h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This was from henryk206:

"Here we go again ! does the above not just prove the point ! The original topic was “are we alone in the universe” and here is another argument starting over religion."

The thing is, to answer the question "are we alone in the universe" we have to look at how life started here, and surmise as to whether the events that led to its arising here are likely to have been repeated elsewhere.

The problem is, as Sorb has confirmed, we can, it seems, only hypothesise about how life started on this planet. (Sorb stated that we cannot form a theory about the origin of life here since we are unlikely to be able to reproduce life in any experiments, which I find surprising if life can form spontaneoulsy, by which I mean by chance, without any conscious direction from a creator: why should we not be able to replicate it if this was the case?) Anyway we don't exactly know how life came about here, and yet we're trying to debate whether it's likely to have happened elsewhere!

A debate like this naturally brings us straight to a debate about our own origins, at least until such time as we encounter life (or even death - fossils etc) from elsewhere. Then we'll know we're not alone in the universe.

I think SoRB's point was that even if we create life in a laboratory, it wouldn't show us that life on Earth started in the same way.

I've noticed this about the debate about whether life could have started by chance: Those who believe it couldn't are impressed by the sheer unlikelihood of it happening that way, like a lottery with unimagineable odds.

Those who believe it could are impressed by the vastness of the universe and the timescale, and argue that these are large enough to render the unimagineable odds less significant.

That seems to be about it.

"Sorb stated that we cannot form a theory about the origin of life here since we are unlikely to be able to reproduce life in any experiments"

I stated no such thing. Please don't misrepresent what I've said. Some people would call that "lying". This is a common tactic among the religious when faced with someone rational - they simply lie about what the rational person said. However, I'm wise to that one, so please, stop it.

"which I find surprising if life can form spontaneoulsy, by which I mean by chance"

Well, yes, if life did "form spontaneously", that would be surprising. However, life, as I have had to tediously repeat over and over again for the hard of thinking, DOES NOT FORM SPONTANEOUSLY BY CHANCE.

Life, as we call it, arises gradually, without the need for outside interference, by perfectly normal and understandable process of chemical interactions. Those individual chemical interactions are the result of well understood physical laws. The only involvement of chance is precisely when and how various chemicals combine. There is NO chance involved in the outcome of those reactions.

"without any conscious direction from a creator: why should we not be able to replicate it if this was the case?"

Let's state the question in a less biased way:

Why should we not be able, in a human-scale laboratory over a time span of hours or even months, be able to replicate a process which took place gradually over a period of thousands of years across an entire planet?

The answer should be obvious.

Since it's clear, however, that I cannot rely on the intelligence of some reading this, let me spell it out.

We COULD simply combine certain chemicals to create the building blocks of life. That experiment is over fifty years old. But to take those building blocks and turn them into organised, self-replicating molecules took, on an entire planet, thousands of years, probably tens or hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, before the necessary convergence of the right chemicals in the right environment, with the right energy input occurred. Without precise knowledge of the necessary conditions, we can't expect to replicate it on human scales of space and time. (Unless we're stupid...)

"Anyway we don't exactly know how life came about here"

... which is why we can't replicate it...

"and yet we're trying to debate whether it's likely to have happened elsewhere!"

Perfect demonstration of the religious mindset. You don't have a completely worked out, perfect answer to that question, so STOP THINKING. Don't even begin to think about related questions. Just read this old book, and do as you're told...

We can debate life elsewhere for one simple reason: EVERY advance in scientific knowledge since Copernicus has reinforced one pivotal piece of knowledge about our place in the universe - we're NOT special. We're not even unusual. Our galaxy cluster is of a common type. Our galaxy is of a common type. Our sun is of a very common type. There are other planets of the same type as ours in this very solar system. No feature of our world seems in any way unusual, except that, obviously, there's life here. That is the only thing that marks our world out, the single unusual thing about it.

There are two possibilities:

1. This is the only planet in the universe with life. Here, on a perfectly normal planet, one of probably trillions in this galaxy alone, something has happened which has never happened before, anywhere in the unimaginable boundlessness of the universe. How likely does this seem, objectively?

2. This is the only planet in the universe that we can SEE well enough to tell whether there is life on it or not. Because, in truth, despite having soft-landed five or six spacecraft on Mars, we still don't even know whether there is or ever was life there, on our second-nearest neighbour, because we've not really looked that closely. As for planets around other stars, it will be a LONG time before we can even begin to look at them properly. Life could be teeming out there, and we'd never know.

To any objective, unbiased mind, the latter possibility is the only one that makes any sense.

SoRB

"I think SoRB's point was that even if we create life in a laboratory, it wouldn't show us that life on Earth started in the same way."

True, but it would prove it were a possiblity.

Not v. well expressed. It would lend strength to the possibility.

