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CERN Lends a Hand To the Origin of Life
SpaceKangaroo writes "In May, a small group of chemists and biologists gathered at CERN to get advice from high-energy physics experts on how to 'organize a scientific community from disparate research groups and how to access powerful computational resources.' One guy has already run simulations about the origin of life on the LHC computing grid, finding that a group of 65,000 chemicals has a good chance of creating a 'self-sustaining' system of chemical reactions (similar to life)."
'Hordijk and his colleague Mike Steel have developed a model of a chemical reaction system where the probability of an arbitrary molecule being a catalyst for an arbitrary reaction was two in a million, a probability that is “chemically plausible” he said.'
Am I right in thinking this is far too vague to be meaningful?
I think I'll hold off on any speculation until I've reviewed the writings of various Bronze Age goatherders on this subject.
Curious how close it is to 65535... the limit for unsigned short? I'd like to see they're source code, maybe that's a bug. Or.. wait.. could that mean God is a programmer?
God created only those 65000 chemicals to create life?
The universe far older than our solar system or galaxy and keeps getting "older" with each generation of space telescopes. There is no compelling reason not to believe that "life" couldn't have started somewhere else very far away very long ago and spread throughout the universe inside rocks. Trying to find the origin of life may be as pointless as trying to find the exact origin of any random goop that washes ashore.
So...the biology guys asked the physics guys about management and computer science? And I guess borrowed their computer?
Do biology guys not have their own supercomputers and have shitty management?
First the "god particle" and now this? What next, is the LHC going to stand outside theatres and tell people the ending to movies?
LOL
There is one funny thing. If it doesnt work....who cares, but if it works there are somewhat 6 billion People that will need anti depressants.
Shouldn't take more than three days for plant life now should it?
Seriously, should they not already know how to organize a scientific community for sharing/publishing/researching/peer reviewing stuff? It's not like the field has been around for a while... Also, let's play a game. It's called spot the problems with this statement from the perspective of the scientific method, "One guy has already run simulations ... finding that a group of 65,000 chemicals has a good chance..."
Overall /. editors are busy being morons again, or this was a horribly written article, or a horribly organized event.
Failure formatting five FAQs of financial facts.
www.pardismart.ir
Sigh. What part of Genesis 1 don't these "smart" guys understand? You see when you look for answers with a preconceived notion. you'll always find what you want to find. ...In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. simples.
In the beginning there was the word, and the word was 16-bit unsigned integer.
This may be a little off topic, however I am always confused by the age of the universe being around 13.75 billion years, however the furthest observed object was GRB 090423 is 260 billion light years away.
So, with nothing traveling faster than light, how the hell is this thing 260 billion light years away, shouldn't the max be 13.75 billion light years away, cause nothing travels faster than light?
Can someone explain?
And what part of Human Evolution you don't understand about "unnecessary and unjustifiable pride" in postings like this?
All "religious" people that don't understand the value of real Human Spirituality this researches are manifesting should reflect.
All this "religious" people that give such "simply" answers on all questions (and then not solving anything) using "God's name in vain", as you do, should reflect that they contradict what themselves claim...
Sigh. What part of Genesis 1 don't these "smart" guys understand? You see when you look for answers with a preconceived notion. you'll always find what you want to find. ...In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. simples.
+5 Funny
I know most of you don't like that answer, but its much more sane than arguing for a giant explosion out of nothing, some accidental joining of proteins in primordial soup, and billions of years of accidental gene mutation and natural selection culminating in the world as we know it. Believing in either option requires faith, but believing in God takes less faith than believing in that!
Really, think about it.
Simple?
Yeah, right. Some joker says "Let there be light.", and I end up having to wade through vector calculus and Maxwell's equations.
42.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What's so hard to understand about the birthday paradox?!
It's a mathematically provable event. Even given the very minuscule chance that a combinational event will occur, such as RNA/DNA/amino acid chains forming, if you increase the number of chances in parallel the probability quickly tends towards 1.
We found that if you take a bunch of sterilized rocks, water, CO2, Methane, etc (stuff that's here, and great quantities in other places in the universe, even in our own solar system), and zap in with static electricity (lightning, which we know happens elsewhere i.e. Mars has it) a bunch of times amino acids form. (The building blocks of life).
Now let's say there's a very small chance that a small simple strand of RNA could randomly form from a mixture of amino acids subjected to heat and cooling, lightning, and even cosmic radiation. If you have gobs and gobs of amino acids, this greatly increases the chance that life will emerge. If you comprehend the true size of the universe, and the plentiful number of stars, it's damn dear impossible to think that similar planets to our own are not out there. Their very existence also vastly increases the chance that life will form.
I would say, as a living entity, that I'm not very surprised that I'm alive. Rather, I'm surprised that anyone believes the odds that life would emerge cold no be very good without the assistance of a God. To these such people, I say: "I forbid you from using any hashing algorithms beyond MD5" I say, we should force them realize their folly in dismissing the birthday paradox...
Life: Birthday paradox. Simples.
I don't see how the birthday paradox enters into it. This is just the law of large numbers.
The birthday paradox is that there is a limited event space, and for each previous event there's a higher chance of overlap because larger parts of the event space is filled. This factor does not enter into the origin of life.
So while we're wasting energy, resources, and brain power on cosmogony, the Chinese are applying all of that to what we have now.
Western science needs to get over itself, accept what we have, and move on to making our lives better.
Either its alive or its dead. There really isnt a middle ground here. Its not mostly alive, or mostly dead. Its one or the other. Wake me up when its anything except dead.
Some joker says "Let there be light.", and I end up having to wade through vector calculus and Maxwell's equations.
Or, as the t-shirt that I have says:
God said ...
... and there was light.
<Maxwell's equations>
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Apparently what it means ;).
So why isn't there life on Mars? You are refuting your own point here.
I would say, as a living entity, that I'm not very surprised that I'm alive. Rather, I'm surprised that anyone believes the odds that life would emerge cold no be very good without the assistance of a God. To these such people, I say: "I forbid you from using any hashing algorithms beyond MD5" I say, we should force them realize their folly in dismissing the birthday paradox...
The problem here is, it's not sufficient to get the same molecule - any molecule - twice to get life started (which is what birthday paradox refers to). You need to get a molecule within a limited set, and even self-replicating molecule might be insufficient - I'd say you need to get to at least primitive bacteria before you have sufficient complexity to guarantee further evolution.
Life: an extremely complex phenomenom, which is not currently sufficiently well understood to say anything definitive about the forms it might take, the chances of its emerging randomly, or the preconditions for such emergency.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
'... a group of 65,000 chemicals has a good chance of creating a 'self-sustaining' system of chemical reactions (similar to life).'
KIRK: Bones, what can you tell me about these 65,000 chemicals?
McCoy: Well, it's similar to life, Jim. But not as we know it.'
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)