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Acetylene Based Life on Titan?
mindpixel writes "Astrobiology Magazine's Leslie Mullen has a fascinating interview with funky science dude David Grinspoon about the possibility that there may exist a whole new biology on Titan where the extreme cold slows normally explosive reactions to a biologically useful pace." From the article: "What's really new in our paper is that we go into the question of energy sources. If there's life there, what's it going to eat? What kind of food is there? And it turns out there's abundant food because of all this photochemistry in the upper atmosphere, where methane is being turned into other organic molecules. Some of those organic molecules are very energy-rich, and one that we consider in the paper is acetylene. We know it's being made in the atmosphere, we know it's raining down on the surface, and it's been detected at the surface with the Huygens probe. We calculated that, if acetylene is reacting with the hydrogen gas to turn it back into methane, quite a bit of energy is being released. So that's our basis for saying there is something to eat on Titan. We don't know if there are any customers, but there's something on the menu."
Any intelligent life form that eats farts should be feared. That is all.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
This is certainly an interesting idea, and one of the more unusual proposed.
:-)
Didn't Bush's new space exploration plan call for us to visit there, soon?
Ignore Alien Orders
Now if we could only be successful in finding intelligent life in Washington DC
Garry AKA -Phoenix- Rising Above the Flames
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
Even just from the summary, it would seem that the life itself is not acetylene-based, just the food the life would eat.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Cute little buggers.
Excited missionaries are pulling out their cold weather gear.
Reading the article makes we wonder exactly what life is, anyway. It sounds as though we only require chemical conversion. What if there is a big rock that serves as a catalyst for this conversion of acetylene and hydrogen to methane. Would we think of that as a life form? Or would we require reproduction? Would reproduction be possible in this slow-motion frozen gel we find on Titan?
It is interesting, though, how the life and the planet co-evolves. Life has really changed Earth and it may have affected Titan, as well.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Suppose there is intelligent life in there, what will they think of earth creatures?
"Amazing! The third planet creatures support temperatures so high that none of the titan lifeforms could withstand. Let's call them extremophiles".
Kinda makes you think...
Clement's Ice World was set on a unthinkably frigid world where sulfur was a solid and liquified steam covered the surface!
It was Earth, of course. The protagonist was an alien scientist kidnapped by drug smugglers and forced to analyze a horrific drug they'd been buying from the natives. It's a juvenile, really, but enjoyable by adults as well.
--Greg
Extremophile: Michael Jackson bungy-jumping.
Now if we could only be successful in finding intelligent life in Washington DC
That reminded me of a joke:
This menacing-looking alien goes to Washington, and lands on the whitehouse gardens. The president is having a walk in there. Then the alien says to him: "I want to speak to the supreme ruler."
Then the president shouts: "HONEY, IT'S FOR YOU!"
Still, when I hear about Titan, I am reminded by Vonnegut's book "The Sirens of Titan." Quite a good read. As for the article, eh, no idea.
Who elsewould like to see 10 billion taken out of that moon landing money and put towards a few swarms probes to Titan to confirm this. Something to researhc this, and the JIMO mission are what i'd really pushed up schedule. Life outside our planet is the type of scientific and philisophical question that we should make all strides to answering. Jupites moons and Titan are the only places we essentially have left in our immediate solar system that might contain life. We really owe it to ourselves to research these to their final conclusion. I'd be happy to expand humanity into the solar system once we know we're not the only thing on it.
The one place in the solar system that saying some one has an explosive personally is a compliment.
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Thats not new, I survive on a diet of acetylene...
Oh wait, no, thats Ethanol.
Well, you got one thing right, you are *bait.
Pathetic.
Sig
We should probably make sure they don't find out about the Acetylene genocide going on at every mechanic's garage and construction site every day.
Therefore, to expect the life on another planet may be complex-molecule-based instead of simple-carbon-based is feasible.
"Complex-molecule-based" versus "simple-carbon-based" ?? Did you make up those terms yourself? Could you please define them? And perhaps elaborate on how this is supposed to follow from the statement "acetylene is organic"?
