FORTH is VERY easily debugged. I wrote literally 4.5 million lines of fully debugged FORTH in 5 years of work, I had between 0 and 3 staff during that time. We found it was extremely easy to debug because it was VERY easy to decompose problems into groups of 5 or fewer instructions. FORTH also makes it very easy to eliminate common data structures and similar problematic elements.
FORTH is also generally quite high performance. Modern JSR-threaded or advanced token-threaded FORTHs typically have execution speeds on a par with machine optimized C. FORTH leaves your 'P language' interpreters in the dust, being trivially an order of magnitude faster than Python or Perl.
As for 'having a syntax' the beauty of FORTH is that the entire syntax takes one sentence to describe and about 10 lines of code to parse. An entire fully-functional FORTH environment with a macro assembler and cross-compiler will generally run you 10k lines of code. The HUGE benefit of this is, you can expect your programmers to have a 100% complete understanding of the tool they're using, down to every line of code in the compiler, interpreter, and editor.
The thing is, if you change your wish to 'FORTH code' its already there, and it is no toy. There are very large pieces of infrastructure running FORTH, and you can do any ordinary tasks in it, though some things really benefit from cross compilers or other tricks.
If you ask me, MOST of what is wrong with the modern software engineering world is gross over-complexity. Even if people never use FORTH it is the thing that should be taught first, true elegance and minimalistic simplicity, which should be the religion of IT.
JSON isn't even close to being as expressive as XML, and has HUGE issues, like character encoding which actually make it almost worse than nothing. Its fine for some casual stuff, but it lacks any realistic way to validate or generate a schema. S-expressions suffer the same problems.
The problem here is the usual problem you have at/. which is that most of the people posting are casual and/or amateur system designers. When you get into the serious large-scale line-of-business infrastructure that is required for things like world-wide financial services, integrated medical records, supply chain integration, etc then you simply cannot afford to use messy ill-defined formats. XML is a HUGE boon to these systems because it can be validated and exactly defined even when very complex data is being transmitted. There's ZERO chance you're going to invent a syntax for transmitting the results of medical tests using some fixed format, XML is really your only choice, and with dozens of providers integrated into that kind of system you really need definitions that are both independent of the implementation and easily extensible.
Anyway, this is definitely OT, though I must say, the lack of real understanding of what XML is about and the surrounding issues is probably why we have the craptastic uselessnes of HTML5 instead of something XML compliant that would have helped enable better web UI development. The last line of the OP is telling, indeed where did XHTML go? We need it more than ever now.
Its 100x better for this than any of the languages you mention, higher performance, generally, and achieves VERY high rates of internal reusability to boot. I literaly wrote 4.5 million lines of fully debugged functioning FORTH code in 5 years. It certainly isn't a FASHIONABLE tool, but its frighteningly effective.
So, he's reinvented FORTH 50 years later and using 5000x more lines of code, and FORTH still does it better! ROFLMAO! Ah, Charlie Moore, I doubt you read/. but you will never be dethrowned as the author of the most elegant code ever. Thx!
I dunno about that. Have you ever encountered something truly CREEPY? I'm not a real high strung person, but I can tell you that for sure you it is pretty surprising how disturbed you can become in the right (wrong) circumstances. I'm skeptical we're any better at handling these things than reasonably educated and experienced people of the past. It may be true that more members of today's society are more used to being exposed to new things, but I think you'd find that most people are still kinda not that far from what they were like 100 years ago.
Yeah, Xenix was already IIRC also owned by SCO at that point (MS owned it for a bit before that). They were both (SCO and Xenix) expensive and not particularly fun OSes. BSD/386 and I guess it was FreeBSD were really your best x86 options at the time.
lol, I worked with Kernel 0.99a and the Walnut Creek collection you either ordered via postal mail, or you could get the 8 floppy disk image off some FIDONET BBSes (my friend ran one). You could do TCP/IP, including a number of things that would otherwise require expensive software to do. TWM was FAR ahead of anything you could get otherwise, which would have been at the time Windows for Warthogs. NetWare 3.0 was born right around the same time, soon after that Novell also acquired UnixWare.
