That describes parts of the Hadean Epoch, and in particular the early parts, but there is some evidence that even during the Hadean Epoch there was liquid water, possibly even oceans. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it states that even though surface temperatures were much higher, the much higher atmospheric pressure meant that liquid water could exist. Considering some evidence that the earliest organisms were autotrophic and lived in an environment very much like existing deep sea vents, one can surmise that while this environment would be pretty damned hostile, it would still have had the critical ingredients; water, complex organic chemistry and an abundance of energy.
I guess some of it depends on how much imagination you want to apply to the potential kinds of life. If we imagine that life has a few key requirements; namely some sort of universal solvent, plentiful energy, and chemistry capable of creating fairly sophisticated molecules and chains of molecules, then I think we're probably looking at the classic "organic soup" of water, complex organic compounds, or the capacity to produce them, and ready sources of energy. If that's the case, then I imagine that while the specific nature of the molecular biology; system of heredity and transcription, energy product and storage, and the other aspects of reproduction and the cellular chemical engine, will still be analogous to life on Earth. I've read that while silicon-based life might be possible, carbon remains the champion for the sheer complexity of the bonds it can produce.
If we broaden beyond that, then who knows? I remember reading 2010 and Arthur C. Clarke hypothesizing about giant organisms in the Jovian atmosphere, and thinking "Who knows, maybe?" But obviously that kind of life would be radically different in chemistry and structure from an kind of organic-based life we know.
I can just see it now. "Satan, we've got to do something about those fucking engineers! There's a fucking Starbucks beside the River Styx. And don't get me started on Steve Jobs' latest project."
These people aren't all that uncommon. Michael Behe is pretty notorious, and he's a microbiologist. Of course, nailing down what exactly Behe believes is tough. His popular writings amount to "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution", and certainly he has never actually published anything in peer reviewed journals promoting Intelligent Design. So some categorize him as a theistic evolutionist. But then he'll apparently go to Evangelical churches and talk like he's an out and out Creationist, so it's possible that we're just dealing with the Frank Spencer phenomenon; where an expert "loans out" his credentials for money.
I remember reading an observation by a chemist or molecular biologist years ago that abiogenesis events might go on all the time, but the problem for any new protolife is that if it appears in an already active biosphere where a fair portion of the existing organisms are very very good at gobbling stray bits of organic material, it's not going to last long at all.
I'm not a huge fan of panspermia in general, as it seems to add an additional step to a problem, but really just pushes the question back. I can concede that it is possible that Mars, which may have been more conducive to life earlier, may have been the source of life on Earth, but until we find some evidence that life actually existed on Mars at some point, and further can show enough molecular commonality with life on Earth, I think Occam's razor suggests we have to stick for the moment with life being indigenous to Earth. That being said, even if we found life on Mars that appeared to be part of the same twin-nested hierarchy as life on Earth (in other words, we're all on the same family tree), that still wouldn't really answer the question, since it's easily conceivable that the transit could have been the other way; Earth to Mars.
What we do know right now is that some of the most ancient genes suggest these early organisms at the root of the tree of life were autotrophic and probably hung around deep sea vents in waters rich in iron and sulfates (this is the idea behind the iron-sulfur world hypothesis). While this doesn't necessarily discount Mars either, as Mars in this early era had oceans and was very likely geologically active, it still suggests to my mind that Earth is still a pretty clear contender for the source of the life we see today.
A lot will depend on whether we can find other life in the solar system. If we go to Mars or Europa and end up finding organisms that have a clear molecular relationship to life on Earth, it certainly proves the limited form of panspermia happened, whereas if it turns out there is no evident genetic relationship, then that ought to tell us life is pretty damned common in the universe, and even in conditions like the Hadean Epoch, when Earth was quite literally at points a hell, life can not only evolve but possibly even flourish.
The reality here is that if there was to be a lawsuit, it would be because Twitter didn't take stronger action sooner. It's pretty strongly suggested that Disney abandoned buying Twitter, which would have made a lot of shareholders a lot of money, precisely because Twitter didn't go after trolls more strongly. In fact, so far as I can tell, a lot of the reason that Twitter is now instituting much stronger measures is to make sure the next buyout isn't scuttled.
