OT: How life came to Earth

I can see how someone skimming it might come to that conclusion.

The repetition is mostly variations on a theme, so repetition is to be expected.

The handwaving is because it is conveying subtle arguments to the traditional intelligent man on the street, who is not an expert in the subject. As such it has no alternative but to "tell stories" that summarise the understanding that has been gained in the past century.

If you want something with more facts, read his "The Ancestor's Tale". That starts at man, and traces the evolutionary steps back to the archaea. Every chapter has something interesting, but there's no way it could be read sequentially!

The power of the medieval church isn't 'science', but is a kind of social pressure. Science didn't order those actions, wasn't the social operator, but the church did, and was.

It is.

No, I don't - I claim to understand part of the picture, but far from all of it. (Or rather, I claim /science/ understands part of it - I try to keep up with information about the field, but I am not a biologist myself.)

And therein lies your problem. I agree that no one has the full picture. But you understand a great deal less than scientists in the field - indeed, a great deal less than most people discussing in this thread. You are not qualified to speculate.

Okay, analogy time again. We know a lot about how electronics works - electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, and the rest. There is also a lot we /don't/ know. Scientists keep learning more, by looking at existing evidence, doing experiments, making calculations - basically, by doing science.

What would you think of someone who speculated that the reason circuits get hot is that the electrons get tired from all that running round in circles, and we all get hot when we run a lot?

We do not know why some materials are superconductors at relatively high temperatures - scientists have hypotheses, but no clear answers. Is it then fine to suggest it's because the Norse gods (or alien robots) like Yttrium, and fine-tuned the universal constants to make them superconduct?

Isn't that all just reasonable speculation - as legitimate an idea as any other? It has as much evidence as your own speculations in biology, and as much rational basis, and is equally helpful at answering questions, furthering science and knowledge, or solving practical problems.

Wandering about the solution space is good. Wandering off with the fairies and your head in the clouds is not. In biology you have apparently so little idea as to where the solution space might be, that you don't even realise how absurd you are.

That's your own personal take on Godwin's law, and a clear indication that you realise you have been ridiculous. Whenever someone calls you out for your ignorance or points out the stupidity of something you've said, you /always/ come back to this as though it were some kind of trump card.

That would mean that the first lifeforms were RNA-based, not DNA-based - as I said.

Bacteria - as we know them today - were not first. The current theories of abiogenesis see RNA (or something related) as the first nucleic acids, since RNA strings and parts can be easily formed and replicated by relatively simple chemical processes (given the right environment). DNA requires more complex processes - it almost certainly evolved from RNA beginnings.

It may be that the step from RNA to DNA happened quite quickly (in evolutionary terms), and that the DNA-based lifeforms outcompeted RNA-based lifeforms. The only RNA-based organisms we know of at the moment are some types of virus, which are not "alive", but which may have a history stretching back to the earliest lifeforms or partially-alive "things". (Maybe we'll find other RNA-based lifeforms hidden away somewhere.)

I think that life as in self replicating chemical elements that convert sunlight or chemical energy into useful work to allow them to grow and reproduce may well be fairly common in the universe. It would be nice to find another example in our own solar system (or even in the deep oceans on Earth) that had evolved with different chemistry to our own.

Until we have at least one other example we are guessing. OTOH life got going PDQ once the Earth had cooled enough for water to remain liquid.

There are still some controversial observations of things in sandstone that might or might not be organic life much smaller than bacteria and suspiciously like the things seen in the Martian meteorite sample. eg

Complex multicellular life may be much rarer than life itself. Taking la definition of life as some sort of photochemical coloured slime that lives by harvesting sunlight from its nearest star (or chemical energy). Extremophiles like snottites on Earth live happily in some sulphurous caves without sunlight relying entirely on chemical energy.

They will probably be non-thermal radio bright for a century or so before they blow themselves up with thermonuclear weapons (or worse) if we are any guide. We have probably been visible to radio telescopes since over the horizon radar, VHF radio and terrestrial TV. Our signals will be much harder to decode now we have gone digital - the analogue ones practically shout their frame rate at anyone who sees it.

Once we go to optical fibre we will effectively go radio dark again.

Arecibo was pretty good at standing out when it was operating. Anything in the beam when they were doing TDR imaging off near Earth Asteroids would know about it if they had similar radio telescopes to us.