We ran web servers, mail servers, workstations, etc on that vintage of software. Who had something comparable? The other options in 1993 were Windows for Workgroups 3.11, some version of NetWare, Mac System 7 (no multitasking at all), and AmigaDOS (much more capable but tied to aging hardware). Granted, there weren't a billion tons of software for it, but I could run X apps, run DOS apps, and had a pretty nice software tool chain.
You can say Linux was "in its infancy" but the competition wasn't that impressive and it was actually one of the better things going (though TBH BSD was mostly a better choice for production stuff at that point).
Yeah, I had a P60 machine for years that ran Smoothwall and acted as a firewall, router, hub, and file server, lol.
I don't recall them being uneconomical though. There were plenty of reasons to ditch the 486, it really was a much more limited chip in some ways. You really HAD to have a pentium to do a number of things, and Linux was quite happy with them.
The old AMD K5's were pretty good, but they invariably were paired with horrible pieces of shit Taiwanese Winbond chip sets and other such drek. I had ONE K5 motherboard that was fast as hell and worked great, but that was out of like 5 tries.
Well, the Universe is huge, so improbable events DO become probable, in some degree. It isn't a horrible theory, but the question is could it be ubiquitous? SOMEWHERE life has bridged from system to system I'd think, and everything else has happened, once. Of course one could argue that ANY life is one of those one-time things, etc. I think the chances that EARTH was seeded that way is what is remote, or any other specific planet.
Correction - your claim is only valid for stars and (probably) large bodies. We know almost nothing about how common smaller interstellar bodies might be, except for some pretty high upper bounds at which point the "murk" would begin obscuring stars to a noticeable extent. There's speculation that some of our long-period comets aren't native to this system, and I could swear there's been a few hyperbolic trajectory objects that have passed though the neighborhood. I want to say there's a moon somewhere that is a bit suspect as well, but I could be misremembering that.
There are no known objects larger than the size of a grain of dust which have been detected within the solar system coming from outside. In fact the only extrasolar material of any kind ever detected AFAIK were neutral atoms detected by IBEX and dust grains, several dozen of which were returned by Stardust for examination. I know of no suggestion that any 'hyperbolic' (non-periodic) comets are thought to be extra-solar, nor any known evidence to suggest any larger body in the solar system is such. Of course it is hard to definitively prove NO such material exists, but were there enough such material that it was likely that it would transfer life to Earth then surely there would be a category of say interstellar meteorites, yet no such are known to exist (and not for lack of looking).
Also I think your clock needs adjusting - *nothing* has been wandering for a hundred billion years, the universe is only about 15 billion years old, and the first third-generation stars ( considered a likely precursor for life) only formed about 9 billion years ago.
Yes, I am well aware of the age of the Universe. That's part of the point. Space is SO VAST that panspermia is simply infeasible if you do the math, it would take too long.
Give the a billion years or two to evolve protolife (stands to reason the first time would be hardest right?) and you're talking 7-8 bya Meanwhile life showed up on Earth about 3.5-4bya, let's call it a 4 billion year difference, possibly pushed to 6 billion if we speculate that life instead first developed around a particularly rich 2nd-gen star.
As for size - the milky way is only ~100,000 light years across. If a life-bearing rock traveled at 0.01% of lightspeed, just 30km/s (3x Earth escape velocity, or about twice Voyager's current speed) it could cross the entire galaxy in a billion years, it wouldn't have to travel nearly that fast or long to reach one of the few thousand closest stars.
The time factor is not related solely to velocity. Of course a rock tossed into space at say 30km/s can cross the distance to another system, but it has to exactly bullseye a target a couple 1000km across from a distance of 10s of trillions of km. The probability of that happening is so close to zero that the difference is almost immaterial. Thus your space rock will cross the distance to millions of star systems, indeed billions before it will ever come close enough to one to be caught and impact somewhere. Now multiply that by the tiny fraction that will hit a habitable planet. Yes, indeed time is a huge factor, time required for this to happen at all.
if a life-bearing planet gets smacked by something big, another planet perhaps, or a rogue passing through the system at high speed, it would send mountain-sized chunks of crust and water in all direction - those mountains are thick with life through-and-through, our own crust certainly is. Some mountains will collide with other planets, some will become asteroids, and some will get a gravitaitonal slingshot out of the system. Those mountains that make it free of the system are now carrying a payload of cryogenically preserved samples beneath kilometers of radiation-shielding rock and ice as they drift across the interstellar void.
