What amazes me, or sadly doesn't much any more, it that the only ideas that most people have, about possible alternates to primordial soup on Earth, accidentally creating RNA which accidentally invented and programmed DNA, is to scream "creationist!"
Of course, it's probably impossible to make or use DNA without already having all the cellular machinery in place to support DNA, which is all created by DNA.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Yeah, sadly science has now become political. This was in the Nat. Rev. today,
I took a seminar in college called the "origin of life". Interesting to me... but there are not any new ideas since then... AFAICT.
We need to find other types of life to give us new ideas... But if it started on Earth, then I think we're stuck with it coming out of the primordial soup somehow.
George H.
Why would life arrive here as spores? Why not robotic spaceships with chem labs, to cook up something appropriate on the spot?
We've had electricity for a couple of centuries and electronics for around 100 years, and we're just starting to understand our own chemistry. What could some ancient civilization do in 10,000, or a million years? Build a few billion AI robotic chem labs?
It's very probable. At least as good as the soup thing.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
All that has done is punted the problem from /here/ to /there/. None of the interesting questions are addressed let alone answered!
Well the interesting questions are way beyond our knowledge (yet?...).
Evolution as we know it since Darwin can be designed into life by a creator or life can have occurred spuriously and then evolved etc., that much we can ask. Of course if a creator has created life who created the creator is the obvious next question, not sure if it counts as one of the "interesting" ones :).
And that superbly complex cellular mechanism, so nicely visualized in the video John posted (mesmerizing to just look at) has come into being.... how? Spuriously, by sheer chance? Does not look like it, I would think it is no more statistically probable than say stable nuclei to go into a chain reaction. OTOH given enough time who knows... Then if a creator made it - again, who designed the creator.
Like you say, the best answers to that we have is "we don't know". Neither do we know if we can possibly know these answers.
Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI
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We know the abundances of the elements that come out of the Big Bang.
It was one of the contributions of Alpher-Bethe-Gamow in the 1940s. Basically the Big Bang can only make elements out to lithium.
The a lithium isotope and deuterium are important as firelighters for getting low mass stars to ignite nuclear reactions (and for H bomb makers which is why you can't trust Lithium to have natural abundance).
You can't do much organic chemistry without a decent amount of carbon and that doesn't get made in the initial phase of the big bang.
Bethe & Hoyle went on to work out the stellar nucleosynthesis processes.
BTW It doesn't put much of a bound on things since the sort of big stars that are big enough to go supernovae and expel bulk iron (and heavier still elements) burn through their fuel supply very rapidly indeed.
Essentially it is like having a candle that is almost all wick!
It may seem like a paradox but the more massive the star the shorter its life span because of the larger region deep inside it where pressure and temperature can sustain nuclear reactions. When the fuel finally runs out the core goes into freefall and it goes supernova. We are in a very literal sense made from the ashes of some previous star. You can put bounds on when from the ratios of certain long half life species.
Shockwaves from nearby supernovae also help star forming regions to become dense enough that they can collapse under gravity.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Well, get creative. This is a design group.
There's no reason that the critters that designed us would have to be like us. Maybe they invented DNA as a sort of joke.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
We may never know the origin of the universe or the origin of life.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Great. Created by whom?
Out of thin air?
Demanding the pre-existence of a very complex and powerful system to explain the beginning of a far less complex system is a lame explanation. You will never avoid the prime mover issue that way.
Best regards, Piotr
We may never know the origin of the high-temperature superconductivity as well. So what? Should we give up and not even try to find it out?
Best regards, Piotr
Because approaching it in a way significantly different than extreme reductionism requires some act of creation. By a deity or your robotic AI labs or the biker mice from Mars. Fine, but then the onus of explaining them is on you.
Best regards, Piotr
Maybe he is right. But then he must accept that the creator does require a creator too. By exactly the same reasoning.
The only intellectually honest way to leave this infinite loop is not to enter it at all.
Best regards, Piotr
Nothing about these statements is 'simple'.
It's not so much 'untrue' as 'undecidable'. The biosphere, after all, DOES absorb cosmic rays, and DOES require genetic variation, which comes (in part) from those cosmic rays. Is a biosphere a 'creature'? Is absorption and utility evidence that the radiation is 'as food'?
The 'niche' concept is similarly ambiguous: who is to say what DOES constitute a niche? Is absence of an occupant a temporary condition, or evidence that the ''niche' is nonexistent?
It's like arguing whether a policy is 'reasonable': some folk say it is, if they aren't outraged by the policy statement, while others are sure it is ONLY if a cogent logical treatment of causes and effects supports it. A third view, is that a person in a discussion can be 'reaasonale' if and only if he/she reacts to reasoned expressions, and no policy can do that.
So, is this a chicken-egg argument, that you label 'impossible' rather than admit it's just complicated?
DNA can be used to store books and videos, by building it without 'cellular machinery', i.e. in a laboratory. It's make-able, and use-able, and no 'probably' about either. Yet, you are comfortable saying 'probably impossible'.
Well, no. Feynman's famous essay from 60 years ago is memorable, but atoms are the same size now as they were then. In 1959 you could do litho with a crayon, and today folks making feature sizes of ~10 lattice constants of silicon in the lab and ~15 in production.
So not so much room remaining, really.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Improvement isn't exactly an objective term, as what counts as an improvement is due to the varying metric imposed by the environment.
There are only lethal and non-lethal mutations. The former ones are quickly and efficiently removed from the gene pool. The latter are indifferent. Then only a very specific context can provide them with some transient value (or not). Take the sickle cell disease for one example. In Europe this means something pretty undesirable, but exactly the same mutation makes one much less susceptible to malaria. For sure something good to have in Africa.
Claiming that evolution leads to improved fit is a severe abuse of the whole concept and exposes an attack surface.
Best regards, Piotr
In two dimensions, perhaps! But until we have cubic dies, I will maintain that statement. :-)
But even then, molecular machines can do far more interesting things with far fewer than a thousand atoms. There is still just a little room left below there! Terrifically hard to design though; you practically have to resort to evolution. :^)
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/
Hard to get the heat out if you go properly 3D. You'd need a densely folded structure with the hot bits around the folded surfaces, and reticulated fluid cooling... wait, that's starting to sound remarkably like the cortex of a brain! :)
And even harder to debug... plus you have to think about fault recovery. The smaller the machinery the smaller the error that fouls up its operation... you need, hmm what shall we call this... and immune system?
Clifford Heath
Yeah I have no idea. Right after there was water we had stromatilites... bacterial colonies.. well not right after, but ~0.5 billion years.. still that suggests something was already cooked up. I mean how far back can we look on Earth.. bacterial fossil-wise?
There's the mars theory.. that mars cooled first, and maybe life seeded/started there. We should send more robots to mars and other places.
George H.
Sure, but it costs nothing to speculate. As soon as we can look in the fossil record, we see life! Stromatolites From nothing to bacterial colonies in 0.4 billion... That seems like a huge step! and then 2 billion till Eukaryotes?
I have no idea, but seeding doesn't seem crazy... lotsa time before our solar system.
George H.
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