"I've noticed this about the debate about whether life could have started by chance: Those who believe it couldn't are impressed by the sheer unlikelihood of it happening that way, like a lottery with unimagineable odds."

I've noticed this about humans in general - their understanding of odds, statistics, and large numbers in general is RUBBISH.

Couple that with a predetermined, brainwashed idea of how life started, and stir in a deep ignorance of how chemistry works, and you've got the perfect excuse for not understanding the arguments.

An oft-quoted analogy used by religious people to apparently try to debunk the idea of life arising from non-life is the one about the whirlwind whizzing through a junkyard and spontaneously assembling a jumbo jet.

The problem with that analogy, as any twelve year old with a chemistry set and two braincells could tell you, is that, unlike jumbo-jet parts, chemicals - the building blocks of life - really do spontaneously assemble themselves into larger more complex structures when you just stir them together randomly. And it's a good job they do, too - my job as a chemical engineer depends on it. Specifically, it depends on the tendency of tetrafluoroethylene (a small molecule) to spontaneously arrange itself into enormously long chains under the correct conditions. I literally would not have a job if that spontaneous increase in complexity didn't happen with industrially repeatable regularity.

"Those who believe it could are impressed by the vastness of the universe and the timescale, and argue that these are large enough to render the unimagineable odds less significant."

OK, first of all, we're not "impressed", necessarily. We just understand, intellectually, what those scales of space and time MEAN. I make the point that we understand it intellectually because it's impossible to intuit those things. You can't understand it on the level that you understand, say, the seasons, or the tides, or the phases of the moon - things that happen on a human scale. You HAVE to do the maths, do the SCIENCE, and use your brain. Unfortunately, that's really too much for some people. They want the world to be a simple, understandable place, with simple answers.

There's a wonderful phrase I used to have as a motto on my office wall: "Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers".

In general, it is reasonable to assume that if you have an answer to a complex problem about the universe, and it's nice and simple and easy to understand, then it's wrong. All the history of science points to this.

What's beautiful, and provocative about science, what keeps a lot of true scientists in it, is this: when you probe beneath the childish, simple answer, you discover mind-boggling complexity. But when you probe beneath THAT, often you find a deeper, more subtle layer of simplicity beneath. Pythagoras's theorem. The inverse square law. E=mc^2. And the frankly bizarre result that e^(pi*i)=1.

And it doesn't render the odds "less significant", it renders them completely insignificant, if you do the maths and make reasonable assumptions.

Just as a for instance - the odds against winning the lottery are well known to be very long, to the point that you really should buy your ticket on a Saturday, because if you buy it on a Monday you have a better chance of being dead by the time of the draw than you do of winning. Winning the lottery really is very, very, very unlikely indeed. But if I played the lottery every week since, say, the last dinosaur died, 65 million years ago, I could reasonably expect to have won it over 250 times by now.

Now consider that, while any given reaction moving non-living matter one step closer to repeatable, mutatable, sustainable self-replication (i.e. life) might be 1000 times less likely than a lottery win, those sorts of reactions are not happening once a week in one room in the UK - they're happening all the time, millions of times a second, all over the planet.

On one level, we should not be surprised life arose, we should be surprised that life arose only once. But with a little extra thought, it should be clear that life might very well have arisen more than once - it's just that all the other forms of life have gone, out competed by our ancestors.

For an interesting take on this possibility, see the short story "The Green Marauder" by Larry Niven, which may be found the the "Stories from the Draco Tavern" collection, among others.

SoRB

Before I reply to Sorb's latest installment I'm going to need a bit of time to digest what he's written. He's written so much and I'd hate to misrepresent what he's said!

I can make a few comments on some of the last converstaions but they wont be in any order.
Intelligence.
An intelligence test that has been devised is to show an animal its reflection. I did that with my and he looked behind the mirror for the other .
However, human, dolphins, apes and elephants are the only animals on the planet to realise it's a reflection and therefore pass the test.
In terms of language, dolphins do seam to have a langauge. Humans are trying to work out a way of communicating with them. In Anne McCaffery's Chronicals of Pern the dolphins were injected with Metasynth that increased their intelligence to that of humans and they could even pronounce human words (like Wonko The Sane tell us in "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish". In Seaquest DSV they had a translater to talk to Darwin the dolphin. The Star Trek star charts list humans and ceteceans as the dominante life forms for Earth.
One woman can talk to an ape and he can reply in sign language which sounds like science fiction but is fact.

Evolving
Also another thing I found interesting is the tarantulas can only see in black and white. This is becuase when they evolved, eyes had only developed far enough to see black and white (they hadn't developed colour yet). The point I'm making is the tarantula is such a perfect form that it hasn't re-evoloved.