How often does this happen? If the collision of stars is fantastically rare, then so surely
Sure, they survived for a few days or weeks of exposure. They might even survive for years. Perhaps 1000's, maybe even millions. The thing is this isn't enough. The Universe is unimaginably vast. If the target of a projectile carrying life were to be the volume of space occupied by another world capable of sustaining that life then assuredly the odds against any such thing happening are expressible only with very large numbers. Consider, in the 4 billion years that the Solar system has existed the Sun has never come close enough to another star or large body at all, otherwise our planet would not be here. The odds, even in billions of years, that any object will come near another solar system is thus unimaginably slim. A rock thus escaping from the Solar System with life within it and tranferring that life to another world would require that said rock beat odds of trillions or probably more like 100's of millions of trillions to one against, and its flight time would on average be extremely long, on the order of many billions of years.
Thus for panspermia to have likely actually happened we would have to imagine that vast numbers of these projectiles are sent out into interstellar space bearing life all the time. There is no evidence that this is the case. Certainly the Solar System contains substantial bits of material that have come from the Earth, but few, if any, have reached solar escape velocity. We have never yet either found a single bit of material which originated from another star system in our own system. Surely the percentage of life bearing rocks would have to be pretty small and thus even if by chance none are around us now we would have to see MANY non-life-bearing interstellar visitors if they exist in the required numbers for panspermia to exist.
Beyond that I just find it hard, having a fairly good knowlege of biochemistry, to believe that ANY form of life could endure in the high energy radiation environment of space without being able to perform any biological functions for billions of years. Even at around 2 K chemical reactions still happen now and then, QM alone means molecules will slowly change and break down, and if even a single gamma ray slams into our poor old microbe every 100k yrs its going to sustain a lot of damage in the 100 billion yrs it is likely to wander out there.
Which of course simply leads to the ultimate problem with panspermia, time. It simply will take VAST time for life to spread, so much that it is far less likely it arrived here from space than just arose on its own, even if it IS possible.
Who says all life on Earth is 'descended from one cell'? Would you recognize life that wasn't? How? People seem to have an incomplete understanding of microbiology. Say you have a liter of sea water. You can look in a microscope and see that there are little shapes in there, some of which you can classify in a general way as various families of bacteria. You can then take said water, strain out all this material, denature it, and sequence the resulting bits of DNA, which you can then match with existing DNA databases. This will tell you roughly what organisms that DNA came from. However, you will have a lot of 'unknown' DNA, and you can't really tell if some of those little blobs in your microscope might be something totally unknown to science. So, if an organism HAS NO DNA, you won't even know any better. Furthermore over 99% of all micro-organisms cannot be cultured at all by known methods. In other words we don't really have any tools to study them further. Again, they could be ANYTHING, we just assume they are related to what we know.
Now, clearly, if a lot of macroscopic life was running around using a completely different biology than us we'd probably notice at some point. OTOH there could be vast numbers of bacteria-like organisms in the ocean and soil, even in us, which we have no clue about. They could be entirely unrelated to us and use quite different biology, yet we we never suspect because our analytical tools are only able to pick out things that we mostly expect to find. Note how hard it has been to detect life on Mars too. We STILL don't know how to devise an experiment that will definitely find unknown biology even when it is not hiding here amongst us.
Beyond that as far as we know even the most early Earth conditions we have evidence of, those preserved in the cores of ancient zircons Pb/U dated to 4.4 gya show chemical evidence of forming in the presence of liquid water, and there is also indirect evidence of an atmosphere (which liquid water implies anyway). So we actually don't know of any such conditions as you describe. Beyond that the most widely accepted evidence of life dates to 3.5 gya, LONG after the formation of the Earth and the LHB. There is indirect evidence for life at 3.8 gya, but no rocks survive from before this point (the Issua Greenstone) intact, so it is highly unlike we will ever know for sure. If such rocks DO exist they are probably located far beneath the surface of the Earth and are very rare, etc. So we can only say for sure that sometime during an 800 million yr period in which there was probably liquid water and some sort of atmosphere life became present on Earth by some means.
