Three, what's stopping it from evolving beyond the microbial stage? It opens the floodgates on "what is possible" in this universe.
Well, this is tough to answer, largely because we don't really have an understanding of how life here on earth went from single-cellular to multi-cellular. In fact, the only thing that we can say for sure about this is that it took a really long time (read: 100's of millions of years).
Now, although this is pure speculation on my part, I would suspect that in the universe as a whole, life is probably fairly common. The steps of creating simple, self-replicating molecules are actually pretty straitforward (and the early stages of organic compounds are easy to make with a bit of methane), so finding populations of these kinds of biomolecules (and even cells) wouldn't be very suprising.
What I would expect to be much more rare would be intelligent life. Look at earth. Hundreds of million years to make multi-cellular life, followed by hundreds of millions of years to make humans. To my mind, that says that it is difficult for all of these steps to happen, and that conditions probably need to be just right.
Then again, if it is simply a matter of getting the ball rolling and then looking for a series of low-probability events, the law of large numbers tells us that given enough time, it will happen.
Who knows? It's too bad that we will likely never really have any solid idea (at least in our lifetimes), given how just plain BIG space is and how little of it we have the ability to visit.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the good old fashioned paper-based storage. Once upon a time, I carried a Palm. Then, I dropped it. Since then, I switched to carrying a small notebook and pen. It has great note taking ability, instant handwriting recognition, and I can use it to transfer messages to other people easily (ie, rip out a page). The demonstration that I often do for people is drop it on the ground, then stomp on it. Nobody has done the same for their PDA.
In terms of distaster data, on trick I used when travelling was to write all my key information (eg, passport, credit card #'s, etc.) on a sheet of paper tucked away. Then, I added some number to all of these values to simply encrypt them (something like your parent's phone number works well - easy to remember and not something likely to be guessed by a pickpocket). Laminate this card, then bring on the end of the world. The result is compact, portable, and secure to all but the most dedicated.
Well, I guess this is where I have to get all philosophical on you.
In the first option, the world is the product of a series of random events that are driven by a set of selectors. As such, there is no inherent meaning of life. Everything is strongly dependent on the series of random events that led up to it and does not imply any inherent reason for our existence. This view is fine by me (and matches very well with Buddhist thinking), but we can see very quickly how this would lead to rampant existential angst.
In the second option, the series of events are guided by some kind of benevolent diety that is sculpting life and has some kind of plan. In this view, there is no more practical insight into the world, but there is a certain amount of comfort from knowing that there is a point to life. What that point is, specifically, gets determined by the rest of the dogma for a particular religion.
Still don't buy it? Fine. Me neither. But some do. There's no evidence, but that's why its called faith.
But I digress. My main point here is that it is possible to have both a solid, concrete understanding of the science behind evolution, yet maintain faith in the teachings of their religion. As a proponent of evoluation, you never make progress towards convincing the religious until you can make it less threatening to them.
I close friend of mine is a devout Catholic (I am an atheist who works in biotech), and he and I have spent a number of evenings talking about the whole evolution/creationism debate. In the end, we tend to agree.
At its very heart, evolution is a random process. Yes, evolution is guided by natural selection, but fundamentally the origin of genetic variation depends on random events, specifically random mutation events. DNA is a molecule and heredity is based upon how a single molecule of DNA behaves, and quite frankly you cannot predict the behavior of any single molecule. You can predict the behavior of populations, but any single molecule behaves randomly. (And yes, I know what I'm talking about, because I work with a technology that uses single DNA molecules.)
The upshot is that all science has to offer on the source of the mutations is that they are random and if they provide benefit for the organism, they will be selected for. Okay great, so here is where faith kicks in. You can either take the atheist/agnostic point of view and claim that these truly are random events, or you can take the faith-based view and see these events as the mechanism by which God has created the world.
If only the hard-core evolution advocates would allow for this role for God and if only the hard-core tub-thumping bible-bangers could accept the bible as metaphor, we might actually get somewhere.
