Slashdot Mirror
A Thermodynamics Theory of the Origins of Life
New submitter SpankiMonki writes "Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine has written an article about how Jeremy England, a MIT professor, may have found a theory of the origin of life grounded in physics. In a paper published last August by The Journal of Chemical Physics, England describes his theory, the 'Statistical physics of self-replication.' Wolchover writes, 'England['s]...formula...indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.' England says his ideas pose no threat to Darwinian evolution: 'On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.'"
Can anyone with more info on this tell me how this earlier paper is different - arxiv.org/abs/0907.0042
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
In other words....
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if a SUPREME BEING shines his light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
Mercury has no ocean or atmosphere to act as a heat bath, so there goes one counter-example. And while Venus has a thick atmosphere, it doesn't necessarily have the right chemicals for life to arise, so there goes your second counter-example.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Depends on the definition of "life" at that point. Mercury should have lots of crystallization effects which release energy during formation... But the excess heat would also remelt... And crystals do "grow"... And they can even reproduce (by fission when the crystal fractures...)
In the case of Venus - insufficient information for a meaningful answer...
I think this is specifically water based, or at least where things can be water like.
With water you get a scum boundary. Thermically there will be pressure to move the heat through the scum boundary. Which will generally be less thermally conductive. This will promote chemical processes that move the heat through the boundary.
The scum boundary becomes cell membranes and the chemical processes then become cellular mechnisims that seek their own energy input (feed on available chemically stored energy).
And we've thoroughly explored those planets? I, personally, have no doubt we will eventually find some form of life on both planets. Obvious surface life seems to be unique to earth in our solar system... but even on earth, subsurface life far out numbers its terrestrial counterparts. Mercuries surface does not appear to be "Teeming with life" but that doesn't mean the subsurface isn't And Venus... well we can't see a damned thing there now can we? I don't see how that's a counter example to anything.
"We have Mercury and Venus as counter-examples. Why aren't they teeming with even more life."
Liquids only exist with the right pressure and temperature (CO2 never goes liquid but sublimates with our atmospheric pressure) --- and liquids will likely be discovered to be the "key". Asteroids, gas giants and --- say --- the moon don't have liquids.
Liquids are a special case of matter interactivity.
So I guess what the author is implying: liquids + energy tend to lead to more efficient molecules that dissipate heat which cycles and eventually leads to life. It is intriguing thought, but needs more evidence.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Can't comment on that paper but if this subject interest you check out this highly readable paper on the evolution of symmetry in biological molecules.
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Even if there's some truth behind the theory in the article, I'd still expect there to be a range of conditions under which life would be possible. Venus is probably out of it. While it seems unlikely that there's life on Venus now, it's still possible that there was life on Venus earlier in its history when (and if) the conditions were less extreme. (Although I can't imagine that anybody would be able to get any evidence for it, if it did exist.)
Because thermodynamics is all about statistics.
This means that even if life-formation goes against the laws of thermodynamics, it still is possible, however remote the probability.
This theory, may, however, be useful in predicting the probability of life forming under certain circumstances.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
These theories are not in opposition. England's theory explains how Urey's experiment works.
Looking at this macroscopically:
Stars kick out elements and supply enegy which creates compounds. Then life forms just as a method for reducing the enegy captured from the sun and stored in compounds back into lower energy things.
We are the entropic process in action.
Example:
Without us there would be massive amounts of stored enegy in the form of hydrocarbons. We are doing are part in the chain of things by releasing that back as thermal energy.
This even explains the evolution of intelligence as being more efficient at energy consumption.
Better start rewriting some chapters in those Texas physics textbooks then...
Because everybody is either democrat or republican, black or white, american or terrorist...
You forgot a few:
everyone believes in:
"Science" and his prophet Darwin or "God" and his prophet [fill in religious leader],
reason or emotion ,
starched or tie-died,
rational or magical,
whistle-blowers or politicians,
capitalist or communists.
Christian nation or Deist nation,
Monotheist or Trinitarian,
Libertarian or Rational,
Successful or Failed
talent or no talent,
monochrome or multichrome.
See? Fixed that for ya!
Why aren't they teeming with even more life.
Do you know they don't? What prof. England does is to some extent to state the obvious: When you have a collection of elements (eg. atoms) that are able to combine to form larger elements (eg. molecules), and you bring about a situation where more 'atoms' can combine, then evolution is likely to happen - some molecules will be more stable than others, so we get 'survival of the fittest'. You could even do this with, say Lego blocks: put them in a large, rotating drum for a while, and they will probably clump together randomly - and the combinations that are not stable enough will break apart.
It may well be meaningful to define 'life' as this exact phenomenon, in which case life really is everywehere, and it is only a question of determining how complex life can become in a given environment.
Physicists sometimes have it easy. This kind of thing is akin that old joke about treating a cow like a sphere.
Look with the chemical origin of life, that it was governed by physics is not in debate.
What matters are the details, what came first; RNA world, life on a metallic surface, or some thing else?