Well, go start your own web forum. If you don't like what Twitter does, there's a whole world out there. Go to it. But I guarantee you, if you simply allow the cranks to control your medium, it will fester into nothingness.
It's their platform. They can do as they please. Don't like it, find somewhere else to post.
It's fair game to criticize Twitter, if you feel they've done wrong, but I find the idea that you want some sort of mandatory regulation more than a little absurd.
I think that greatly depends on the kind of Libertarian. I have most certainly seen some Libertarians argue against regulation, claiming it "distorts the market". I guess it depends on how far you think regulation should go. I, for one, don't believe tainted or dangerously toxic products should be sold at all, and support any government regime that prevents their sale, but some believe that personal choice should override that. So there are a lot of shades of gray even in Libertarianism.
Deterrence is very much part of any justice system, and always has been. When a court is confronted with antisocial behavior that is clearly becoming more common, he will often use his sentence to send a message to other potential offenders. The judicial system is not a binary yes/no machine.
that would be an interesting twist: lots of new beachfront property.
As opposed to what is going to happen, which is lots of old properties become beachfront:)
Well, maybe you're right, but even if this was something of a 1970s meme, the fact was that it was at best a view held by all a minority of researchers, and even those researchers weren't proposing that Ice Age was going to happen any time soon, save perhaps in geological time.
It sounds more like anecdotal claims of dubious merit to me. I've suspected for several years now that posters who proclaim that they were told this by college profs were either exaggerating or simply making it up, basing it on something they read elsewhere on the Internet. As it is, even the article I mention suggests that, at the time, there were some legitimate fears that sulfur dioxide aerosols from industrial pollution could lead to cooling, but that that view was only held by a minority of climatologists, and never really seems to have been viewed by the wider scientific community as a significant issue. Fifty years ago, the research was much as it is today, that human CO2 emissions will trap more energy in the lower atmosphere and lead to surface warming. In reality, AGW is about as controversial in the scientific community as biological evolution or Big Bang cosmology.
I can only speak to the work I've done in a fairly small project that merged multiple sources and creating a set of file formats and protocols to communicate changes. It certainly wasn't trivial even in my case, and working with vendors to create interfaces in their own applications to work with these protocols could be a challenge. I suppose in many instances with aging infrastructure, you may also be dealing with fairly old systems where finding expertise to actual build interfaces could be a problem. But the theory I was operating under is that you create a common environment that discrete systems can push to and pull from was still a lot cheaper and manageable than telling everyone involved "We're moving you over to a new system".
It seems rather odd to me, as a person who comes from a networking background, that there would be this obsession over running the identical application, or running a centralized application, in all agencies or departments, is necessary or even desirable. The world I started out my professional life in was dominated by networking protocols, whether we're talking low-level data exchange protocols like TCP/IP or NETBIOS or higher level protocols like SMTP. One never really expected that all front end applications would function the same, or possibly even do precisely the same things, but you built message-exchanging protocols, databases and file formats that captured the data and activities that could at a minimum be expected by all the front-facing high level applications, and then the only problem you might have to deal with is where one particular application didn't support all the necessary features.
This monolithic system approach just seems so very 1950s-1960s to me, and suffers the same kinds of problems that older approach often had, with too many critical failure points that would simply bring an entire system down, where having a distributed system with multiple independent or semi-independent nodes meant that failures were at least limited, and the wider system could still function. It strikes me that the current drive in many governments towards monolithic centralized CRM-style applications is the product of both heavy sales pressure from big guys like HP and Oracle, and a lack of perspective and experience by organizational IT decision-makers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's enough of the ancient crust to demonstrate that there were no large complex lifeforms before 600 million to a billion years ago.
That describes parts of the Hadean Epoch, and in particular the early parts, but there is some evidence that even during the Hadean Epoch there was liquid water, possibly even oceans. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it states that even though surface temperatures were much higher, the much higher atmospheric pressure meant that liquid water could exist. Considering some evidence that the earliest organisms were autotrophic and lived in an environment very much like existing deep sea vents, one can surmise that while this environment would be pretty damned hostile, it would still have had the critical ingredients; water, complex organic chemistry and an abundance of energy.