And of course we haven't managed to produce life in a lab, nor are we likely ever to do that in a way analogous to how it happened on the early Earth. The earth is a vast experiment which ran for a very long period of time and somewhere in there we can be pretty confident a monumentally, unimaginably, vast number of different conditions existed at least once. I don't see any overwhelming need to invoke the entire universe in order to come up with an adequate amount of time and circumstance for life to arise. However even if we were to assume that panspermia is true the Earth can only have sampled some limited portion of said Universe, its material derives from only a small part. Thus we would have to assume life arose in just that small part, and we would again face the questions of why only once, and that surely it must have happened many times in other places, why do we only see one kind of life, etc. Really panspermia doesn't solve any of our problems at all. It COULD be the actual mechanism by which life came to Earth, we may never know, but if so we must still continue to ask all the same questions.
This was another book in the same vein (also a Life publication). It featured the same Zallinger pieces and probably some of the same text, but covered the entire history of the Earth from beginning to today (or at least 1960-ish when it was published). I remember the front piece to the first chapter which described the formation of the Earth. The mysterious solar nebular, with its newly formed Sun at the center, and a nascent Earth circling, casting its shadow across the dust beyond, a smaller Moon in tow (this was before the days of the catastrophic collision theory of the orgin of the Moon). A somewhat later image showed a vast and still geologically active Moon looming over the molten surface of an Earth barely formed.
And then there were the trilobites, the nautiloids, crinoids, agnath fish, and finally stem tetrapods, etc etc etc. I could go outside and pick up chunks of Ohio limestone, hailing from a Devonian-era intracontinental sea and practically nothing but intermingled brachiopods, crinoids, primitive corals, sponges, and the occasional trilobite (the largest specimine on record of which was found not 5 miles from my house).
How didn't I end up in your line of work? Beats me. I guess I also looked in the right end of a telescope, sat down in front of a computer, read Einstein, and did many other silly things;)
Should be easibly fixable, but there ARE other good keyboards. I've just never found one that I achieve the sheer velocity of typing on. I was just typing this slowly, it took 2 seconds, lol. Even the nice Northgate keyboards never quite had exactly the right nonlinear springiness as the buckling spring.
So true, 8" cast iron skillet belonged to my grandmother, it really shows no signs of wear that a good wire brushing of the outside surface won't fix. Probably good for a couple hundred years of use, easily. No stickier than your average 'no-stick' thing that even if you pay $100 bucks for it will last 2 years tops.
Interesting commentary. I was going to say, but I was in a hurry before, that I don't necessarily buy my own logic here. I mean it is TRUE, and things like the police couldn't function without some concept of "imminent threat" and legitimate force. Its easy for a drone program, etc to use that as a justification. OTOH we REALLY would obviously want to be asking if the drones have any business flying in the first place (another grey area, obviously there's SOME line here, but its not like it is drawn clearly in one place). I think the things that most bother me are the refusal to be transparent about how, when, where, and why these things would be used, and the willingness to entertain the notion that something like this could be used in cold blood after deliberation. Of course again the same arguments can be made for expediency and etc. They aren't vapid arguments and you don't have to be evil to make them. You just have to be the guy that will take the blame if some terrorist plot comes off some day, etc.
So, that means nobody, not even the police, can for instance shoot someone when they are putting other people in danger or in self-defense???
This is of course the rub. Just being a government official doesn't reduce your rights, and EVERY CITIZEN CAN ALREADY DO WHAT Rand Paul is TECHNICALLY arguing against. If I happen to have a drone and its armed and I see something happening I can shoot people with it. In the state I live in I can do that if I am reasonably sure that force is necessary to prevent loss of life, commission of crimes, etc.
Ahhhh, yeah, I wasn't sure how that worked. I've only made it to the 'life preserver' level of yacht ownership so far... Luckily we have something called the Coast Guard, just make sure they don't decide to sieze your property, lol.
Wow! This is what we needed. I'm so GLAD Congress has finally come to its senses and organized to protect the rights of a minority which has been so shortchanged and hard pressed. Next we really badly need a lobby for mega-yacht owners, they get such a raw deal.
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FORTH is VERY easily debugged. I wrote literally 4.5 million lines of fully debugged FORTH in 5 years of work, I had between 0 and 3 staff during that time. We found it was extremely easy to debug because it was VERY easy to decompose problems into groups of 5 or fewer instructions. FORTH also makes it very easy to eliminate common data structures and similar problematic elements.