I have this to toss at so-called astrobiologists who claim that life is spontaneous and easy.
If it is so easy why is there only one kind of life -- 20 amino acids, 4 DNA/RNA bases? To a bio organic chemist the "selection" of this chemical code is arbitrary. Why do we not live in an ecosystem with a shadow "alternative" biosphere? After all life existed for 3 billion years on this planet before even becoming multi-cellular. Plenty of time for chemical weirdos to develop a four base genetic code templating for D chirality beta amino acid chains with side chains made of silicon.
Step off physicists, this field belongs to chemists.
In other words, evolution can be considered how we are here whereas thermodynamics can be considered a theory of why we are here. (Paraphrasing religious/scientific dualists)
Which is why I said "habitable zone + Miller Urey" is more plausible.
And what "chemicals" do you think venus lacks that early earth didn't? I mean, it's not like carbon dioxide and nitrogen aren't present here.
For all we know about Venus, it could be a soup of unfamiliar life... taking this new perspective on life and sending a scientific lander to Venus to search might be a worthwhile annual expenditure of $0.25 per capita for the next 5 years.
Possibly because the 'heat bath' description is somewhat simplistic. The earth has environments where organisms, or more simply clumps of molecules can lose energy locally. You have a dark surface that absorbs sunlight more effectively than the puddle of water you reside in and you lose energy to that puddle.
The environments of Mercury and Venus lack temperature differentials that would drive such a process.
Have gnu, will travel.
Mercury has no ocean or atmosphere to act as a heat bath, so there goes one counter-example. And while Venus has a thick atmosphere, it doesn't necessarily have the right chemicals for life to arise, so there goes your second counter-example.
From TFS:
Where do you see the word "chemicals?"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Whenever I hear about a physicist who explains a problem from outside his area of expertise with a few simple equations, I think about this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...
Asteroids, gas giants and --- say --- the moon don't have liquids.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"England says his ideas pose no threat to Darwinian evolution."
Really? This had to be stated?
* Why would this have anything to do with Darwin's theory of evolution? Evolutionary theory is pointedly silent on the origins of life, nor does it depend on a thermodynamic explanation of speciation.
* Why would the article, or England for that matter, feel the need to explicitly state this?
[opinion] I feel like the scientific community has so rabid about avoiding anything resembling creationism that they have to reassure themselves when new ideas come up, even if the ideas are no threat to their core beliefs. [/opinion]
It's disappointing and makes it hard to take anything this guy says seriously, regardless of how reasonable or far fetched his formula is.
In the Journal of Chemical Physics, England describes YOU!
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
Without chemicals, life would not be possible(TM)
(TM) Dupont
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You must be those guys who label organic food with "contains no chemicals" and similar nonsense.
Here's a hint: a "group of atoms" difinitively implies one or more chemicals.
The paper has nothing to do with "the origin of life". We know that life exists, so proving that it can arise tells us nothing that we don't already know.
What we need to know is how fast it can arise and how likely it is.
Isn't this what Terrence Deacon has been saying for a while now?
Personally, I think there must be some form of self-organization at work. The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it is based on selection of attributes that randomly arise over time. As a theory to explain the system-of-systems we see all around us, that is an awfully thin basis. One has to presume that merely by chance some beneficial attribute arises that just happens to be useful in surviving some random environmental chance. You start adding up all the chances of chances, and pretty soon life looks literally impossible.
But what if there is some undiscovered mechanism of self-organization that is self-directing the adaptation of life? Something inherent in the nature of the structure of matter itself. Why DO plants all grow towards the sun? Maybe it's not because it has anything to do with reproduction, but because that's what the stuff that plants are made of self-organize to do, naturally.
Anyway, just a thought.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The theory doesn't insist on life -- it simply further develops a principle that actually goes back IIRC to work by Prigogene on self-organization in open system (although I'm too lazy to look it up to be certain) and that is observed in phenomena like the transition from conduction to turbulent convection. The interesting thing is extending it to the microscale and chemistry.
Also, what's wrong with the "and" operator here, as well? Given a temperature range and physical environment conducive of complex chemistry between free energy sources and free energy sinks, self-organization of the chemistry to optimize the generation of entropy, via a natural selection favoring those processes that are most efficient at transferring the energy from a rate limited source AND that possess a certain "stability" in the physical environment. Self-replicating processes might not always be the most efficient, even, but they might possess the stability needed, or not. Once you have the self-replication, though, you have a pathway to life. Urey-Miller isn't even contradictory of this -- the nucleation of the self-replicating processes itself likely requires random noise to generate the soup in which the requisite self-organizing chemistry can take place.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Clearly the original poster intended to signify a to-be-defined set of “usable” chemicals. It is clear to everybody versed in even rudimentary chemistry that a concentration of noble gasses would not give rise to life for the simple reason that though concentrated they do not react. Thus the expected reactivity of the chemicals under consideration becomes a key concern. The building blocks of life as we know it (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, & cetera) is a pretty reactive bunch of stuff.