Because the statement "acetylene is organic" doesn't mean anything in particular. It's saying that the acetylene molecule has a carbon-carbon bond in it.
But the other people saying 'no' are (as far as I can tell thru HISTORY) full of horse-hockey.
Who is saying 'no' to what?
Tell me exactly what in the world you know about organic compounds on another planet that will/will not produce life, please?
Since this is the first semi-intelligible statement in your post, I'll try and answer it:
1) Most scientists believe that life in all its forms, terrestrial or otherwise, follows the laws of chemistry. All life we know of appears to do so.
In the same way that we also believe that all the universe follows the same laws of physics. We have no reason to believe otherwise. (and the chemistry follows from the physics, anyway.)
2) We know that certain conditions are required to sustain life regardless of its form. For instance, life requires energy. This follows from the laws of thermodynamics being one of those things believed to be universal in 1).
3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.
Yes, it's flamebait/trollbait. How about you editors/moderators tell me your experience on Titan, [..]
No, it's just moronic. How about you tell me about all those atoms you've seen yourself? Still believe they exist though, don't you?
Let the organic/biological scientists determine this, not the uneducated populace.
David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".
Even I don't dare step into this conversation, except as far as I have made my agrument.
You didn't really make one.
Oh there are no Russian jokes here...
By the way, a description of life is: An open, coherent spacetime structure kept far from thermodynamic equilibrium by a flow of energy through it---a (carbon-based) system operating in a (water-based) medium, with higher forms metabolizing (oxygen). I wonder if we can consider Stars as living beings, because similar arguments can be made for them too. Heck, everything has life!
Is the impact on religion. The 7th day and so forth. Like Copernicus and Gallileo popping the churches/government bubble isn't pleasent and because of the current polical atmosphere, these times are no exception.
Not anonymous because I am not afraid, though I may regret it in the near term.
Are you drunk or angry or something? I half expected your post to contain numerous threatening references to the UN.
Ohhhh...Tasty Acetyline...urmblargargumgruch!!
How does the earth replenishes its carbon 14 source (half-life of 5730 yrs)? Spallation. This is the reason for carbon dating can be "somewhat" constant and "more or less" reliable. (Assuming that the high energy particles are constant.)
This is a great topic to stump some of the more well educated scientists. N2 ----> 14CN.
http://www.sns.gov/aboutsns/what-why.htm
My question: does spallation work on Titan? I know that Saturn has an intense magnetic field, but I don't know if Saturn emits high energy particles. Can high energy particles from our sun can reach that far to influence Titan? I wonder if he factored this into his theory or not. The article does not explain this. I would figure that he would have to take this into account, if high energy particles are "abound." These particles can change most of the gases in the upper atmosphere to many different types of molecules. Using acetylene from methane as an example is very loaded. If there is enough energy to make this, why would acetylene not want to change into larger organic chains when exposed to this high energy or react with the next nearest neighbor molecules. Considering life is a major leap, however there is some chemistry (using high energy light/particles) that can do similar things.
Okay so lets deconstruct your assumptions ... I'll grant YOU, your worthyness!
That physics art-science thing you refereanced still has not figured out the lesser related 3.14... "pie" thing for circles. Perhaps our ten digit number system 0-9 is flawed? If we can't even count right how can we eliminate possibilities of life on other planets?
P.S. Don't delimit and judge worthyness based on your bias!
(Putting on asbestos suit.)
I'm assuming the warning covers the rest of the solar system. So those little black rectangles can kiss our carbon based rear ends.
Also, members of the Titan version of Slashdot are probably saying, "I for one welcome our monkey-based overlords."
You don't know what "Organic" means. A diamond is considered organic because it has carbon. Tool.
>>> We calculated that, if acetylene is reacting with the hydrogen gas to turn it back into methane, quite a bit of energy is being released. So that's our basis for saying there is something to eat on Titan. We don't know if there are any customers, but there's something on the menu.