Unless and until we find some other life elsewhere it will be speculation but some people are much better at it than others.

RNA world looks like a compelling model to me since RNA structures can both store information (if a little unreliably) and behave as catalysts. Most of the required ingredients have been seen in interstellar space.

Invoking a deity to avoid the question is the sole preserve of the feeble minded. They are still left with "who created The Creator?".

Speculation based on knowledge and understanding is valuable.

Speculation based on ignorance is lazy and time wasting.

On a sunny day (Sun, 13 Feb 2022 02:53:37 -0800 (PST)) it happened whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You should see that in the time frame the mathematicians that were working on the epicycles most certainly did think of themselves as scientists. So did the schools in those days that teached it

These days same happens with string theory and endless parroting of 'photon' and Einstein's math (is only math). We need to look for a mechanism_ if we want to advance, I suggested one (not even my idea), but the fact that gravity seems to move at the same speed as light IS a big hint it is the same particle in my view, and from that a lot of things fall into place. When those particles are produced in stars or maybe black holes the universe will push itself apart expand ever faster, internal heating of the planets is then explained too, as is galaxy arms motion, plus a few other experiments. Indeed it is when the old guys [peers] die and a new generation embraces new ideas that we advance, That or we selfdestruct or at least set civilization back for thousands of years with the war mongering US Military Complex and their brainless puppet Biden and his low IQ supporters. I Have Spoken :-) I posted this in the raspi newsgroup last week about fairy tails about 'glowball warming the current fake science': About greenhouse gas causing glowball warming: it is a fake story:

up Milankovich cycles on that page, and scroll down to to graphs showing cold and warm periods.

Look up CO2 levels over the previous millions of years with google, those were at times much higher, not many humans around back then. Same Milankovich cycles.

Al Gore's fairy tales telling to sell his stuff, an excess of [US] capitalism. Same way for jabbing everybody over and over again against a virus that is not worse than the flue and the jabs do not provide immunity -the Medical Industrial Complex. And there is their Military Industrial Complex trying to make war in Europe in Ukrain.

No radiation is not as dangerous as many are made to think, a plot originating from 'hide under the table for the nuclear bomb' media drive. Wild life at Chernobyl is thriving!

have worked with radiation, still have a live interest designed and build stuff to measure it:

of course there is tri-pic: that link is old, much more since then.

I measure radiation 24/7 with YES logged by a Raspberry! And this sits next to me on the table:

there is a PMT with scintillator crystal in that cardboard tube.

Thorium _maybe_ a way out I think China is experimenting with a Thorium reactor.

Dump it in the Mariana Trench, lock up the few that start babbling about the deep sea fishes and creatures there ask them if they eat meat.

True, same way we wonder: 'How did they build those pyramids?'

Russia has some ships with small nuclear reactors that they use to power cities on the coast.

A bunch of green fanatics calling 'mama help' (or 'God help us') as the changing climate drives them to other parts of the world where they, if lucky, cook their food on campfires is a possible scenario. All that knowledge we had, replaced by rain-dances Oh wait its already happening in the US. The black revolution of lower IQ and their facilitator Precedent ByeThen

Just imagine every transport electric and the power grid fails (it often does there) no emergency vehicles no tools no instruments... Bringing a generation up with lies and fairy tales is dangerous for the species. Religious powers in the past, Viking experiment was positive for life on Mars was denied half an hour later (I remember the announcement). Those religious leaders do not allow you to know we are just like a speck of dust in an universe where there are many others and their beliefs, their fairy tales differ.

Scientists are always looking for an experiment that demonstrates a weakness in the prevailing theory of the day, or a better more complete theory that works in more extreme conditions or makes new testable predictions. That is pretty much how Nobel prizes are won.

We are living through a golden age of observational astronomy where more and more wavebands are coming on stream at very high resolution. The latest will be the Webb telescope once its mirrors are all aligned.

Epicycles were the Fourier transform of their day and did allow astronomers to make useful predictions even if they were wrong in principle they did work well enough in practice to get results.

Even when they put the sun at the centre which neatly sorted out retrograde motion they still *needed* epicycles to handle the eccentricity of orbits until Kepler formulated his famous equations for elliptical motion.

Even then solving for the true eccentric anomaly accurately and quickly for a given mean anomaly remains an active research problem even today!