I expect professor English has already formalised this (fairly trivial) observation in his work. If that is not the case, it could no doubt be effortlessly included. I do not believe it to be a profound point. I especially resist the tendency Slashdot users often display of building straw-men absurd logical reductions.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
"At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.”"
This is great, now somebody can easily go and model the economy thermodynamically. After all this should be a much simpler system.
Then again thinking about the second law feels like you can never come out ahead, introducing this concept to economics would be fatal to certain parts of the finance industry.
Je me souviens.
And what "chemicals" do you think venus lacks that early earth didn't?
Chemically chemicals? Anyway, whether Venus does have the right stuff or not is irrelevant - it's still not a counter-example.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
For all we know about Venus, it could be a soup of unfamiliar life
Absolutely, though what form that would take...
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
And right below, you have this: "[..]from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."
In other words, Venus might see this phenomenon arise, but just not the particular specific case where life gets involved (ie. the wrong atoms are present or the wrong process is started or whatever else can affect the outcome).
You could say that life is only a more efficient given certain pressures and temperatures. By definition, conditions that are favorable for life are favorable because life is a more efficient way to increase entropy in those conditions.
Plants grow towards the sun because they need sunlight for energy. And evolution is considerably more complex than just "random useful traits".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
>I'd love to see what the surface of Venus looks like.
http://www.space.com/18551-ven...
We've had I think several probes that got deep enough to photograph the surface, even if they didn't last long.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There might be life on/in Venus. Just not apparently the water/carbon based life that we're so egocentrically looking for.
It's hard to imagine other forms of life and go expensively looking for them on a hunch that they may exist. That doesn't mean they don't.
The problem is how would you *detect* unfamiliar life? It's not like it gives off life-onium rays. You can detect particular chemicals you believe are produced by certain kinds of life, but that's a pretty narrow detection window. The best bet would probably be collecting samples and monitoring them for long periods under a powerful microscope looking for activity or complex organized structures, but even that would presume that the local life is active or organized in away we can see and understand. A simple crystalline life form for example might well appear like nothing more than a grain of sand on human timescales. Hell, aside from their propensity to arise spontaneously you could almost classify fire and crystals as life forms already - they "eat", they grow, they reproduce, fire even excretes, and crystals manage the organized self-replication with errors. If the errors were cumulative instead of structural they would be evolving already.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>It is clear to everybody versed in even rudimentary chemistry that a concentration of noble gasses would not give rise to life
That depends entirely on the environment - at sufficient temperatures and pressures the noble gasses become quite active. In fact they might be some of the few elements still non-volatile enough to build a stable chemistry around.
Yeah, chemistry is weird - it's built directly upon quantum mechanics after all. And we're only beginning to understand how extremely biased our understanding is towards "chemistry that can occur at STP".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think a more telling point is that any catalyst that dissipates energy more efficiently than "dumb chemistry" will be primed to explode across it's environment if it's capable of self-replication. And it's damnably hard to draw a line between self-replicating chemistry and life.
To use your car analogy, you don't need 1000hp to pull ahead in a drag race against someone with a 100hp car, 100.1hp will be enough in the long term.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
. . . but it sounds like the cart's being put in front of the horse here.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Define life. Fire and crystals are extremely close by many definitions. Viruses are borderline, being clearly life by some and clearly non-life by others - they do not eat, excrete, respire, or even self-replicate by themselves, instead relying on subverting the self-replication capacity of other life to do so.
If you go by the increasingly popular definition of life as "capable of imperfect self-replication", which is necessary and sufficient for evolution to kick in, then crystals and fire are extremely primitive forms of life - fire's self-replication is too unstable for evolution to accumulate complex functionality, and crystals are generally far too stable and self-correcting. Both death-knells for productive evolution.
But hey, they perform abiogenesis at the drop of a hat, so who knows what might exist out in the cosmos. On Mercury or Venus for example the high temperatures might well make many crystals unstable enough that they become capable of evolution. A little alloy contamination here, a little structural reinforcement there, and suddenly the crystal can survive environmental fluctuations, but is no longer capable of perfect self-replication, and voila, evolution is off to the races.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You left out self-replication. Survival of the fittest is an evolutionary concept and only applies to that big drum of Lego blocks if you get clumps of blocks capable of promoting the formation of similar clumps of blocks. At that point evolution can kick in, otherwise you just have a bunch of tumbling "rocks" that resist "weathering".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, your right; most of the population will settle for nothing less than little green men with anal probes, flying saucers and prescient, liberal advice for our species (Venusians would be all about the greenhouse effect).
I for one, would be fascinated to find Venus teaming with wacky crystal structures that display just the right amount of entropic dissipation to give physicists hardons.
Unless someone can prove how intelligent life arises inevitably (and given Earth's long history without anything most of us would find intelligent) I suspect we'll never find anything worth communicating with, which I think is what I think most layman actually mean when they say "life."
