawkin's book does tackle the question directly

I've some multicolor "light fixtures" for which I have been developing an animation package so I can create "effects" without having to manually determine when each lamp illuminates and with which color. I.e., the

A 64180 would be far more capable -- and a '7180 far more USEFUL! (a single chip solution that can actually *do* something nontrivial)

If you enjoy self-abuse, a 99115 would be more exotic. Or, 43201/02,

If you really want to LEARN something, throw together a 2900 chipset and design your own instruction set! Application-specific processors were all the rage "way back then" (hunt for a copy of "Mick & Brick"). The design effort is more "what is of value to you in a CPU" than "how do I wire these things up".

If it is anything like the '010, you may regret the effort. (TI never really seemed to get the hang of "microprocessors"). The 9918 might be an interesting (though sorely constrained in its abilities) as a "display controller" -- with some other CPU as host.

Motogorilla's RGP would have been an interesting device but I don't think they ever released production silicon (and I have no one to "return" the NDA-released materials to, after all these years -- but "Do Not Destroy!" <frown>)

I refer you to New Scientist, 11th July 2026, page 11.

" Traces of earth's primordial magna ocean spotted in lava".

The text makes it clear that it wasn't actually primordial, but rather a transient consequence of the early collision with a Mars-sized object that left us with our remarkably large moon.

So the surface probably did get sterilised at least once.

Getting hit by a Mars-sized object produces effects that rather overshadow "extreme vulcanism".

There are a lot of things you can't see, and showing you how might happen in nature would take a lot more effort than it would for somebody who was a quicker study.

Very intelligent design. People have been working on that for a while now.

They made a sort of synthetic cell back in 2016 with 473 genes, but they didn't know what a third of those genes were doing. The University of Minnesota has recently made a SpudCell with just 36 genes, but it fails after about five divisions.

They do now. That might make them traces of an earlier scheme surviving in a parasitic niche.

That wasn't the way it struck me, or whole lot of other people whose opinions carry more weight than yours (or mine).

One reviewer said "However, readers with little background in science may need patience." You've got very little background in science and no patience at all.

Creationism isn't a explanation - it's just a cop-out. His attitude to organised religion may make him express that point of view more aggressively than is strictly necessary, but any scientific explanation isn't going to include "God did it", because "God" is undefined.

On 7/20/26 18:15, john larkin wrote: [...]

We'd guesses as much, but there it is stated clearly at last.

Where did the creator come from?

Jeroen Belleman

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid spake the secret code <113lhgk$1agv7$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

In my case, I'm trying to keep the parts BOM as small as possible and the design as simple as possible to keep the price per badge down.

As I stated, the point is to use the parts I have, not make the "best" SBC one could make.

Already did that in college.

Many arcade machines and high end PC graphics cards used this chip. Being familiar with this chip got me a job offer with Evans & Sutherland in the 90s.

Maybe, but again, I'm not asking for different alternatives to what I'm already working with. I was asked what I'm designing and I posted a list.

Everything I've listed has value to me, which is all that matters.

Some other people in the vintage compy community would likely have interest in the 401x dongle. A couple other people have already expressed interest in the 6805 SBC.

One theory (mine) is that life did evolve incrementally somewhere in the universe billions of years ago, got to be very smart, and designed us carbon-based life as a practical joke or a high school science project. [1]

What I can't understand is that if the little green men are smart enough to have interstellar flight, why do their flying saucers crash so often?