This reaction doesn't make any sense. The C-C bond is much too stronger to be broken by a small release of energy done by the hydrogen absorbtion. At worst, this will generate etylene in the first step, and then ethane in the second step.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
Everytime you light that cutting torch, you're killing millions of Titanians.
Is it just me or are Slashdot's articles getting incrementally longer?
Direct away from face when opening.
Well, for one, a complexs molecule can be more than simple carbon chains, as one "tool" said so in a post below this one.
Obviously that one had no knowledge of organic chemistry, in which nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and I believe two, if not three, other elemtns make up almost the entirety of organic chemistry. So there's your complex molecule. Care to give examples where I'm wrong in my understanding of Organic chemistry on that standpoint? I'm getting this info directly from one University of Memphis professor. (Granted we're rated as one of the best medical schools in the country, so our understanding of biochemistry isn't that far lacking, if at all, and you can do the research yourself on that one.)
1) Most scientists believe that life in all its forms, terrestrial or otherwise, follows the laws of chemistry. All life we know of appears to do so. In the same way that we also believe that all the universe follows the same laws of physics. We have no reason to believe otherwise. (and the chemistry follows from the physics, anyway.)
Part of that I already stated, next point, please?
2) We know that certain conditions are required to sustain life regardless of its form. For instance, life requires energy. This follows from the laws of thermodynamics being one of those things believed to be universal in 1).
The Second law semantically conradicts itself. If energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred/transformed thru heat (which is how we measure all things energy-wise, by wattage) then the entire universe, as far as we can tell, is a perpetual motion machine (We cannot disprove this simply because we cannot test the entire universe, this is a theory much like the "LAWS" of thermodynamics (which we may disprove wrong to a point with the advanceent of technology.)
3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.
Let's see you do that here on Earth, then do the exact same experiment directly upon the surface of Mars? Get the same result? Odds are, most likely not. regardless of how thoughtful scientists are, there's always something missing that we've not yet thought about, which adds to our own confusion about how the universe works. Until you do your own physics testing on another planet under controlled conditions, there's no way you'll get accurate enough data to even compare. Earth-simulated conditions !=Mars conditions.
David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".
Has he been to Mars to conduct the very experiments I'm suggesting???? I thought not. Until he has and has written a book about it, (I'm expecting it to cover at least four full volumes) I'm not going to give him a lick of credit about Mars physics. Until he's been there to experience and test it all for himself, your quote basically means nothing to me.
Yes, I'll be an uneducated twit about that. Why?
Simple. Because none of us have put foot on Mars and then run comprehensive tests with our bare hands and our bare brains, right there at the point of gathering samples and putting them into a testing station. Until we're actually present on Mars and we're able to measure it all personally, I'm only taking the data we have with a grain of salt. I want to see a human on Mars showing the temperature rising, or the greenhouse effect happening without human interference.
And I have made my point/argument, you're just not thinking far enough ahead into the future, you're only thinking about the highly limited here and now.
Mod me again as trollbait/flamebait. Those of you modding me most likely couldn't respond, anyways.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is hard to comprehend, but I think it has some merit, we only know of life here on earth, carbon based. but to think there maybe another element based lifeform, that truly rocks. here hoping that Europa will have lifeforms as well..
i do not suffer from Insanity... I revel in it.
Don't worry, if there is some "acetylene terrorist" in there,
Bush will seek and "smoke them out" !
Everyone know, they have some "chemical warfare",
look look this powerpoint slide, they have "CHEMICAL BOMBS" !!!
they have some sneaky plans, look at this slide!!!
they gonna attack us with chemical bombs!
we must destroy them! I mean... bring democracy in there!
Then we try to bring "democracy"
over our new "acetylene bacteria" chemical storm warlord,
then we just send another Unocal V.P. dress up
as an "acetylene bacteria" warlord
and nobody on CNN will ever see the difference.
Worst case, hey just nuke them all. As simple as that.
Don't forget, "their terrorist, they eat acetylene" !
Don't forget, "we finish the job", "we finish" as Bush said!
"God bless us. God bless US. God bless America".
After all we "borrow" all the methane in there and burn it up here.