By heat bath, they do not necessarily mean "hot". The *difference* in temperature matters. The system (life) has to dump heat (delta-Q) into its surroundings (atmosphere, bath, etc) for replication to be favorable. The system usually has to be hotter than the surroundings for the heat (Q) to flow from the system into the surroundings. An engine is more efficient on colder days than hotter days. The system *can* absorb heat from the surroundings, but this is usually accompanied by an increase in disorder of the system.
So, Venus is just too darn hot to act as an efficient head dump for the negative delta-G's of carbon-based biochemistry.
Good old \delta G_sys = \delta H_sys - T \delta S_sys
[That said, I think that the paper is defining delta Q backwards (+ Q flowing out of system) from the usual convention (+ Q flowing into the system).]
>The main topic here centers around the carbon based organisms we have become accustomed to.
I didn't see any such limitation implied, though carbon based life is used as a proof-of-concept example. I could easily envision a hot world where some sort of crystals melt and reform on a daily or seasonal basis - any inclusions that allow them to dissipate energy more efficiently and avoid melting would be step one, if they can promote the accumulation of such inclusions in new growth you've got step two, and if the new growth is anything less than a perfect copy of the original then you've primed the pump for evolution and are off to the races.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And dropping a probe in the Sahara for an hour would determine there is no life on Earth either.
We know next to nothing about venus. That data- rather than enlighten us, merely highlights how little we know.
Besides the obvious technical hurdles, I think this (little green men to do charades with) is what people are really interested in.
They certainly don't want to hear that Venus has vast oceans full of self-replicating life forms that could, if they got into the Earth's mantle, trigger a massive increase in super-volcano activity. That's just a downer and not worth funding at all. That one Russian lander that melted after a few minutes was plenty to prove that any people walking around on Venus won't be able to sit at a table and chat with us.
Hell yeah the Venusians would be all about the greenhouse effect, look at how cold and lifeless our world is! They've probably already infiltrated the government and fossil fuel industry as part of their terraforming project. Why waste all that energy on invasion and terraforming when you can just give the locals the internal combustion engine and let them terraform themselves out of existence? };-)
>given Earth's long history without anything most of us would find intelligent
There's another big unsubstantiated claim in it's own right - intelligent life could have arisen several times here already, how would we know? If we wipe ourselves out tomorrow then in a million years there'll be precious little evidence that we ever existed as an intelligent race, if we hadn't made it through the last ice age (genetic evidence suggests only about 2000 of us did) then the evidence of our existence would already be almost gone - when some future archaeologist finds a stone tool who would suspect that it originated with a completely different species rather than their own stone-age ancestors? Even stone sculptures of humans would likely be dismissed as representations of some primitive god. Me, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we start colonizing the Moon and discover ancient traces of one or more previous technological races, preserved by the lack of life, weather, and geologic activity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Dude, must you be such a downer? Charades via teleconferencing is admittedly less entertaining, but who would want to actually travel to such a miserably cold world as Earth? :-)
As for the supervolcano "bugs", well, I would certainly hope we discover such things *before* bringing back samples to study...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...
Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.
You must be those guys who label organic food with "contains no chemicals" and similar nonsense.
Don't be a jackass. OP said "Venus doesn't have the right chemicals," which completely ignores the premise of the paper - that, in the right conditions, individual atoms will come together in just-such-a-way to form the "right chemicals" for life.
Here's a hint: a "group of atoms" difinitively implies one or more chemicals.
No, it implies more than one atom. Kinda like how the phrase "set of tires" implies more than one tire, but not a whole car.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...
Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.
Where does water vapor come from, if not liquid water?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Ice subliming into vapor. At pressures below 1 kPa or at temperatures more than a few degrees below C, except at really high pressures, you won't see liquid water, but can easily see transitions from solid ice to water vapor in the -50 to 0 C degree range.
I'm glad to see someone else already made this comment. It's precisely this type of misappropriated use of the word "theory" in a scientific setting that leads so many people to ignorantly denounce legitimate scientific theories, confusing them for scientific guesswork.
...plus Miller Urey never created anything close to a cell or self replicating molecule
IIRC there is no universally agreed convention for which direction of delta Q you set as positive, so that's not necessarily any sign of incompetence.
Yes, I assume you've read about the recent creation of NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl at high pressures, compounds not possible in standard chemistry.
‘Impossible’ Sodium Chlorides Challenge Foundation of Chemistry
I think all the radioactive waste would be a clue...
Not necessarily. If you apply the logic to stable elements or molecules, they become the building blocks of something that can one day self replicate.
seriously ? Add a few billion years of chance and yes, you will have complex structures that can survive in their environment.
Are you comfortable using the biblical "Grow, multiply, populate" (that is, adapt to different conditions and stay, which rules out both crystals and fire BTW)
And exhibiting conscious-like attitude as a bonus.
As you point out, it must be done at scales different from ours and considering all kind of materials.
Finally, without detracting from the study, the tendency to obey the formula that describes heat dissipation is inherent IMHO to the fact that all combinations who do not dissipate enough heat will get too hot eventually.
In oher words, life is matter * time. Things that do not grow, cannot survive division or do not multiply, do not adapt, are less likely to stay than those who do.
