OT: How life came to Earth

Yes.

You are not. (At least, not in biology. Perhaps you are qualified to speculate in electronics, or cooking.)

What would be the point in my explaining this all /again/ ?

If you believe you have something useful to contribute about electronics (and I don't doubt that), stick to that. Come back to the science or biology threads when you are willing to learn something.

There are some viruses that are so simple that they can't hijack a cell's replication systems - they hijack another virus's hijacking! In a sense, they are small viruses that infect other large viruses. Fun stuff.

In the part you skipped, you responded to my point that "Nobody thinks the first lifeforms on earth were DNA-based" by "Huh? Bacteria were first." Then you mixed things up thoroughly by saying you thought RNA might have been first.

Given your other posts in this thread, I do think you already knew that the kind of bacteria we see today were not the first lifeforms, and that you /do/ understand that RNA-based lifeforms almost certainly preceded DNA-based lifeforms. But your post looked confusingly like the exact opposite.

Let's chalk this down to miscommunication rather than misunderstanding, and move on.

Speculation about possibilities, alternates to concensus, is the opposite of faith. It's an admission that we may be wrong.

Try it. Speculate about something. Design. Try to phrase it as something other than insults, to inspire constructive discussion. Maybe even on-topic.

One of my daughters is a PhD biologist who has her own DNA consulting business. She's been mentioned in the New York Times. She doesn't mock my ideas, but then she knows I can write her out of my will.

I like the jump from "water" to "earliest known life." The rest is routine.

On a sunny day (Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:53:43 +0000) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <sub61n$vcp$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:

Relativity is very simple.

Too simple as it lacks a mechanism; Its like electrickety without electrons, and breaks down by definition. The sad part is the peer reviewed masses parroting it no end without looking for a mechanism. Mamaticians are the worst, got fixed on divide by zero, re-normalization, singularities, and the epicycles of course. There ARE no singularities in nature! Mamaticians have a lack of understanding of nature, math is just a couple of neurons in the brain running an incomplete model of nature. However those mamaticians sell it as the ultimate and only truth. We neural nets know better,

Design some electronics and you will see how limited your mamatical theories are in describing reality.

I have seen the first picture of that new telescope, many stars that will become one after the mirrors are aligned. Nice that it works so far.

Le Sage does not work for particles that are like billiard balls (or snooker balls if you live under Boris), but it can very well work for a more complicated particle. In the 5 1/4 floppy days I wrote a simulation that worked.

Einstein had more mind shortcuts, photon was one of those more a political pawn in the game.

Been coding all day, reached my target, very complex stuff, was not sure I would get it to work, but already started on phase 2 now, 14 hours at the keyboard.

Self-centered and misses the point. This isn't about speculation, or consensus, or 'wrong' (whatever that means), it's about the utility of a theory. In the sciences, a good theory is defined by properties that 'maybe a miracle happened' lacks.

If you can't see those properties, you cannot appreciate a good theory. If you don't recognize those properties, as is apparently the case, you generate meaningless badges of validity that you apply to any random concept. 'John Larkin says it's valid' is thus a tainted brand.

But, you imagine that someone here does? No one except you can even identify the members of the set 'my ideas'. We make specific statements here about the IDEAS, that you always ignore. Somehow, though, you always try to defend the tainted brand.

Black holes.

Trying to claim some mathematics is useless, is missing the point entirely. You need math because much of it is useful. Singularities and fractals are messy math, but... that doesn't always misfit the world around us.

There are very important uses of (for instance) eigenvalues, that are not immediately apparent in nature.

""" Orsino recognised him and smiled. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘How are you, my good fellow?’

‘To tell you the truth, sir,’ said Feste, ‘all the better for having enemies and all the worse for having friends.’

Orsino laughed. ‘It’s the opposite.’ he said. ‘The better for your friends.’

‘No, sir, the worse,’ said Feste. ‘How can that be?’ ‘Well, sir, they praise me and make an ass of me. Now, my enemies tell me plainly that I’m an ass, so that, sir, I learn something about myself from my enemies, while I’m deceived by my friends, so that, comparing conclusions with kisses, if four negatives make two affirmatives, why then, I’m worse off having friends and better off having enemies.’ """

(From "Twelfth Night")

Your daughter is humouring her old da' and his semi-senile banter. We're more honest in this group.

On the contrary. The discussion here is wrongly fixated on the information content of DNA, and where that information could have come from.

Before there can be any physical mechanism that self-replicates using

*whatever* coding scheme, the mechanism itself must be enclosed away from the environment. A "self/non-self" distinction must be drawn, and these bubbles do exactly that. Any chemical environment (such as these thermal pools) which can spontaneously generate such enclosures allows the encapsulation of *anything* that aids in the generation of more such enclosures. The *tiniest* advantage related to the increase in any ionic or chemical element that enhances the process leads to a proliferation of that variant.

Such non-coded replication requires no majick injection of encoded information to start the slow climb up to coded self-replication.

I'm glad your daughter is polite to you, even though she must be aware you're a lost cause.

Even Arecibo's most powerful pulses would be invisible to equipment like ours beyond about 10,000 light years. That's not very far in galactic terms, and definitely not intergalactic.

The 1997 version, with Imogen Stubbs, HBC, and Ben Kingsley, is one of my favorite movies.

No, just more prissy.

Wrongly? The information is precisely what makes a cell work.

She has ideas too. Must run in the family.

You worked hard to misinterpret me there. Of course the information is important. But it's also utterly irrelevant until some containment can be postulated. Fixating on the information while ignoring the need to contain it, is what is wrong.

What I mentioned is the best candidate for containment. Within that context, we can discuss the chemistry and information theory required to enhance the generation of such cells. That enhancement doesn't have to start with either DNA, with RNA, or with any a-priori information. It only needs something that enhances the probability of generation of a cell similar to itself.

And that's important.

CH

Ideas are easy and cheap.

Even my daughter's /dog/ has ideas! Mostly they are repetitive, but he shows imagination about ways to encourage you to throw his ball or other toys.

You know your life's out of kilter when you are having a nice hot bath, there's a plop, and you open your eyes to see a Jack Russell looking at you and the ball he's dropped in the water.

Then why do so few people have them?

Sounds OK to me.

Most people /do/ have ideas.

Few people have ideas that it is worth /other/ people following up.

It is to me, too. If it wasn't I'd simply shut the door. He's a fun animal to have around.

<snip>

They absolutely certainly didn't. William Whewell invented the term in 1833. Natural philosophy is as close as you could get to that before then.

They might have taught natural philosophy, which isn't quite the same thing - science is about creating and improving a coherent body of knowledge as a shared literature which everybody can cite.

Natural philosophers wanted to set up a body of knowledge about the real world, but the refinements involved in getting everybody else to accept it and letting other people improve it are what makes modern science.

<snipped Jan demonstrating that he doesn't know what modern science is about>

snip>

And a remarkably comical one, since magnetism is just the consequence, of the relativistic interaction of moving charges.