That's all absurd, cramming a crew into a tiny dark cylinder, deep inside tons of magnets, to reduce their radiation exposure a little.
Space is not people-friendly. Earth is.
Traveling to or living on Mars woud be lethal. Living on the moon would be bad too.
Staying on Earth just because we evolved here would be even more absurd.
Travelling to Mars might be dangerous. but living there would be fine, once we'd engineered a safe environment for people to live.
We might well be able to engineer people who could live there safely - evolution has yet to come up with an error-detecting genetic code that lends itself to error correction. but intelligent design could do better.
I expressed no religious beliefs, and it's good that you wouldn't attack any.
RNA World is a religious belief. Concensus and faith without evidence.
Sure. Chemicals are not life, as a junk box full of parts is not a working electronic instrument.
We are an astoundingly complex structure that uses chemicals and quantum mechanics. At least I am.
This is
Let's feed and educate a billion kids instead of putting victims on the moon or on Mars.
No religion endorse it.
None that John Larkin can understand. In fact all life depends on a couple of RNA based enzymes, and they probably have been there from the start. Some viruses are RNA only. DNA offers a more stable genome, but there aren't any DNA based enzymes. John Larkin is arguing from ignorance, and he's got a lot of ignorance to draw on.
Sadly. John Larkin isn't all that complicated. Push the right button and you get the same half-baked response every time.
A better education might have provided a greater variety of responses, but he still hasn't got a patent of his own.
John Larkin thinks that Trump has "commons sense". He probably couldn't process Obama's better ideas.
"As well as" would be a better choice than "instead of". The two activities aren't mutually exclusive, and you probably need to feed and educate a lot more kids to get enough engineers to get to the point of being able to put a colony on Mars.
In the US, at the moment, wealth is more heritable than height.
And we are skeptical of your intelligent design stance. For that matter, there are quite a few blunders in living beings that an intelligent designer wouldn't have made.
Jeroen Belleman
There are lots of chemists and biologists who think that self- replicating RNA is a credible step on the path towards evolving life. There is no need for the seeds of life to have come from elsewhere than earth, although that possibility is not excluded.
It's remarkable that the reproduction of RNA and DNA still today can be made to work simply by cycling the temperature of the right mixture of chemicals, much like day and night cycles, as may well have happened on a young earth.
To our current knowledge, actual intelligent designers are even less probable than random mutations producing a working cell. How did the intelligent designers come to be? They would have been subject to the same kind of constraints as life on earth, the right conditions and enough time.
In fact, as long as we haven't found evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, we can't have any real idea of how common or rare it is. However, we *can* be pretty confident that *intelligent* life is at least a few million times less likely than just any life. On those grounds, I have less trouble believing in evolution than in intelligent design.
Darwin's evolution provides a plausible path to the complex life we see today, without requiring intelligent or divine intervention. That's its strength. Postulating such intervention is superstition unless direct convincing evidence is found.
As for the possible existence of alien civilisations with billions of years advance on us, I'm skeptical. Based on what we see on earth, I tend to think that technically advanced civilisations are unstable. I think they'll blow themselves up rather quickly, on cosmic time scales.
Jeroen Belleman
It would be, if that was what had been going on. John Larkin is too pig-ignorant to be a ware of the decades of work that went into establishing that random mutations do happen, and that the mutations that do produce an improvement in the next generation do experience positive selection.
Covid-19 has been giving us an object lesson in this behavior for the past couple of years, but John hasn't noticed.
If you are as pig-ignorant about the subject as John Larkin is, his speculations don't rate as mysticism - contentless rabbiting on is the technical term.
It's more that invoking a creator is pulling a rabbit from a hat, and avoiding thinking about where the creator came from
But in fact he is a biologist first, and his aversion to intelligent design is mainly based on the sloppy thinking it embodies.
John Larkin doesn't understand much, and finds stuff he doesn't understand boring. He's much too vain to admit that he's pig-ignorant, even to himself.
Lot's of people don't find the book boring.
"Tim Radford, writing in The Guardian, noted that despite Dawkins's "combative secular humanism", he had written "a patient, often beautiful book... that begins in a generous mood and sustains its generosity to the end." 30 years on, people still read the book, Radford argues, because it is "one of the best books ever to address, patiently and persuasively, the question that has baffled bishops and disconcerted dissenters alike: how did nature achieve its astonishing complexity and variety?"".
It is still in print after thirty years. Boring books do tend to go out of print.
Advice that John Larkin doesn't realise applies to him.
Your stance is one of incorrigible ignorance. You have the same problem with climate change.
Our cells are very ordinary. There are lots of them around. The origin of the first self-replicating cell was probably equally ordinary, and there were probably a lot of different solutions that all more or less worked, but Darwinian selection got rid of all but the best solution.
They do now.
Not that you show much sign of ever having done it. The circuits you boast about don't come with any mention of the next-best solution.
That assumes that everybody is as silly as we are.
There people who look at human social organisations over the past few thousand years and see evidence of the evolution of better modes of government. I grew up in Australia where the constitution was ratified in 1901. It works better than the US constitution, which was ratified in
1776, and the UK's arrangements which got extensively reworked from 1832.I spent 19 years in the Netherlands where the constitution got dramatically reworked "In 1917, like in 1848 influenced by the tense international situation, universal manhood suffrage was introduced combined with a system of proportional representation to elect the House of Representatives, the States-Provincial and the municipality councils. The Senate continued to be elected by the States-Provincial, but now also employing a system of proportional representation, no longer by majorities per province."
Proportional representation seems to be a key advance leading to multi-party democracy and coalition governments which seem to work better than their Australian, UK and US equivalents.
We'll probably learn to do even better in future if the more primitive arrangements in places like the US and Russia don't produce a catastrophic failure before they get cleaned up.
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