No chance those "terrorists" get a hand on that "precious gas".
Oooops sorry is that microphone still on?!
http://www.jengajam.com/r/End-Of-The-World
Because the Huygens probe had many platinum-covered appendages, this (catalyst) triggered out the chemical reactions depicted in the OP, which heated the probe much more than expected (it is notorious that the probe's temperature was well above manufacturer's predictions during all descent).
:-)
Then once on ground, this heating continued, and Huygens whose batteries had been designed to last "the 3-hours descent + some margins" in a -150 degree environment, lasted indeed six hours more for being much hotter...
Hervé, part of the Huygens technical team
OK, as we are not april 1st now I wonder wether I shoulnd't have posted anonymously
Herve S.
How can Mad Cow Disease be abbreviated "BSE"? ...wait..... /G
It really should be "MCD"!
It metabolizes carbon and oxygen, and can reproduct, even grow.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Having worked around welders, the acetylene thing put me off. Next time you're around a big metal bottle of the stuff (and there's nothing lit or burning for miles around, and you're outside!), crack the valve real quick and take a whiff. Farts don't begin to describe it, you have to mix in a rotten egg and a scortched garlic clove, along with the kind of farts your dog makes after eating liver. Good thing it's 821,190,000 miles from Earth, or we'd be able to smell it from here.
That's an interesting proposition. There is something about fire. But we could just add another criteria and change the sencence:
"An organism is an entity, capable of responding to its environment, in which reproduction takes place."
Try to falsify it by example.
because it doesn't - fire certainly responds to its environment (wind, water) in addition to reproducing.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Seems to be available energy that is one of the main driving factors for the possibility of life. Anyone ever considered that most of the energy in the universe is contained in the stars so they may in fact be teeming with life? I have a theory that this is indeed the case, and that for intelligent life the speed of concious processes is directly related to the thermodynamic activity of the surrounding environment. That would mean that any thought processes of such creatures would be happening at an incredible rate; to them, we would seem to be as inanimate as rocks. If that is so, I'm not sure why we haven't seen any signs of intelligent behaviour; perhaps we're not looking for the right indicators. I'm not sure what kind of activity one would expect such star dwellers to get up to. Anyone know if there has been any speculation about this before?
Reactions slows with temperature either because diffundation speed slows (the speed of molecules) or that the energy of the collisions between molecules aren't enought to make them react.
The molecular speed should be a problem. I believe cell size of modern life is limited by diffundation of oxygen and other molecules. Any life would have to use lots of transportation engines in their cells (or keep them very, very small).
Life generally needs to do reactions in long chains (especially things that are energetic like acetylene!) Some enzymes could be good catalysators and help the reaction rates, I guess. But are they really made from proteins on Titan? What is used instead of water? Methane?
Assume that the "proteins" are working in clusters. Then we have cell membranes, DNA and...
Any physical chemist care to comment? Is there some trick to keep big C-based molecules moving about at ca 94 K average temperature?? (According to Wikipedia)
Now, even if possible functional cell parts can be conceived, considering the slower reaction rates -- how muc longer would life take to evolve? (Fewer reactions/second means that random reactions are tried slower.)
(No pun intended with my "Subject".)
Is there a slashdot site for physical chemists I can go read their comments about this story? :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
BSE = Bovine Spongy Encephalopathy, the technical term for Mad Cow Disease.
I thought that natural gas is artificially made to smell; so that one that passes by a leaking source could notice the leak and warn the others/run/take cover/etc
Isn't the natural smell = no smell?
The saddest poem
The bees drink the nectar from flowers and regurgitate/vomit it into cells in their hive on their return. I wouldn't call it "cud" because they don't bring it back up, chew on it, and then swallow it as part of an extended digestive process such as ruminant mammals use. And it's certainly NOT piss because the nectar isn't absorbed by the digestive system and filtered out by some kidney-like organ (now honeydew from aphids is effectively piss, but that's another matter).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Actually it is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy... but I digress
Yeah, I read somewhere that life, or "complex adaptive systems" tend to export entropy* and import/make order. Temporary local order is achieved at the cost of increasing the overall entropy in the universe. Maxwell's little demon might fit the definition of life?