E = M + e*sin E

Looks deceptively simple and going from E to M it is. Going the other way gets very interesting when M is small and e -> 1. Mercury is quite a handful with e = 0.25 if you are doing it by hand.

The real time series for planetary positions today are actually a set of Fourier terms to perturb the basic planetary position form Kepler's laws to take account of all the other planets. It isn't really so different.

Engineering solutions do not need to be completely correct they just have to be good enough for the task in hand.

No-one applies relativistic corrections to automotive speedometers!

Established church tended to be into burning heretics and their books. New knowledge conflicting with scripture was viewed as very dangerous by the authorities. US YEC's still haven't got out of those Dark Ages.

There can be some big egos involved in science. Leibnitz and Newton is one we can look back on from far enough to see that. Poor old Hooke was practically written out of history by Newton's fans after his death.

Hoyle's steady state theory was another more recent example. Shot down in flames when the microwave background and also way too many very remote active radio galaxies were discovered by the observers. Insanely bright and very compact engines driving the jets make them hard to explain without dropping matter down the gravitational plug hole.

He chooses to remain wilfully ignorant.

Le Sage doesn't really work, but there is no point in arguing with you about this since you don't actually understand relativity at all. That seems to be a big failing in many electrical engineering courses.

David Brown snipped-for-privacy@hesbynett.no wrote in news:suarr2$996$1@dont- email.me:

Had you examined the article, you would know that I already knew that.

The two big leaps are

Where did this universe come from and why is it so perfectly tuned to support DNA-based life?

and

How did DNA come about?

Making DNA from primordial soup is as likely as putting a bunch of parts into a Cuisinart and getting a cell phone.

Cool. It follows that the repair mechanisms distinguish between uselesss/fatal mutations and potentially useful ones. They must let a calibrated fraction of potentially useful ones past the checks.

I did some electronics for a P-P collision experiment at CERN. Wire chamber detectors and data reduction. I got to sit in on some conferences. It was shocking and amusing to see how vicious and jealous and mean-spirited some of the physicists were to their "colleagues", and how normal that seemed to be to the crowd. Beauty queens aren't in it.

Agreed.

That's unknown.

We know there is a very small number (probability of molecules banging together) multiplied by a very large number (length of time, number of planets).

I believe the very large number will turn out to be more significant than the very small number. You believe the opposite.

Either answer is terrifying, as AC Clarke observed.

AIUI you substitute faith, albeit of a different kind.

I've read a bunch of books about the origin of life. The soup theory has very bad numbers.

I only choose to speculate about explanations for things that are now unexplained.

That provokes hostility. Perfectly normal.

Then someone should make some RNA-based life in a lab.

It would be a numerically remote path from "very like" to a DNA based replicating cell. I've seen calculations like 1 part in 1e150 in the age of the universe.

It's not a chemistry problem, it's a programming problem.

A few with a big axe to grind have tried to convince the scientific community that it is impossible so that "Goddidit" is the only answer.

It solves nothing to kick the can down the road like that.

Yes. It didn't go away. Plenty of common viruses are RNA based.

That is bare RNA usually loop based infective agents mainly cause trouble for plants though. Animals have better counter measures.

Isn't a bad layman's introduction. We have been over this same ground many times before. About the simplest viroids are an RNA loop containing just enough info to self replicate in a host and very little else.

You can haggle about whether or not they are truly alive because they need to hijack a cell to replicate (at least all the ones I know of do).

It is possible that someone will cook up an RNA world in the lab or a computer simulation before too much longer. They are getting closer.

The coronavirus giving us so much trouble, flu and common colds too are all RNA viruses. That is why they evolve so rapidly. Their replication isn't entirely reliable. Covid actually has better error checking on its transcription phase then most so it changes more slowly than influenza.

No need they are already present in nature and some still cause trouble for important commercial crops from time to time. This one attacks avocados but other viroids target other specific hosts.

There are even simpler things that can only replicate if the plant they infect is also infected with another independent virus.

People have been making designer RNA sequences for ages.

It is a lack of imagination problem - yours and the bone heads who did the daft calculation on the odds of a perfect DNA based cell springing up from nowhere perfectly formed. If you set out to fail you will!

What you and they are missing is all the scaffold and dead ends explored between the simplest self replicating molecule that ever formed and the gradual evolution of ever more complex life over geological timescales. The Earth sat with single celled not particularly exciting stage for a long time before more complex cooperative multicellular life evolved.