Don't take this vision as an argument against creationism, there is no difference between life created in one miracle step, or life being an eventual and maybe transient byproduct of universal laws.
If there is a god creator of all things, residing outside time necessarily, creation encompasses all past and future time in one step. This incidentally makes Dawkins an inaccurate theorist for not realizing the possibility.
If there is no god, a miraculous event can happen if its probability is above zero by any margin, if it did not happen we would not have been here to notice it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Governer Christie, is that you?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Hydrogen, Venus used to have tons of it bonded to oxygen in an ocean, the ocean boiled under a runaway greenhouse, radiation then split the water vapour blasting the hydrogen off the planet. The oxygen then found some carbon to bind with which is why it's called a "runaway" greenhouse. The fate awaits the Earth in roughly half a billion years.
As TFA said "life is a special case", ie: Life needs certain ingredients in a specific environment to be the most efficient way to dissipate energy, but life is not the only example of spontaneous self-organising matter (crystals are an obvious example). This guy's idea attempts to explain ALL spontaneous self-organization of matter as a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When you get down to the molecular scale the line between alive and not-alive is poorly defined, my personal opinion is that "life" is an arbitrary distinction between different types of chemistry, a word invented by humans to more easily comprehend and talk about the world around us. Interestingly the distinction between alive and not-alive is a modern way of seeing the world, the oldest tribal religions (polytheism) believed everything had a spirit (was alive), including rocks, clouds, and celestial bodies.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't think the bar is quite as high as "intelligent life" but anything short of multicellular life that can be seen without
a microscope is not going to bring much excitement to the average non-geek. An animal that moves and eats would
be the ultimate prize but even a plant that grows would be awesome. Personally for me I would love for someone
to discover life (even here on earth) that wasn't DNA/RNA based. Having a single evolutionary path greatly limits
our understanding of how life may have originated.
What waste? Fission waste = cesium, etc - stuff with half lives in the range of years to decades, within a few centuries most of it's safe, within a few millenia it pretty much all is. A species would have to be pretty stupid to leave that waste mixed in with a majority of perfectly good enriched fuel that would then need to be stored for millions of years before it decays to safe levels. It's not like reprocessing the "spent" fuel is particularly difficult, in many ways it's a lot easier than the initial mining and enrichment process. Yep. A species would have to be pretty stupid not to do that.
Also, presuming we actually contained it, what are the odds that in a few million years someone will dig down into Yucca Mountain in just the right spot to discover our own waste? Hell, we know of at least one "natural" nuclear reactor in the great rift valley - are we 100% certain it isn't in fact an ancient waste repository that got excavated by an underground river millions of years later?
But that only applies to *technological* species. Our species has been around largely unchanged for tens of thousands of years, and has been been almost wiped out at least once during that period. If we hadn't survived that ice age what evidence would be left that we ever existed?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I prefer to keep religious language out of scientific discussion - it comes loaded with far too many personal preconceptions which cloud rational discourse. As appears to be the case here - I don't see any way to get "adapt" from "grow, multiply, populate" without at least a few major preconceptions.
Sure, apparently conscious activity makes things easier, but good luck finding that in bacteria. And even if we find it - if we create/encounter a digital artificial intelligence possessing true sentience and sapience, is it necessarily alive in a biological sense? It may well have no sense of personal self-preservation or desire to reproduce - those are things instilled by evolution, and may not be relevant concepts to a manufactured mind. In fact it might be far safer for the creators if they were not.
Not gonna argue that life =/= matter*time, provided we also through in a sufficient energy gradient to perform useful work. Without an energy gradient to fuel directed action, there cannot be life. And that brings us back to the premise of the paper.
>If there is a god creator of all things, residing outside time necessarily, creation encompasses all past and future time in one step. This incidentally makes Dawkins an inaccurate theorist for not realizing the possibility.
Don't know about Dawkins, but the argument has been brought up enough times in the discussion of free will. However that argument would seem to me to be based on the premise that the universe is deterministic - that given perfect understanding of this moment, all future moments can be predicted, and thus all outcomes are an inherent properties of the initial instant of creation. And to the limit of the understandings of current science that premise is false - quantum mechanics appears inherently non-deterministic, which renders all other phenomena non-deterministic as well. The Many Worlds interpretation could still be made to work with it, but that presumes a continuously bifurcating multiverse universe in which *all* possible outcomes do in fact occur, making the complete multiverse inherent in the moment of creation. But Many Worlds tends to wreak havoc on all other religious and philosophical discussion, so I'll leave it alone.