*Entropy is lack of order. A really good compression algoritm would produce compact entropy data, and if we knew how to decipher that data we would get a lot of information out of it, more than we would get out of an equal amount of ordered data. If aliens compress their information we might have trouble finding them with SETI perhaps, as there are no patterns/order which we expect life to produce.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
..in full pirate regalia.
There is no doubt in my mind that if us piddly earthlings can see these things, his almighty noodly appendage SURELY could reach to the stars and touch them as well.
Convert now! Save yourself, ye scurvy seadogs! Arrrrrr!
http://www.venganza.org/
DG: By ultraviolet light and also by interactions with Saturn's magnetosphere. There's a lot of energy up there. Then the acetylene is raining down and getting buried....
Other than that small confusion in the heads of the interviewers, I find the concept of acetylene based life very intriguing.
I, for one, welcome our new acetylene metabolizing overlords.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Well, yes, I didn't say life was alone in doing it. Life could be described a complex adaptive system, and a refrigerator would just be a somewhat complex system. There's also all sorts of 'dead' and simple systems in nature.
The defintition of the term Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) seem to vary a bit. The book The Quark and the Jaguar : Adventures in the Simple and Complex might be of intrest.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Hello? 21st century here, all $DEITY's should be buried by now. Open your eye's people, Darwin's theory has been out for nearly 150 years, religion has long been obsolete!
Bring it on you fundi's, I dare you. Modding me down will get you a one-way ticket to Hell...
This sig is intentionally left blank
Didn't Bush's new space exploration plan call for us to visit there, soon? :-)
What Bush said was "The Dept of Homeland security will checkout Uranus for WMD's"
How many overlords does this make? Doesn't it get a bit tiring every time you turn around we have welcome new overlords like those giant ants, black monoliths, 900 foot Jesus, giant squid, or even intelligent doormats. C'mon slashdot. Just stick with one overlord and we'll all be happy toiling away in the gallium arsnide mines, the selenium tarpits, and Wal-Marts. Hold on there's a knock at the door.
I'm back. The delivery man gave me this package. It had this cool hat in it. It's a gelatinous blue with tentacles. It looked just like the one he was wearing. Except his was pulsating. I'm going to try it on.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW ACETYLENE BASED LIFEFORM TITAN OVERLORDS. TIME TO DELIVER MORE HATS.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
They can try to reproduce, but it won't get anywhere...
Only sterile animals that produce are humans (if the person is indeed sterile)... but that's done through the science we use. It's unfair to say that sterile beings aren't beings because they can't reproduce. It's just that they try... and fail.
Does said object have beings that want or need our women? If so, yes, it is a planet. See "Mars Needs Women," "The Mysterians,""Huminoids from the Deep," "Breeders," and "Alien Seed" amongst others, as well as the writings of Paldir of Rigel 7.
I've theorized since grade school that not all forms of life would necessarily have our biology and need the same things to live as we did. Although it was more "aliens might not need to breathe air" then....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Spock: The PAIN, The PAAAIIINNNNN!
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
It seems that if life can be found on Titan it would be a significant change in a factor of the Drake equation that estimates how much alien life is out there.
A self-reproducing thermodynamic work cycle. Video of Kauffman's explanation
Maybe we're all having problems defining life because it is a subjective definition like good and evil. So maybe it is better to think as ancient people did and define everything as being alive or go with my topic and define everything as being dead. Or just use a neutral words to describe recognizable structures like cell and dna and human without attaching subjective connotations like life and death.
If you really think about it replication in the context of life does not mean what we usually take it to mean i.e. an identical copy. Most things we take as alive produce something similar to the parent and often requires more than one individual to do it, while individual prions considered by most to be dead actually do themselves carry out the task of forming identical replicas from their surroundings.
people thinking outside of the box with possible life forms.
Now when will these silly ass science fiction TV series ever realize biped aliens were only acceptable in the 70s and 80s?