FORTH is also generally quite high performance. Modern JSR-threaded or advanced token-threaded FORTHs typically have execution speeds on a par with machine optimized C. FORTH leaves your 'P language' interpreters in the dust, being trivially an order of magnitude faster than Python or Perl.
As for 'having a syntax' the beauty of FORTH is that the entire syntax takes one sentence to describe and about 10 lines of code to parse. An entire fully-functional FORTH environment with a macro assembler and cross-compiler will generally run you 10k lines of code. The HUGE benefit of this is, you can expect your programmers to have a 100% complete understanding of the tool they're using, down to every line of code in the compiler, interpreter, and editor.
The thing is, if you change your wish to 'FORTH code' its already there, and it is no toy. There are very large pieces of infrastructure running FORTH, and you can do any ordinary tasks in it, though some things really benefit from cross compilers or other tricks.
If you ask me, MOST of what is wrong with the modern software engineering world is gross over-complexity. Even if people never use FORTH it is the thing that should be taught first, true elegance and minimalistic simplicity, which should be the religion of IT.
JSON isn't even close to being as expressive as XML, and has HUGE issues, like character encoding which actually make it almost worse than nothing. Its fine for some casual stuff, but it lacks any realistic way to validate or generate a schema. S-expressions suffer the same problems.
The problem here is the usual problem you have at /. which is that most of the people posting are casual and/or amateur system designers. When you get into the serious large-scale line-of-business infrastructure that is required for things like world-wide financial services, integrated medical records, supply chain integration, etc then you simply cannot afford to use messy ill-defined formats. XML is a HUGE boon to these systems because it can be validated and exactly defined even when very complex data is being transmitted. There's ZERO chance you're going to invent a syntax for transmitting the results of medical tests using some fixed format, XML is really your only choice, and with dozens of providers integrated into that kind of system you really need definitions that are both independent of the implementation and easily extensible.
Anyway, this is definitely OT, though I must say, the lack of real understanding of what XML is about and the surrounding issues is probably why we have the craptastic uselessnes of HTML5 instead of something XML compliant that would have helped enable better web UI development. The last line of the OP is telling, indeed where did XHTML go? We need it more than ever now.
Yeah, in about 3000 lines of code too. hehe. Most awesome piece of software ever written if you ask me.
I never really 'got' colorFORTH. Good old FIGForth and its descends are still out there chugging away though.
Its 100x better for this than any of the languages you mention, higher performance, generally, and achieves VERY high rates of internal reusability to boot. I literaly wrote 4.5 million lines of fully debugged functioning FORTH code in 5 years. It certainly isn't a FASHIONABLE tool, but its frighteningly effective.
So, he's reinvented FORTH 50 years later and using 5000x more lines of code, and FORTH still does it better! ROFLMAO! Ah, Charlie Moore, I doubt you read /. but you will never be dethrowned as the author of the most elegant code ever. Thx!
Oh, well, then you know all about what lurks in R'lyeh...
I dunno about that. Have you ever encountered something truly CREEPY? I'm not a real high strung person, but I can tell you that for sure you it is pretty surprising how disturbed you can become in the right (wrong) circumstances. I'm skeptical we're any better at handling these things than reasonably educated and experienced people of the past. It may be true that more members of today's society are more used to being exposed to new things, but I think you'd find that most people are still kinda not that far from what they were like 100 years ago.
Yeah, Xenix was already IIRC also owned by SCO at that point (MS owned it for a bit before that). They were both (SCO and Xenix) expensive and not particularly fun OSes. BSD/386 and I guess it was FreeBSD were really your best x86 options at the time.
lol, I worked with Kernel 0.99a and the Walnut Creek collection you either ordered via postal mail, or you could get the 8 floppy disk image off some FIDONET BBSes (my friend ran one). You could do TCP/IP, including a number of things that would otherwise require expensive software to do. TWM was FAR ahead of anything you could get otherwise, which would have been at the time Windows for Warthogs. NetWare 3.0 was born right around the same time, soon after that Novell also acquired UnixWare.
