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Thread: Bringing the alien life debate back to reality

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    I think his point was that "if making life was easy, we'd have done it by now"...and I agree. Despite all of our efforts and searching, life is only found on Earth and we can't create life, only modify it.
    I don't think making life from prebiotic chemicals is easy, and I doubt that those actively engaged in this area of research think its easy either.

    But I think there has been a widespread public perception that life in practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemicals, and we should just expect it to easily emerge.

    So a good conservative scientific practice is to question how realistic and valid that assumption really is.

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    Doc Dutch (03-21-2023)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    The stories I've read is that you can't think of it as a sphere with a two dimensional surface hanging in space like a balloon or globe.

    The sphere is the only analogy our simian brains can grasp without higher mathematics.

    Three dimensional positively curved space itself wraps around a fourth dimensional hyperspace we cannot percieve through sensory perception.
    Shades of Edwin Abbott's "FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions" and the difficulty of seeing dimensions higher than our own.

    https://steemitimages.com/DQmZEav7Ro...ipAPYtm/02.gif

    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    I don't think making life from prebiotic chemicals is easy, and I doubt that those actively engaged in this area of research think its easy either.

    But I think there has been a widespread public perception that life in practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemicals, and we should just expect it to easily emerge.

    So a good conservative scientific practice is to question how realistic and valid that assumption really is.
    Agreed and that's how I read his point: it's not inevitable and it's very rare.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    Agreed and that's how I read his point: it's not inevitable and it's very rare.
    If we find microbial life on Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, or on Mars it will go a long way towards supporting the hypothesis that life is practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemistry.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    If we find microbial life on Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, or on Mars it will go a long way towards supporting the hypothesis that life is practically inevitable in the presence of liquid water and chemistry.
    IF. So far it seems unlikely since, if it's inevitable, it'd have been created in a lab.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    IF. So far it seems unlikely since, if it's inevitable, it'd have been created in a lab.
    There are a lot if ifs and maybes in this debate.

    There were probably hundreds of thousands or millions of years of intermediate chemical and physical steps and processes that had to happen before the first microbial cell. Steps that we can only guess at or hypothesize.

    So I don't think the experimental science really expects to create a fully developed cell from prebiotic chemicals in our lifetime.

    I think the best to hope for is that the self organization of peptides and amino acids into a functional strand of RNA is the prize here. If that happens, it will suggest the RNA world hypothesis, or something like it, was the mechanism for abiogenesis.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    There are a lot if ifs and maybes in this debate.

    There were probably hundreds of thousands or millions of years of intermediate chemical and physical steps and processes that had to happen before the first microbial cell. Steps that we can only guess at or hypothesize.

    So I don't think the experimental science really expects to create a fully developed cell from prebiotic chemicals in our lifetime.

    I think the best to hope for is that the self organization of peptides and amino acids into a functional strand of RNA is the prize here. If that happens, it will suggest the RNA world hypothesis, or something like it, was the mechanism for abiogenesis.
    Agreed on ifs and maybes. All we have are results and the result is, after decades of searching, mankind has found no sign of life anywhere but on Earth. Also no luck trying to create something that is "inevitable".

    Not a biochemist, so I can't say how many cycles it would take, but the consensus seems to be consistently negative results.

    Agreed on cell, but isn't "life" a step or two down from that? The LUCA thing?

    While abiogenesis can't be ruled out, it's clearly a rare event.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    Agreed on ifs and maybes. All we have are results and the result is, after decades of searching, mankind has found no sign of life anywhere but on Earth. Also no luck trying to create something that is "inevitable".

    Not a biochemist, so I can't say how many cycles it would take, but the consensus seems to be consistently negative results.

    Agreed on cell, but isn't "life" a step or two down from that? The LUCA thing?

    While abiogenesis can't be ruled out, it's clearly a rare event.
    As far as I know, LUCA was a fully functioning, self replicating prokaryotic cell.

    But LUCA stood at the end of a series of unknown intermediate chemical and physical steps we can only guess at.

    If our abiogenesis experiments aren't successful, if we don't find microbial life on the moons of this solar system that have liquid water, if we don't detect biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and if we never detect an alien footprint in the radio wave portion of the EM spectrum, we would have to totally rethink our assumptions about how common life is.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    As far as I know, LUCA was a fully functioning, self replicating prokaryotic cell.

    But LUCA stood at the end of a series of unknown intermediate chemical and physical steps we can only guess at.

    If our abiogenesis experiments aren't successful, if we don't find microbial life on the moons of this solar system that have liquid water, if we don't detect biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and if we never detect an alien footprint in the radio wave portion of the EM spectrum, we would have to totally rethink our assumptions about how common life is.
    Who is making these assumptions about how common life is? Not me.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    Shades of Edwin Abbott's "FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions" and the difficulty of seeing dimensions higher than our own.

    https://steemitimages.com/DQmZEav7Ro...ipAPYtm/02.gif

    That book is supposed to be famous among geeks, mathmeticians, physicists!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    That book is supposed to be famous among geeks, mathmeticians, physicists!
    It's pretty satirical but I haven't read it in decades. I do remember the lesson of how a sphere or cone would appear to a 2D creature....which leads to a more philosophical discussion of entities on a higher dimensional plane. Note the limited view atheists have of an entity that exists outside of Space/Time.

    Example: https://www.doesgodexist.org/Pamphlets/Flatland.html
    Now the reason that I have told you this little story is to give you a foundation by which you can understand God. When you read, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), you are reading a description analogous to Flatland. The concept is that, a God, who is in a higher dimension than are we, a God who has the same kind of relationship to us which the sphere had to Flatland, that, this kind of being touched our little “Flatland,” so to speak, and in violation of all of our laws of science created matter out of nothing. God is so superior to us, he exists in such a higher dimension than do we that what is natural and ordinary to him is miraculous to us. The Bible recognizes this concept and uses it in every single description of God.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Doc Dutch View Post
    Who is making these assumptions about how common life is? Not me.
    No, not you.
    There is a widespread public perception that the galaxy is pregnant with life. I blame Star Trek!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    No, not you.
    There is a widespread public perception that the galaxy is pregnant with life. I blame Star Trek!
    Which is odd since most Americans are Christians.
    God bless America and those who defend our Constitution.

    "Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    That book is supposed to be famous among geeks, mathmeticians, physicists!
    It is. Even physicists...like geophysicists.

    Also valuable in mineralogy as well (for those who took mineralogy and had to do crystallographic projections....)

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    The Earth had has four billion years for silicon based life or other exotic forms of life to emerge. But we've never seen anything other than the one lineage of carbon based life all descended with modification from the same microbe which existed 3.8 billion years ago.
    an intelligent creature on a methane based planet a million light years from here would probably consider that irrelevant.......
    Isaiah 6:5
    “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

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