I guess some of it depends on how much imagination you want to apply to the potential kinds of life. If we imagine that life has a few key requirements; namely some sort of universal solvent, plentiful energy, and chemistry capable of creating fairly sophisticated molecules and chains of molecules, then I think we're probably looking at the classic "organic soup" of water, complex organic compounds, or the capacity to produce them, and ready sources of energy. If that's the case, then I imagine that while the specific nature of the molecular biology; system of heredity and transcription, energy product and storage, and the other aspects of reproduction and the cellular chemical engine, will still be analogous to life on Earth. I've read that while silicon-based life might be possible, carbon remains the champion for the sheer complexity of the bonds it can produce.
If we broaden beyond that, then who knows? I remember reading 2010 and Arthur C. Clarke hypothesizing about giant organisms in the Jovian atmosphere, and thinking "Who knows, maybe?" But obviously that kind of life would be radically different in chemistry and structure from an kind of organic-based life we know.
I can just see it now. "Satan, we've got to do something about those fucking engineers! There's a fucking Starbucks beside the River Styx. And don't get me started on Steve Jobs' latest project."
These people aren't all that uncommon. Michael Behe is pretty notorious, and he's a microbiologist. Of course, nailing down what exactly Behe believes is tough. His popular writings amount to "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution", and certainly he has never actually published anything in peer reviewed journals promoting Intelligent Design. So some categorize him as a theistic evolutionist. But then he'll apparently go to Evangelical churches and talk like he's an out and out Creationist, so it's possible that we're just dealing with the Frank Spencer phenomenon; where an expert "loans out" his credentials for money.
I remember reading an observation by a chemist or molecular biologist years ago that abiogenesis events might go on all the time, but the problem for any new protolife is that if it appears in an already active biosphere where a fair portion of the existing organisms are very very good at gobbling stray bits of organic material, it's not going to last long at all.
I'm not a huge fan of panspermia in general, as it seems to add an additional step to a problem, but really just pushes the question back. I can concede that it is possible that Mars, which may have been more conducive to life earlier, may have been the source of life on Earth, but until we find some evidence that life actually existed on Mars at some point, and further can show enough molecular commonality with life on Earth, I think Occam's razor suggests we have to stick for the moment with life being indigenous to Earth. That being said, even if we found life on Mars that appeared to be part of the same twin-nested hierarchy as life on Earth (in other words, we're all on the same family tree), that still wouldn't really answer the question, since it's easily conceivable that the transit could have been the other way; Earth to Mars.
What we do know right now is that some of the most ancient genes suggest these early organisms at the root of the tree of life were autotrophic and probably hung around deep sea vents in waters rich in iron and sulfates (this is the idea behind the iron-sulfur world hypothesis). While this doesn't necessarily discount Mars either, as Mars in this early era had oceans and was very likely geologically active, it still suggests to my mind that Earth is still a pretty clear contender for the source of the life we see today.
A lot will depend on whether we can find other life in the solar system. If we go to Mars or Europa and end up finding organisms that have a clear molecular relationship to life on Earth, it certainly proves the limited form of panspermia happened, whereas if it turns out there is no evident genetic relationship, then that ought to tell us life is pretty damned common in the universe, and even in conditions like the Hadean Epoch, when Earth was quite literally at points a hell, life can not only evolve but possibly even flourish.
Nonsense. They have tasers. They could keep themselves amused all night.
You, on the other hand, might enjoy it less.
So yet another country with better Internet than North America.
The reality here is that if there was to be a lawsuit, it would be because Twitter didn't take stronger action sooner. It's pretty strongly suggested that Disney abandoned buying Twitter, which would have made a lot of shareholders a lot of money, precisely because Twitter didn't go after trolls more strongly. In fact, so far as I can tell, a lot of the reason that Twitter is now instituting much stronger measures is to make sure the next buyout isn't scuttled.