Finally, since you seem to enjoy this sort of thing, how about a theory that makes the rise of sentient life in the universe not only likely, but inevitable? One of the great mysteries of science is how fin-tuned the physical laws of the universe seem to be for the creation of life, even slight variations could potentially have left the universe a cold (or hot) and lifeless void in which even stars could not form. But here's where it gets interesting - the forces didn't separate out into their current fine-tuned values until some moments after the big bang, before that they were believed to be unified into some sort of omni-force. If we make just two assumptions we can make sentient life inevitable from the moment of creation:
(1) that the state of the "stuff" in the universe influenced the balance between the forces after separation (seems reasonable)
(2) that quantum states do not actually collapse until their effects are observed by a sentient observer (one of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics, though it's fallen out of style as utterly unprovable)
Given those two premises you now have the first instants of creation as effectively spawning a Many Worlds scenario, all possible states of the "stuff" will exist in superposition, resulting in the omni-force coalescing into all possible balances of forces. Each of which will proceed to shape it's particular superposed version of the universe into the natural outcome of those values. Until, eventually in one of the myriad superposed universes a conscious mind evolves. At which point the entire superposed multiverse collapses into the range of states that gave rise to that mind, and things continue on.
A bit of a stretch, but fun.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why do we keep the poor guy? He's had a great insight.
Now, let's get all scientific on his ass. Get a bottle, fill it with the right and ...
MAKE SOME LIFE!
Water.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Chemicals, chemistry etc. = Bonding of atoms and their interactions, Life would not exist without the chemistry driven by electromagnetism. Don't believe then go read a good physics book.
Only in the sense that a lump of plastic may one day become a Lego block.
Or a bunch of vegetables, having been eaten by a woman, may one day become a baby.
That's true, but explains nothing.
Exactly. Calling the amino acids produced by the Miller Urey experiment "precursors of life" is like calling a lump of silicon a "precursor to a Pentium".
It's true in a very literal sense, but really quite meaningless.
A few billion years is nowhere near sufficient.
A billion billion years wouldn't be sufficient, giving the complexity of life.
That's why England's ideas are so intriguing: they propose a physical mechanism that is not entirely dependent on chance.
In the end, it's all physics.
Why does the kind of diversity you argue is lacking mean that a potential in a system under certain conditions cannot converge to form the basis of life?
All galaxies have the basic properties of being swirly and full of stars... sure there's slight variations on that but that is basically the essence of them... a huge system with massive potential evolved and converged to form structures with those specific properties.
I don't think the problem is that the the paper is looking at this from the perspective of physics, but more that you are looking at it from the perspective of biological chemistry alone... Looking at chemistry alone everything looks very specific and unique before even delving into biology.
Using biblical references triggers preconceptions, indeed, but not using it makes sure those won't ever be solved. Personally I have no problems imagining some ancient men with time on their hands building up their model of reality, be it with or without divine inspiration.
About adapting: the verb populate (fill up, whatever) applied to a set of different environments needs the subject to adapt, I don't see alternatives.
Good point about the self aware AI, it might be sentient without having undergone evolution, I guess things will get interesting when we are faced with different kinds of CG awareness.
About the need for energy, this is true but a detail of this universe. Some "game of life" simulation which basically makes stuff appear from nowhere has no need for that and might end up with darwinian-like stuff. Don't argue that the pc running the simulation needs energy because in the context of the simulation itself it is not implemented, while here it is. In fact the idea that nothing get created and nothing get destructed in the context of the game of life is complete nonsense.
About the deterministic universe, i think that there is no difference between deterministic and random once you remove time. Uncertain is who is subjected to time. Same for multiverses or quantum metaworlds where quantum states are resolved. There is no theoretical upper limit of complexity, especially for people like us, who live in a billion galaxies' universe and can't tell how many beans are in a jar without counting them.
And this takes me to the latter point: it is an elegant theory, and favoring elegance and simplicity is the way to go, but remember no upper limit on complexity means that the wildest models have basically the same probability of being true than the most likely ones.
It's been a pleasure.
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"key physical attribute associated with life" = silly and deceptive. The KEY attribute of life is complexity, not water nor energy. And you can't fake complexity--you have an intelligence putting that into the system or you have random chaos. Deal with it.
Cranky educator.
I hadn’t actually, but thanks for the insight.
I suppose that in the light of this I should return and revise “usable” to read “usable at the prevalent conditions within the given environment”. In that form the statement still stands and accommodates for your observation, too.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
With enough blocks this could conceivably happen...
Take a look at some of Graham Cairn-Smith's work on crystal evolution and development. "Seven Clues" was a very interesting read ("Seven Clues to the Origin of Life", CambridgeUP, ISBN 9780521398282).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Isn't it wonderful that science isn't a democracy, and most people don't get a vote.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
... to the continuing absence of intelligent life on Earth?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I don't know why you've got quotes around the "natural".
The Oklo complex contains many distinct reactive centres. It's in Gabon, on the Atlantic coast, not in the Rift Valley which is on the other side of the continent. There are at least 15 activity centres in the Oklo mine and another one in a different mine some 35km SE from Oklo. A number of boreholes (for assessing more reserves) suggest activity at other centres, but since the mine is shut down now, it's unlikely to be studied more.