I mean, there was alien spaceship that found planets with lots of natural resources, and would land upon them with the goal of building automated factories to make products and send them back to the alien home world.
It did by building lots of little robots (ooooh Beowulf cluster!), which in turn build factories, which build more little robots and then go on to build more factories and so until the planet is fully covered in robotic factories. These factories are what then build the products (and spacecraft) that the home world was so interested in to begin with.
Unfortunately one of the factory ships gets it's programing scrambled by radiation from a super nova. In it's confusion it decides Titan looks like a good planet for industry. So the ship builds factories, the factories make robots, the robots make factories... except the software that determined how robots and factors were to be made were also corrupted by the supernova radiation.
Long story short, the robots end up competing for limited resources, and evolution begins. Today there are intelegent robots on Titan. We just need a Mars bound manned mission that we can re-route Titan to prove this fact.
What, don't believe me? Go read James P. Hogan's _Code_of_the_Lifemaker.(look! Not even a referral link!)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Well, for one, a complexs molecule can be more than simple carbon chains, as one "tool" said so in a post below this one.
Okay! So what you're saying is that: "big, complex molecules can be made of other things than just carbon chains"? Well that's not news to anyone who knows about silicone rubber, for instance.
So who are these people you speak of saying otherwise? Who are you debating on this?
BTW, you shouldn't use the term "complex molecule". In chemistry a "complex" is something different than a molecule.
The Second law semantically conradicts itself. If energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred/transformed thru heat (which is how we measure all things energy-wise, by wattage) then the entire universe, as far as we can tell, is a perpetual motion machine
No. The universe as a whole isn't gaining or losing any energy. It would only be a perpetual motion machine if it was gaining energy.
How about learning some science before criticizing it?
where scientific method was explained.
people seem to mistake theory for hypothesis.
They think theory means some type of made up idea instead of bieng confirmed through repeated experimental tests.
They are exactly correct evolution is a theory.
Religion is a hypothesis.
Well, I'm not going to debate the merits of your medical school, but claiming some (any!) authority on a subject by citing the supposedly stellar credentials of the institution where you are a student is not the best way to start an argument.
And I'll leave that, at that.
The Second law semantically conradicts itself.
Ah, you're one of those. Look, if you're going to come in here challenging basic, basic scientific principles like the laws of thermodynamics, you're going to have to do better than:
[snip]
And I have made my point/argument
You've made an extraordinarily poor argument, and if anything, whatever point you were trying to make was probably better off before you took up its cause.
Frankly, as a chemist-turned-surgeon myself, I'm a little disturbed by your high opinion of yourself (apparently based largely upon the school where you happen to be a student), your ignorance of basic physics and chemistry, and your dogmatic and clueless approach to the scientific process.
Maybe you're just having an off day?
I stand slightly corrected. ;D
soon they will take over ourplanet and harvest us like we harvest cows...... making us eat beans all day
oh the humanity!!
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Diamond, and other simple Carbon containing compounds such as carbides, carbonates, cyanides, CO2 and CO etc are generally not considered as organic compounds.
*All* of Titan isn't likely to be as low as 100K...
Agreed. But I hope you admit it's hard to imagine a significant area of Titan that has stayed three times hotter than the planetary average over geological time spans, long enough for life to spontaneously arise. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems unlikely.
My understanding is that Terrestrial life that exists now in inhospitable niches did not spontaneously arise there de novo, but gradually evolved to cope with the niche, as the niche changed, or by migration from more hospitable places.
"What butt does toothpaste come from?"
a automobile plant is alive? When more complex nanotech becomes reality (self-replication), man can claim to have created life?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No religion is either a delusion (if you believe it) or a con (if you pretend to believe it).
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
This is an old topic now, but I just wanted to correct myself.
Life might produce an abundance of patterns and order.
'Nature' or randomness might produce patterns too, you might flip 10 tails in a row for example.
A compression algoritm would compress those 10 tails into 10t or something, so the absense/removal of order might indicate that someone has been using a compression algoritm.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)