Bringing the alien life debate back to reality

Doc Dutch said:
Not a biochemist, but your previous posts about the origin of life back up the conclusion that photosynthesis is not a requirement.
Click to expand...

I think the author is also on shaky ground in claiming that all the hypotheses for the mechanism of abiogenesis are terrible. To me, that's calling the game when it's still in the second quarter.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
why assume alien life would require amino acids, peptides or organic compounds?......
Click to expand...

Not a biochemist, but from previous posts on the subject it appears that carbon and silicon are the most likely base-elements of life due to how many combinations of molecules can be formed from them.

Not saying a lifeform couldn't evolve from Uranium, but if it did, it wouldn't look like anything recognizable by humans. Maybe a planet could be "alive", but how could we hope to communicate with a creature whose "seconds" are equal to multiple human generations?
 
NiftyNiblick said:
I don't understand the concept of the spherical shape of space
as a sphere always exists in whatever is outside it's circumference.

What's outside of the sphere would be part of the same infinite universe the way I can imagine it.
Click to expand...

The stories I've read is that you can't think of it as a sphere with a two dimensional surface hanging in space like a balloon or globe.

The sphere is the only analogy our simian brains can grasp without higher mathematics.

Three dimensional positively curved space itself wraps around a fourth dimensional hyperspace we cannot percieve through sensory perception.
 
Cypress said:
I think the author is also on shaky ground in claiming that all the hypotheses for the mechanism of abiogenesis are terrible. To me, that's calling the game when it's still in the second quarter.
Click to expand...

I think his point was that "if making life was easy, we'd have done it by now"...and I agree. Despite all of our efforts and searching, life is only found on Earth and we can't create life, only modify it.
 
Cypress said:
The stories I've read is that you can't think of it as a sphere with a two dimensional surface hanging in space like a balloon or globe.

The sphere is the only analogy our simian brains can grasp without higher mathematics.

Three dimensional positively curved space itself wraps around a fourth dimensional hyperspace we cannot percieve through sensory perception.
Click to expand...

Possibly.
I'm too old, perhaps, to imagine that which is not perceptible to my senses.
Not saying, however, that it's an inappropriate thing to do for those so inclined.
Interesting discussions, at the very least, do come of it.
 
Doc Dutch said:
I think his point was that "if making life was easy, we'd have done it by now"...and I agree. Despite all of our efforts and searching, life is only found on Earth and we can't create life, only modify it.
Click to expand...

I don't think making life from prebiotic chemicals is easy, and I doubt that those actively engaged in this area of research think its easy either.

But I think there has been a widespread public perception that life in practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemicals, and we should just expect it to easily emerge.

So a good conservative scientific practice is to question how realistic and valid that assumption really is.
 
Cypress said:
The stories I've read is that you can't think of it as a sphere with a two dimensional surface hanging in space like a balloon or globe.

The sphere is the only analogy our simian brains can grasp without higher mathematics.

Three dimensional positively curved space itself wraps around a fourth dimensional hyperspace we cannot percieve through sensory perception.
Click to expand...

Shades of Edwin Abbott's "FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions" and the difficulty of seeing dimensions higher than our own.

[url]https://steemitimages.com/DQmZEav7RoFXdq8DfcY9GL3QaGtmXc3PaMP3T3MripAPYtm/02.gif
02.gif
[/URL]

 
Cypress said:
I don't think making life from prebiotic chemicals is easy, and I doubt that those actively engaged in this area of research think its easy either.

But I think there has been a widespread public perception that life in practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemicals, and we should just expect it to easily emerge.

So a good conservative scientific practice is to question how realistic and valid that assumption really is.
Click to expand...
Agreed and that's how I read his point: it's not inevitable and it's very rare.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Agreed and that's how I read his point: it's not inevitable and it's very rare.
Click to expand...

If we find microbial life on Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, or on Mars it will go a long way towards supporting the hypothesis that life is practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemistry.
 
Cypress said:
If we find microbial life on Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, or on Mars it will go a long way towards supporting the hypothesis that life is practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemistry.
Click to expand...

IF. So far it seems unlikely since, if it's inevitable, it'd have been created in a lab.
 