Damn, I'm annoyed that it's in that province. I was looking forward to taking a side trip to Oklo after some up-coming work out of Gamba and Libreville ; but somehow I don't particularly fancy driving several hundred kilometres for it. Would have made for some amusing questions when bringing samples back home - though being a card-carrying geologist should render such materials perfectly reasonable.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Are you sure there's not another formation in/upstream of the Great Rift? I first heard of the formation in the context of speculation that it may have contributed to elevated mutation rates during some of our ancestors evolutionary leaps, which would presume that it was irradiating the region they lived in, or at least the water supply.
"natural" because if the contextual presumption were true, then it would be an old nuclear waste dump, not a naturally occurring formation.
As a geologist with an apparent interest in the area, perhaps you would care to speculate on the surrounding formations suitability as such a dump over the last few hundred million years? I think it's safe to say that the major criteria are geologic stability and relative impermeability to water in it's configuration at the time. Clearly water made it in eventually, but that possibility is pretty much inevitable on those timescales. Also I think it's safe to presume that the waste itself might be stored in mineralized form for long-term stability, as we had that technology worked out almost immediately.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree completely about the non-RNA life, life with a fundamentally different origin would do far more to expand our understanding of the potential. On the other hand something more similar to us might provide greater insights into our own biology - less philosophically interesting, but with greater potential for short-term benefits.
Hey, why settle for plants or animals? How about a predatory slime mold - a mobile amorphous colony organism displaying clear volition and some measure of intelligence? And even a lot of microscopic and single-cell organisms can put on a good show with the aid of a high power video microscope and perhaps some time dilation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I could as easily see the argument *against* adapting: Go forth and fill all the niches I have made for you, but leave the others to their own occupants so that the balance may be preserved. Certainly such an interpretation would have saved us from a *whole* lot of problems we've created for ourselves.
I don't disagree about the game of life example, but since the context being discussed is life in *this* universe, I don't see that it's applicable. Obviously life in other universes, simulated or otherwise, may follow very different rules.
I have to disagree with your contention that there is no theoretical upper limit to complexity on purely practical grounds - it places the ravings of a madman on equal footing with the reasoned conjectures of specialists, and thus destroys the possibility of meaningful discourse and the advancement of a practical understanding thus enabled.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Always nice to discover that somebody competent has already explored many implications of an idea.
I would disagree with your sig. Birds are dinosaurs in exactly the same way that we are small rodent-like creatures living in the underbrush. Or that we are both an early multicellular colony organisms, or self-replicating clay crystals. We are their descendants, but we have undergone massive changes since we were them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> I could as easily see the argument *against* adapting: Go forth and fill all the niches I have made for you, but leave the others to their own occupants...
As I see it, there were no others ATM. "Thou shalt not steal" came later.
> I don't disagree about the game of life example, but since the context being discussed is life in *this* universe, I don't see that it's applicable.
My point was that, somewhere, it is not applicable: if we don't want to bring gods into the equation we must assume that awareness (of the same quality we experience) is a process. It can be implemented with the right programming of the brain and/or other relevant systems.
This can be done according to our universe rules, but it should also be simulated when understood. In the simulation energy might not be needed or implemented the same way.
So when you said "energy" I would say "change" which is more general. A minor issue, though.
I would not bother distinguishing simulated from real. All we have is systems.
From the point of view of simulated entities, the simulated world is real. I don't mean it looks real, I mean it respects the definition of "real". Real is what you can experience and interact with, the simulated entities cannot reach our world, the system that is simulating them. It is not real for them, it is "meta". Stuff coming from the "meta" can be only represented according to the rules of the simulation.
About the upper limit on complexity, the problem you outline is a practical consideration, as you say. I make a different one: no matter if theories are scientific, religious, economic, they have success depending on how useful they are for the most influential persons.
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I'll repeat - the topic under discussion is the spontaneous rise of life and protolife in this universe, as such the potential rules elsewhere are irrelevant. *Here* enthalpy seems to be required to power life. "Real" life requires it to drive its biological processes, and simulated life requires it to drive it's simulation (regardless of the rules within the simulation). Theoretically sure, you could perhaps run the same simulation in another universe where enthalpy is not a relevant concept, but until such day as we discover the existence of another universe that's completely irrelevant.
>About the upper limit on complexity, the problem you outline is a practical consideration, as you say. I make a different one: no matter if theories are scientific, religious, economic, they have success depending on how useful they are for the most influential persons.
Agreed, with the caveat that "useful" need not have any relationship to "describing reality in an inherently useful or consistent manner". Western religion for example seems togenerally be riddled with internal inconsistencies and offer extremely little of practical value to the believers in its description of the world, but great value to the bureaucracy that organizes them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> "Real" life requires it to drive its biological processes, and simulated life requires it to drive its simulation (regardless of the rules within the simulation)
Sure but the first is energy, the latter is meta-energy, from the point of view of the simulation, that is if you spoke to the artificial life creatures, you would be making a metaphysical, non demonstrable statement. The thermodynamic theory could not make sense or be conceivable, there.