(I hope this is clear - I'm at work and don't have time to fully polish this message)
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I'm confused - I thought it was the US that had the obesity problem.
Is it just me, or did anybody else read that headline to say that Google is mapping people who have just graduated?
Well, this is tough to answer, largely because we don't really have an understanding of how life here on earth went from single-cellular to multi-cellular. In fact, the only thing that we can say for sure about this is that it took a really long time (read: 100's of millions of years).
Now, although this is pure speculation on my part, I would suspect that in the universe as a whole, life is probably fairly common. The steps of creating simple, self-replicating molecules are actually pretty straitforward (and the early stages of organic compounds are easy to make with a bit of methane), so finding populations of these kinds of biomolecules (and even cells) wouldn't be very suprising.
What I would expect to be much more rare would be intelligent life. Look at earth. Hundreds of million years to make multi-cellular life, followed by hundreds of millions of years to make humans. To my mind, that says that it is difficult for all of these steps to happen, and that conditions probably need to be just right.
Then again, if it is simply a matter of getting the ball rolling and then looking for a series of low-probability events, the law of large numbers tells us that given enough time, it will happen.
Who knows? It's too bad that we will likely never really have any solid idea (at least in our lifetimes), given how just plain BIG space is and how little of it we have the ability to visit.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the good old fashioned paper-based storage. Once upon a time, I carried a Palm. Then, I dropped it. Since then, I switched to carrying a small notebook and pen. It has great note taking ability, instant handwriting recognition, and I can use it to transfer messages to other people easily (ie, rip out a page). The demonstration that I often do for people is drop it on the ground, then stomp on it. Nobody has done the same for their PDA.
In terms of distaster data, on trick I used when travelling was to write all my key information (eg, passport, credit card #'s, etc.) on a sheet of paper tucked away. Then, I added some number to all of these values to simply encrypt them (something like your parent's phone number works well - easy to remember and not something likely to be guessed by a pickpocket). Laminate this card, then bring on the end of the world. The result is compact, portable, and secure to all but the most dedicated.
In the first option, the world is the product of a series of random events that are driven by a set of selectors. As such, there is no inherent meaning of life. Everything is strongly dependent on the series of random events that led up to it and does not imply any inherent reason for our existence. This view is fine by me (and matches very well with Buddhist thinking), but we can see very quickly how this would lead to rampant existential angst.
In the second option, the series of events are guided by some kind of benevolent diety that is sculpting life and has some kind of plan. In this view, there is no more practical insight into the world, but there is a certain amount of comfort from knowing that there is a point to life. What that point is, specifically, gets determined by the rest of the dogma for a particular religion.
Still don't buy it? Fine. Me neither. But some do. There's no evidence, but that's why its called faith.
But I digress. My main point here is that it is possible to have both a solid, concrete understanding of the science behind evolution, yet maintain faith in the teachings of their religion. As a proponent of evoluation, you never make progress towards convincing the religious until you can make it less threatening to them.
I close friend of mine is a devout Catholic (I am an atheist who works in biotech), and he and I have spent a number of evenings talking about the whole evolution/creationism debate. In the end, we tend to agree.
At its very heart, evolution is a random process. Yes, evolution is guided by natural selection, but fundamentally the origin of genetic variation depends on random events, specifically random mutation events. DNA is a molecule and heredity is based upon how a single molecule of DNA behaves, and quite frankly you cannot predict the behavior of any single molecule. You can predict the behavior of populations, but any single molecule behaves randomly. (And yes, I know what I'm talking about, because I work with a technology that uses single DNA molecules.)
The upshot is that all science has to offer on the source of the mutations is that they are random and if they provide benefit for the organism, they will be selected for. Okay great, so here is where faith kicks in. You can either take the atheist/agnostic point of view and claim that these truly are random events, or you can take the faith-based view and see these events as the mechanism by which God has created the world.
If only the hard-core evolution advocates would allow for this role for God and if only the hard-core tub-thumping bible-bangers could accept the bible as metaphor, we might actually get somewhere.
(I hope this is clear - I'm at work and don't have time to fully polish this message)