Doc Dutch said:
IF. So far it seems unlikely since, if it's inevitable, it'd have been created in a lab.
Click to expand...

There are a lot if ifs and maybes in this debate.

There were probably hundreds of thousands or millions of years of intermediate chemical and physical steps and processes that had to happen before the first microbial cell. Steps that we can only guess at or hypothesize.

So I don't think the experimental science really expects to create a fully developed cell from prebiotic chemicals in our lifetime.

I think the best to hope for is that the self organization of peptides and amino acids into a functional strand of RNA is the prize here. If that happens, it will suggest the RNA world hypothesis, or something like it, was the mechanism for abiogenesis.
 
Cypress said:
There are a lot if ifs and maybes in this debate.

There were probably hundreds of thousands or millions of years of intermediate chemical and physical steps and processes that had to happen before the first microbial cell. Steps that we can only guess at or hypothesize.

So I don't think the experimental science really expects to create a fully developed cell from prebiotic chemicals in our lifetime.

I think the best to hope for is that the self organization of peptides and amino acids into a functional strand of RNA is the prize here. If that happens, it will suggest the RNA world hypothesis, or something like it, was the mechanism for abiogenesis.
Click to expand...

Agreed on ifs and maybes. All we have are results and the result is, after decades of searching, mankind has found no sign of life anywhere but on Earth. Also no luck trying to create something that is "inevitable".

Not a biochemist, so I can't say how many cycles it would take, but the consensus seems to be consistently negative results.

Agreed on cell, but isn't "life" a step or two down from that? The LUCA thing?

While abiogenesis can't be ruled out, it's clearly a rare event.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Agreed on ifs and maybes. All we have are results and the result is, after decades of searching, mankind has found no sign of life anywhere but on Earth. Also no luck trying to create something that is "inevitable".

Not a biochemist, so I can't say how many cycles it would take, but the consensus seems to be consistently negative results.

Agreed on cell, but isn't "life" a step or two down from that? The LUCA thing?

While abiogenesis can't be ruled out, it's clearly a rare event.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, LUCA was a fully functioning, self replicating prokaryotic cell.

But LUCA stood at the end of a series of unknown intermediate chemical and physical steps we can only guess at.

If our abiogenesis experiments aren't successful, if we don't find microbial life on the moons of this solar system that have liquid water, if we don't detect biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and if we never detect an alien footprint in the radio wave portion of the EM spectrum, we would have to totally rethink our assumptions about how common life is.
 
Cypress said:
As far as I know, LUCA was a fully functioning, self replicating prokaryotic cell.

But LUCA stood at the end of a series of unknown intermediate chemical and physical steps we can only guess at.

If our abiogenesis experiments aren't successful, if we don't find microbial life on the moons of this solar system that have liquid water, if we don't detect biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and if we never detect an alien footprint in the radio wave portion of the EM spectrum, we would have to totally rethink our assumptions about how common life is.
Click to expand...

Who is making these assumptions about how common life is? Not me. :)
 
Cypress said:
That book is supposed to be famous among geeks, mathmeticians, physicists!
Click to expand...

It's pretty satirical but I haven't read it in decades. I do remember the lesson of how a sphere or cone would appear to a 2D creature....which leads to a more philosophical discussion of entities on a higher dimensional plane. Note the limited view atheists have of an entity that exists outside of Space/Time.

Example: https://www.doesgodexist.org/Pamphlets/Flatland.html
Now the reason that I have told you this little story is to give you a foundation by which you can understand God. When you read, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), you are reading a description analogous to Flatland. The concept is that, a God, who is in a higher dimension than are we, a God who has the same kind of relationship to us which the sphere had to Flatland, that, this kind of being touched our little “Flatland,” so to speak, and in violation of all of our laws of science created matter out of nothing. God is so superior to us, he exists in such a higher dimension than do we that what is natural and ordinary to him is miraculous to us. The Bible recognizes this concept and uses it in every single description of God.
 
Cypress said:
The Earth had has four billion years for silicon based life or other exotic forms of life to emerge. But we've never seen anything other than the one lineage of carbon based life all descended with modification from the same microbe which existed 3.8 billion years ago.
Click to expand...
an intelligent creature on a methane based planet a million light years from here would probably consider that irrelevant.......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top