Langauge
s played a vital role in humans developing langugae. We didn't domesticate s they domesticated themselves. It was a co-opertation between early humans and s. The s wanted the hand around the camp fires of early humans since they'd get any scraps the humans threw out. The humand were quite happy for the s to hang around since with superior hearing and smell they'd give an early warning of any intruders.
If you look the neanderthals, they had large ears and noses which humans don't. We don't becuase we lost them since the s did that job for us. With a small nose, we were able to move out mouths much more and develop language. Langauge is a super powerful thing to have. It means you can teach other to do things but telling them rather than showing. It was langauge that allowed us to out evolve the neanderthals.

On the last note, I think SoRB has run out of things to say. As a Chineese Provberb says, "Man who resorts to abuse, admits his argumants have run out".

Before I come to SoRB's more recent contributions, let's recap a couple of things.

I quoted "Nobel prize-winner Sir Francis Crick stated that it is inconceivable that life could have simply appeared on earth without someone introducing it."

Sorb replied:
Just because the guy who said it was clever once doesn't mean he's right. In fact, this is an ideal demonstration of Clarke's first law. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Sorb, you dismiss his guy’s assertion mainly because it doesn’t fit in with your belief.
Then you say:

"people do not believe that life can spontaneously create itself, because that word, "create", implies volition."

You quibble over the word “create” (I shall henceforth endeavour to use the word “form“ to avoid offence to SoRB), but the key point is that you do believe in the spontaneous generation of life.

Sorb then continued:
"The CORRECT question, which you do not ask because the answer is self evident and invalidates your chosen superstition, is this:

Do people really believe that life can arise from the operation of well understood chemistry obeying physical laws? "

You talk about “well understood chemistry obeying physical laws” as if the processes involved in the formation (formation, not creation, to avoid upsetting you) of life were well understood, although they are not.

Sorb again: "And obviously the answer is "yes",because we, and all life on earth, are self-replicating collections of perfectly ordinary chemical elements. "

I completely agree that we are self-replicating collections of perfectly ordinary chemical elements. We’re not talking about what we are, but about how we originated.

I stated, "We cannot be alone in the universe as there must be an intelligence behind the creation of life, hence there must be a creator."

Sorb erroneously stated: "This is answering a question with a worse question. Any "creator" you posit is AT LEAST as complex as we are, and has to have had an origin. All you've done there is move the question back a notch - you've not answered it. You may THINK you have. You, personally, may be perfectly satisfied with your non-answer and the primitive superstition that flows from it. Intelligent people, by contrast, require answers that go some way to answer the question, rather than begging another, more complex one."

Contrary to what you claim, the assertion that God created life on this planet, if correct, perfectly adequately answers the question as to how life originated HERE. If it’s moving the question back a notch, that’s irrelevant as far as the discussion about how life on EARTH originated is concerned. If God put life here, then he did. Addressing the question of where God himself came from is another, theological debate that can be left to one side for the purposes of THIS discussion.

Sorb also said:
"I agree, btw, that our particular sort of intelligence does seem to be something of a fluke, arising out of some pretty specific details of our environment."

He then goes on the surmise about dinosaurs flying to the moon

"It's salutary to think that dinosaurs "ruled the earth" for hundreds of millions of years but never evolved intelligence. Or did they? Serious question: assume for the moment that theropod dinosaurs developed human-style intelligence about seventy million years ago.
Assume further that they developed a technological civilisation similar to our own. How would we know? If humanity were to go extinct in the next ten thousand years, what artefacts of ours would still be detectable EVEN IN PRINCIPLE in seventy million years' time? What evidence would there be that we were ever here? (Answer in next paragraph) Personally, I'd be amazed but not entirely surprised if, in a decade or twenty when we start exploring the moon *properly* we find a lunar landing craft with a little flag and all that kind of thing and a plaque saying "Harry the Hadrosaur was 'ere" in dinoglyphics - because the environment of the moon would tend to preserve artefacts better than the earth, I think. Of course, they might have cleaned up all the evidence before they got in their transwarp spaceship and headed for the Delta Quadrant... "

...together with SoRB's brain

<<Langauge
s played a vital role in humans developing langugae. We didn't domesticate s they domesticated themselves. It was a co-opertation between early humans and s. The s wanted the hand around the camp fires of early humans since they'd get any scraps the humans threw out. The humand were quite happy for the s to hang around since with superior hearing and smell they'd give an early warning of any intruders.
If you look the neanderthals, they had large ears and noses which humans don't. We don't becuase we lost them since the s did that job for us. With a small nose, we were able to move out mouths much more and develop language. Langauge is a super powerful thing to have. It means you can teach other to do things but telling them rather than showing. It was langauge that allowed us to out evolve the neanderthals.>>


Pure conjecture and Western-centric. Most Asian cultures regard dogs as vermin and/or a food source.

"I think SoRB has run out of things to say"

That cracking sound you hear is hell freezing over...