We ran web servers, mail servers, workstations, etc on that vintage of software. Who had something comparable? The other options in 1993 were Windows for Workgroups 3.11, some version of NetWare, Mac System 7 (no multitasking at all), and AmigaDOS (much more capable but tied to aging hardware). Granted, there weren't a billion tons of software for it, but I could run X apps, run DOS apps, and had a pretty nice software tool chain.
You can say Linux was "in its infancy" but the competition wasn't that impressive and it was actually one of the better things going (though TBH BSD was mostly a better choice for production stuff at that point).
Mine worked GREAT in Linux. Windows definitely hated them. Then again I had little use for Windows...
Yeah, I had a P60 machine for years that ran Smoothwall and acted as a firewall, router, hub, and file server, lol.
I don't recall them being uneconomical though. There were plenty of reasons to ditch the 486, it really was a much more limited chip in some ways. You really HAD to have a pentium to do a number of things, and Linux was quite happy with them.
The old AMD K5's were pretty good, but they invariably were paired with horrible pieces of shit Taiwanese Winbond chip sets and other such drek. I had ONE K5 motherboard that was fast as hell and worked great, but that was out of like 5 tries.
Well, the Universe is huge, so improbable events DO become probable, in some degree. It isn't a horrible theory, but the question is could it be ubiquitous? SOMEWHERE life has bridged from system to system I'd think, and everything else has happened, once. Of course one could argue that ANY life is one of those one-time things, etc. I think the chances that EARTH was seeded that way is what is remote, or any other specific planet.
Correction - your claim is only valid for stars and (probably) large bodies. We know almost nothing about how common smaller interstellar bodies might be, except for some pretty high upper bounds at which point the "murk" would begin obscuring stars to a noticeable extent. There's speculation that some of our long-period comets aren't native to this system, and I could swear there's been a few hyperbolic trajectory objects that have passed though the neighborhood. I want to say there's a moon somewhere that is a bit suspect as well, but I could be misremembering that.
There are no known objects larger than the size of a grain of dust which have been detected within the solar system coming from outside. In fact the only extrasolar material of any kind ever detected AFAIK were neutral atoms detected by IBEX and dust grains, several dozen of which were returned by Stardust for examination. I know of no suggestion that any 'hyperbolic' (non-periodic) comets are thought to be extra-solar, nor any known evidence to suggest any larger body in the solar system is such. Of course it is hard to definitively prove NO such material exists, but were there enough such material that it was likely that it would transfer life to Earth then surely there would be a category of say interstellar meteorites, yet no such are known to exist (and not for lack of looking).
Also I think your clock needs adjusting - *nothing* has been wandering for a hundred billion years, the universe is only about 15 billion years old, and the first third-generation stars ( considered a likely precursor for life) only formed about 9 billion years ago.
Yes, I am well aware of the age of the Universe. That's part of the point. Space is SO VAST that panspermia is simply infeasible if you do the math, it would take too long.
Give the a billion years or two to evolve protolife (stands to reason the first time would be hardest right?) and you're talking 7-8 bya Meanwhile life showed up on Earth about 3.5-4bya, let's call it a 4 billion year difference, possibly pushed to 6 billion if we speculate that life instead first developed around a particularly rich 2nd-gen star.
As for size - the milky way is only ~100,000 light years across. If a life-bearing rock traveled at 0.01% of lightspeed, just 30km/s (3x Earth escape velocity, or about twice Voyager's current speed) it could cross the entire galaxy in a billion years, it wouldn't have to travel nearly that fast or long to reach one of the few thousand closest stars.
The time factor is not related solely to velocity. Of course a rock tossed into space at say 30km/s can cross the distance to another system, but it has to exactly bullseye a target a couple 1000km across from a distance of 10s of trillions of km. The probability of that happening is so close to zero that the difference is almost immaterial. Thus your space rock will cross the distance to millions of star systems, indeed billions before it will ever come close enough to one to be caught and impact somewhere. Now multiply that by the tiny fraction that will hit a habitable planet. Yes, indeed time is a huge factor, time required for this to happen at all.
if a life-bearing planet gets smacked by something big, another planet perhaps, or a rogue passing through the system at high speed, it would send mountain-sized chunks of crust and water in all direction - those mountains are thick with life through-and-through, our own crust certainly is. Some mountains will collide with other planets, some will become asteroids, and some will get a gravitaitonal slingshot out of the system. Those mountains that make it free of the system are now carrying a payload of cryogenically preserved samples beneath kilometers of radiation-shielding rock and ice as they drift across the interstellar void.