About the latter point, yes that what I meant for useful myself. About the religious bureaucracy, though, are you sure that it justifies them? labels and miracles do not define Christians (Mt. 7:22-23). Their work, their love does. (much reference, Mt 21:31-32). So either it's some reverse psychology thing, or there are deviation from the spirit of the book for many interpretations of it.
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I've not heard of such. But I don't have close knowledge of the Rifts. Great, Eastern or Western. There's certainly some weird volcanism associated - hyper-alkaline, highly potassic, things like the "baking soda volcano of (pardon my spelling, it's too late to be looking it up) Oldo Lengai. Those have some pretty exotic chemistry - "baking soda volcano" is not exactly a jest. I have a very vague memory of uranium minerals being reported in association with carbonatites (Oldo Lengai is a carbonatite volcano), but not as ores.
Africa is a big place, with a complex geological history. But generally, for a long-term dump (hundreds of millions of years is ridiculously too long a time scale; a few hundred thousand years is entirely adequate from a radiation safety point of view) you want to be away from water (most of Africa outside the Namib and Sahara deserts is pretty damp, and the Sahara has been damp in large parts within the history of our species), and you want to be away from active volcanics, earthquakes, etc. Which leaves you with mid-continental deserts - depressingly similar to Yucca Mountain. There may have been lots of pork barrel involved in the lobbying for (and against) the proposed repository there, but it's not a particularly bad site. Nor, to be honest, is Sellafield/ Seascale, or the place the Finns are proposing.
Huh? In Oklo? Water was an essential component in Oklo - without the water (these were seabed deposits, IIRC) to act as a moderator, you'd have had hardly any nuclear interaction at all. To get efficient fission of 235-U you need slow neutrons, but 235-u yields fast neutrons ; so you need a moderator.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
As the theropod dinosaurs are increasingly well known, in terms of both species count, and the level of detail of individual species, it is becoming increasingly evident that many of the characters that we used to consider uniquely "avian" are actually synapomorphies with the rest of the theropods. The wide distribution if scale-derived integumentary structures ("feathers" in birds ; feather-like forms in other theropods) is probably the best known example, but the presence of pneumatic bones is also a theropod characteristic, not just an avian one. And that is a big structural rearrangement. Or, possibly, since the same character is also found in ancient pseudosuchians ("pseudo-crocodiles", they're closely related to crocodiles, but not direct ancestors), they're a primitive character for all archosaurs (birds + dinosaurs + crocs + pterosaurs + (IIRC) mosasaurs, but not ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs), which were lost in the ornithischian clade of the dinosaurs.
There, I said it : "clade". Rude word in polite company. But, unfortunately, the jaw-cracking terminology and eyeball-searing deductive rigour of cladistics is necessary to sort this stuff out. As well as adequately preserved, discovered, adequately prepared and adequately described, material.
Palaeontology is a fast moving field, despite the boxes of dusty bones all around the department.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I was not thinking radiation safety, you are right about that. Rather whether a civilization 10M-100M years ago might have found the formation the natural reactor is now located in a viable waste repository. If they did a "Yucca Mountain" with high-level nuclear waste the highly-radioactive stuff would have decayed long ago, but the uranium would still be largely untouched, even U235 has a half-life of 704M years. Really, I suppose any time much after the Cambrian explosion 542M years ago is a potential consideration for a prior civilization (or even further back if we accept the possibility of hive-minds), but by 100M years ago the world was teeming with life easily sophisticated enough to potentially house advanced intellect within a single being.
As for water, yes it's essential to functioning as a nuclear reactor, but I think we can all agree that a river (or even large amounts of draining groundwater) running through the Yucca Mountain waste repository would be a Bad Thing. I'm presuming the hypothetical previous civilization would have had similar thoughts on the matter - the question is: "Might Oklo have looked like a good waste repository site 100M+ years ago, and the river only later found it's way in as climate changed and mountains moved."
Hmm, and here's an interesting thought: If you were one of the last members of a dying race and wanted to leave a time capsule for any races that might come later, can you think of any better spot than a nuclear waste repository to attract the attention of people millions of years later? A massive ore deposit that will only be interesting to people who've harnessed nuclear fission.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I take no exception to the proposal that birds are a member of the same clade as at least some subgroup of theropods. But by the same logic we are members of the same clade as the proto-mammal "rodents" that were contemporaries of those theropods. Calling birds dinosaurs is exactly equivalent to calling humans proto-mammal rodents. I'm quite certain we share numerous major distiguishing features with those ancestors, but that doesn't mean we are *equivalent* to them. Just as we are not equivalent to that early multicellular ancestor that start the clade known as "animals"
To put it another way, "birds" and "humans" define particular modern day subsets within their respective clades, not the entirety of them, nor even defining representatives, they are just one of the myriad forms (both living and extinct) that have descended from those ancestors.
Of course naming is always a somewhat arbitrary thing anyway as the boundaries between "things of a type" exist almost entirely in our minds. But it seems to me that attempting to stretch a species classification to include all descendants is entirely non-productive. I mean really, we're all bacteria, right? Why bother with any other names?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.