Yeah, because booting off the Nazis will totally kill a website.
Well, go start your own web forum. If you don't like what Twitter does, there's a whole world out there. Go to it. But I guarantee you, if you simply allow the cranks to control your medium, it will fester into nothingness.
It's their platform. They can do as they please. Don't like it, find somewhere else to post.
It's fair game to criticize Twitter, if you feel they've done wrong, but I find the idea that you want some sort of mandatory regulation more than a little absurd.
I think that greatly depends on the kind of Libertarian. I have most certainly seen some Libertarians argue against regulation, claiming it "distorts the market". I guess it depends on how far you think regulation should go. I, for one, don't believe tainted or dangerously toxic products should be sold at all, and support any government regime that prevents their sale, but some believe that personal choice should override that. So there are a lot of shades of gray even in Libertarianism.
Well, I'm personally relieved. I wouldn't want anything that was made with some percentage of unreal chicken.
And you can provide a list of said textbooks, right?
There's still money in the bank, and Chen and his management team need to string things out until they've managed to empty it.
Net neutrality is a dead man walking. I'm sure it will be repealed in very short order.
Deterrence is very much part of any justice system, and always has been. When a court is confronted with antisocial behavior that is clearly becoming more common, he will often use his sentence to send a message to other potential offenders. The judicial system is not a binary yes/no machine.
Wake me up when you find the supreme court rulings banning deterrence as part of a sentence.
Justice is also about sending a message
I have pants with big pockets, you insensitive clod!
As opposed to what is going to happen, which is lots of old properties become beachfront :)
Well, maybe you're right, but even if this was something of a 1970s meme, the fact was that it was at best a view held by all a minority of researchers, and even those researchers weren't proposing that Ice Age was going to happen any time soon, save perhaps in geological time.
It sounds more like anecdotal claims of dubious merit to me. I've suspected for several years now that posters who proclaim that they were told this by college profs were either exaggerating or simply making it up, basing it on something they read elsewhere on the Internet. As it is, even the article I mention suggests that, at the time, there were some legitimate fears that sulfur dioxide aerosols from industrial pollution could lead to cooling, but that that view was only held by a minority of climatologists, and never really seems to have been viewed by the wider scientific community as a significant issue. Fifty years ago, the research was much as it is today, that human CO2 emissions will trap more energy in the lower atmosphere and lead to surface warming. In reality, AGW is about as controversial in the scientific community as biological evolution or Big Bang cosmology.
I can only speak to the work I've done in a fairly small project that merged multiple sources and creating a set of file formats and protocols to communicate changes. It certainly wasn't trivial even in my case, and working with vendors to create interfaces in their own applications to work with these protocols could be a challenge. I suppose in many instances with aging infrastructure, you may also be dealing with fairly old systems where finding expertise to actual build interfaces could be a problem. But the theory I was operating under is that you create a common environment that discrete systems can push to and pull from was still a lot cheaper and manageable than telling everyone involved "We're moving you over to a new system".
It seems rather odd to me, as a person who comes from a networking background, that there would be this obsession over running the identical application, or running a centralized application, in all agencies or departments, is necessary or even desirable. The world I started out my professional life in was dominated by networking protocols, whether we're talking low-level data exchange protocols like TCP/IP or NETBIOS or higher level protocols like SMTP. One never really expected that all front end applications would function the same, or possibly even do precisely the same things, but you built message-exchanging protocols, databases and file formats that captured the data and activities that could at a minimum be expected by all the front-facing high level applications, and then the only problem you might have to deal with is where one particular application didn't support all the necessary features.
This monolithic system approach just seems so very 1950s-1960s to me, and suffers the same kinds of problems that older approach often had, with too many critical failure points that would simply bring an entire system down, where having a distributed system with multiple independent or semi-independent nodes meant that failures were at least limited, and the wider system could still function. It strikes me that the current drive in many governments towards monolithic centralized CRM-style applications is the product of both heavy sales pressure from big guys like HP and Oracle, and a lack of perspective and experience by organizational IT decision-makers.