How often does this happen? If the collision of stars is fantastically rare, then so surely
Sure, they survived for a few days or weeks of exposure. They might even survive for years. Perhaps 1000's, maybe even millions. The thing is this isn't enough. The Universe is unimaginably vast. If the target of a projectile carrying life were to be the volume of space occupied by another world capable of sustaining that life then assuredly the odds against any such thing happening are expressible only with very large numbers. Consider, in the 4 billion years that the Solar system has existed the Sun has never come close enough to another star or large body at all, otherwise our planet would not be here. The odds, even in billions of years, that any object will come near another solar system is thus unimaginably slim. A rock thus escaping from the Solar System with life within it and tranferring that life to another world would require that said rock beat odds of trillions or probably more like 100's of millions of trillions to one against, and its flight time would on average be extremely long, on the order of many billions of years.
Thus for panspermia to have likely actually happened we would have to imagine that vast numbers of these projectiles are sent out into interstellar space bearing life all the time. There is no evidence that this is the case. Certainly the Solar System contains substantial bits of material that have come from the Earth, but few, if any, have reached solar escape velocity. We have never yet either found a single bit of material which originated from another star system in our own system. Surely the percentage of life bearing rocks would have to be pretty small and thus even if by chance none are around us now we would have to see MANY non-life-bearing interstellar visitors if they exist in the required numbers for panspermia to exist.
Beyond that I just find it hard, having a fairly good knowlege of biochemistry, to believe that ANY form of life could endure in the high energy radiation environment of space without being able to perform any biological functions for billions of years. Even at around 2 K chemical reactions still happen now and then, QM alone means molecules will slowly change and break down, and if even a single gamma ray slams into our poor old microbe every 100k yrs its going to sustain a lot of damage in the 100 billion yrs it is likely to wander out there.
Which of course simply leads to the ultimate problem with panspermia, time. It simply will take VAST time for life to spread, so much that it is far less likely it arrived here from space than just arose on its own, even if it IS possible.
Who says all life on Earth is 'descended from one cell'? Would you recognize life that wasn't? How? People seem to have an incomplete understanding of microbiology. Say you have a liter of sea water. You can look in a microscope and see that there are little shapes in there, some of which you can classify in a general way as various families of bacteria. You can then take said water, strain out all this material, denature it, and sequence the resulting bits of DNA, which you can then match with existing DNA databases. This will tell you roughly what organisms that DNA came from. However, you will have a lot of 'unknown' DNA, and you can't really tell if some of those little blobs in your microscope might be something totally unknown to science. So, if an organism HAS NO DNA, you won't even know any better. Furthermore over 99% of all micro-organisms cannot be cultured at all by known methods. In other words we don't really have any tools to study them further. Again, they could be ANYTHING, we just assume they are related to what we know.
Now, clearly, if a lot of macroscopic life was running around using a completely different biology than us we'd probably notice at some point. OTOH there could be vast numbers of bacteria-like organisms in the ocean and soil, even in us, which we have no clue about. They could be entirely unrelated to us and use quite different biology, yet we we never suspect because our analytical tools are only able to pick out things that we mostly expect to find. Note how hard it has been to detect life on Mars too. We STILL don't know how to devise an experiment that will definitely find unknown biology even when it is not hiding here amongst us.
Beyond that as far as we know even the most early Earth conditions we have evidence of, those preserved in the cores of ancient zircons Pb/U dated to 4.4 gya show chemical evidence of forming in the presence of liquid water, and there is also indirect evidence of an atmosphere (which liquid water implies anyway). So we actually don't know of any such conditions as you describe. Beyond that the most widely accepted evidence of life dates to 3.5 gya, LONG after the formation of the Earth and the LHB. There is indirect evidence for life at 3.8 gya, but no rocks survive from before this point (the Issua Greenstone) intact, so it is highly unlike we will ever know for sure. If such rocks DO exist they are probably located far beneath the surface of the Earth and are very rare, etc. So we can only say for sure that sometime during an 800 million yr period in which there was probably liquid water and some sort of atmosphere life became present on Earth by some means.