"The Star Trek star charts list humans and ceteceans as the dominante life forms for Earth."

If you're going to use that sort of reference, here's an even cooler one for you - according to the official Technical Manual, the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC1701-D, from the Next Generation TV series, includes dolphins and killer whales for "navigational research".

SoRB

<>

So tarantulas don't need colour vision. Along with the vast majority of the animal kingdom. So what?

Langauge
s played a vital role in humans developing langugae. We didn't domesticate s they domesticated themselves. It was a co-opertation between early humans and s. The s wanted the hand around the camp fires of early humans since they'd get any scraps the humans threw out. The humand were quite happy for the s to hang around since with superior hearing and smell they'd give an early warning of any intruders.
If you look the neanderthals, they had large ears and noses which humans don't. We don't becuase we lost them since the s did that job for us. With a small nose, we were able to move out mouths much more and develop language. Langauge is a super powerful thing to have. It means you can teach other to do things but telling them rather than showing. It was langauge that allowed us to out evolve the neanderthals.>>

Erm, no. Dogs were domesticated tens of millenia after humans evolved (presumably with language) into homo sapiens. Neanderthals' large noses were *not* for smelling either. And nobody knows how big their ears were. Pretty useless paragraph all in, that one..

hi sarah... or robert... i looked at your profile and some other of your posts before i wrote this. i think i have some good advice for you

i have alot of trouble reading your posts. im interested in what you have to say... what anyone has to say in a debate... but i have alot of trouble figuring out what you have to say. your typing and language are difficult to follow and i have to stop and try and figure out what you are trying to say.

you seem to be very creative (your very clever and droll first two entries into your journal) and thats a very good thing! lotsa times creativity includes passion ...which may be part of the problem tho with your posts. ...that youre just answering without taking time to make sure its readable.

sooo... what i suggest is that you preview your stuff first before posting it... and repair any typos and spell check any dubious words.

and if its a language problem (like english is your second language) then maybe write your stuff into a translating engine... and then paste the result back in and translate back into your language to proofread it... then if its what you mean to say... put that in here and preview it for visual clarity... and THEN post it.

right now whats going on with your posts is akin to mumbling in the hearing world.... we want to assess what you have to say but its sooo hard because youre essentially mumbling and we cant understand.

Um dot dot dot

I'm still interested to read Sorb's explanation of this statement of his:

"However, life, as I have had to tediously repeat over and over again for the hard of thinking, DOES NOT FORM SPONTANEOUSLY BY CHANCE."

If it does not arise by chance, and if it is not spontaneous, what is he saying? It arose deliberately and in a planned way? Is Sorb a theist now? Bit of a dichotomy going on with Sorb here.

More gems from Sorb; here we have conjecture/ hypothesis presented as fact, yet again:

"Life, as we call it, arises gradually, without the need for outside interference, by perfectly normal and understandable process of chemical interactions."

Interesting use of the present tense "arises". Life certainly "arose" at some point somehow, but is there any evidence at all of it arising anywhere any more?

And - this is funny - in Sorb's mind "gradually" is the opposite of "by chance" or "spontaneous". You see, Sorb thinks life evolved without a creator, gradually, in a deliberate way (not by chance) and not spontaneously

And yet "spontaneous generation" is a synonym used to describe abiogenesis: the supposed spontaneous generation of living organisms(the Concise Oxford Dictionary 1998.

So you'd better write and tell the compilers of the OED that they're "hard of thinking", Sorb.

This is the link, were one can read the opinion of Hawkings.

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=61568575&blogID=96762216&MyToken=2617e901-0de6-40d0-a9bd-d4b70a7b62b3




Greetings from Amsterdam (the only Amsterdam in the whole universe)

I'm sorry about my inability to put the point across. You're not the first to mention it. In fact when I talk verbally I do tend to mumble. I seam to have a very different style for constucting sentances which is shown in the books I write but as become "my style". The spelling mistakes are simply becuase spelling is not my strong point or, my brain moving faster than my hand so the word I'm thinking of is about two words ahead of the one I'm writeing, plus I'm possibly partly dislexic which means I very often get numbers or letters in the wrong order.
English is my first and only language but I think like me there are quite a few English people who can barely speak English.
Just one thing about the start of your mail. You mentioned Sarah or Robert. I'm not either of those. I'm haven't quoted my name as Robert on my site but I've been called Robert many times through my life, as well as Merlin, Einstein, Frankenstein, David, Derek, Professor, Steptoe, Sarah, Rick, Pip, Pippa and a few meant more as insults which may be blocked if I mention them here.
I don't know if I can change my style when I'm writeing but I'll read through what I write as I'm about to do and hope you can understand me.
Thanks for letter me know.

Sorry about the last message. Clicked Post instead of Preview. I'll check next time.