And of course we haven't managed to produce life in a lab, nor are we likely ever to do that in a way analogous to how it happened on the early Earth. The earth is a vast experiment which ran for a very long period of time and somewhere in there we can be pretty confident a monumentally, unimaginably, vast number of different conditions existed at least once. I don't see any overwhelming need to invoke the entire universe in order to come up with an adequate amount of time and circumstance for life to arise. However even if we were to assume that panspermia is true the Earth can only have sampled some limited portion of said Universe, its material derives from only a small part. Thus we would have to assume life arose in just that small part, and we would again face the questions of why only once, and that surely it must have happened many times in other places, why do we only see one kind of life, etc. Really panspermia doesn't solve any of our problems at all. It COULD be the actual mechanism by which life came to Earth, we may never know, but if so we must still continue to ask all the same questions.
This was another book in the same vein (also a Life publication). It featured the same Zallinger pieces and probably some of the same text, but covered the entire history of the Earth from beginning to today (or at least 1960-ish when it was published). I remember the front piece to the first chapter which described the formation of the Earth. The mysterious solar nebular, with its newly formed Sun at the center, and a nascent Earth circling, casting its shadow across the dust beyond, a smaller Moon in tow (this was before the days of the catastrophic collision theory of the orgin of the Moon). A somewhat later image showed a vast and still geologically active Moon looming over the molten surface of an Earth barely formed.
And then there were the trilobites, the nautiloids, crinoids, agnath fish, and finally stem tetrapods, etc etc etc. I could go outside and pick up chunks of Ohio limestone, hailing from a Devonian-era intracontinental sea and practically nothing but intermingled brachiopods, crinoids, primitive corals, sponges, and the occasional trilobite (the largest specimine on record of which was found not 5 miles from my house).
How didn't I end up in your line of work? Beats me. I guess I also looked in the right end of a telescope, sat down in front of a computer, read Einstein, and did many other silly things ;)
Should be easibly fixable, but there ARE other good keyboards. I've just never found one that I achieve the sheer velocity of typing on. I was just typing this slowly, it took 2 seconds, lol. Even the nice Northgate keyboards never quite had exactly the right nonlinear springiness as the buckling spring.
Yeah, I have one of those, cast iron with enamel, lol.
So true, 8" cast iron skillet belonged to my grandmother, it really shows no signs of wear that a good wire brushing of the outside surface won't fix. Probably good for a couple hundred years of use, easily. No stickier than your average 'no-stick' thing that even if you pay $100 bucks for it will last 2 years tops.
Older ain't better, but it ain't worse either.
Indeed, my current keyboard is dated from '85. They really do just never wear out, although skins on the esc and F12 keys seem to have gone AWOL...
Interesting commentary. I was going to say, but I was in a hurry before, that I don't necessarily buy my own logic here. I mean it is TRUE, and things like the police couldn't function without some concept of "imminent threat" and legitimate force. Its easy for a drone program, etc to use that as a justification. OTOH we REALLY would obviously want to be asking if the drones have any business flying in the first place (another grey area, obviously there's SOME line here, but its not like it is drawn clearly in one place). I think the things that most bother me are the refusal to be transparent about how, when, where, and why these things would be used, and the willingness to entertain the notion that something like this could be used in cold blood after deliberation. Of course again the same arguments can be made for expediency and etc. They aren't vapid arguments and you don't have to be evil to make them. You just have to be the guy that will take the blame if some terrorist plot comes off some day, etc.
So, that means nobody, not even the police, can for instance shoot someone when they are putting other people in danger or in self-defense???
This is of course the rub. Just being a government official doesn't reduce your rights, and EVERY CITIZEN CAN ALREADY DO WHAT Rand Paul is TECHNICALLY arguing against. If I happen to have a drone and its armed and I see something happening I can shoot people with it. In the state I live in I can do that if I am reasonably sure that force is necessary to prevent loss of life, commission of crimes, etc.
Ahhhh, yeah, I wasn't sure how that worked. I've only made it to the 'life preserver' level of yacht ownership so far... Luckily we have something called the Coast Guard, just make sure they don't decide to sieze your property, lol.
Wow! This is what we needed. I'm so GLAD Congress has finally come to its senses and organized to protect the rights of a minority which has been so shortchanged and hard pressed. Next we really badly need a lobby for mega-yacht owners, they get such a raw deal.