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Toasticle posted:Not to be sci-fi nerd but carbon based life is only what we know because it's what's here so it's all we know the details of. "Life" could be energy based. No clue how it could form but to think in a universe this size that life will be based on what's here is a bit egotistic, or that our definition of life is the only one. Even intelligence, we can barely agree on what sentience is, who knows what else is out there It is extremely likely that any other life is going to be very similar to the life we see on Earth. Everything in the entire universe is made up of the same building blocks and exposed to similar pressures (heat, pressure, etc). If I had to guess, I would say that the basic forms of life (like bacteria, etc) are going to be extremely similar regardless of where it forms, with a higher degree of variation being possible as multi-cellular beings evolve in their respective environments. So it's entirely possible that you might end up with some organism that is as smart or smarter than humans and lives underwater, but very unlikely that there's some floating ball of energy organism. Regarding the "chimps are 99% the same" thing, it's important to keep in mind that all organisms share a large portion of their genetic code (because of the way evolution works), particularly if you're just looking at mammals or something. The protein-coding regions of the mouse genome are ~85% similar to a human (which is why we can sometimes effectively use mice as an experimental model for human disease). Human intelligence is likely more a matter of intelligence over a certain threshold being capable of things like complex communication and reasoning. The gap between a chimp's intelligence and a mouse's is larger than the gap between a human's and a chimp's, even though humans have had such a great impact on the planet. If we ever encountered a significantly more intelligent organism, it would probably be possible to communicate with them and would not be comparable to humans communicating with chimps. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 20:54
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:10 |
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Toasticle posted:I in no way have the background to discuss this well, my only problem is statements like "Everything in the entire universe...." We've seen first hand Earth and the moon, Mars (Venus?) and a comet/asteroids through probes and the rest by by various forms of telescopes, of which we've seen a fraction of a fraction of what's out there and even then just at frequencies we decided are the important ones to observe. What we know about the rest of the universe is an educated guess. There's still plenty of very weird poo poo out there we don't really have a grasp of, we've been watching KIC 8462852 for a decade and are still not quite sure what is going on there. (Google it, I in no way could correctly explain it). All matter is still composed of atoms (and atoms composed of the same subatomic particles), and we know how various atoms have been formed since the Big Bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#/media/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg If you observed only 2% of the Earth, you could indeed infer the fundamental building blocks of the other 98% based upon that. Everything would still be made of the exact same stuff at the subatomic level. We already know about all the elements that can occur naturally and be stable. Like, it isn't possible for there to be some mysterious life form made out of a 0th element because the very concept of a 0th element makes no sense. Sure, there might be some magical form of life that is built from some completely unknown building block, but that is literally the same as an argument for God or any other magical thing. The fact that we don't understand much about stuff like dark matter does not in any way mean that there might be some bizarre dark matter life or something.
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Jan 15, 2016 21:22
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Toasticle posted:These type of statements are all I'm talking about. Something like 2/3 of the universe is made of dark matter/energy, we know pretty much nothing about it so saying there can't be life based on it is complete guessing. How can you say with any certainty that there can't dark matter based life (or highly unlikely) when you or anyone else knows nothing about it? I admitted it's possible, just that it's a completely negligible possibility. It's like wondering if the Earth's crust might actually be alive and we just can't detect it because its form of life is so radically different from ours. Yeah, it can't exactly be disproved, but it's not really worth considering unless we come across some sort of evidence indicating it might be the case.
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Jan 16, 2016 00:39
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Toasticle posted:Neither of you are basing this on anything more than "I don't see how therefore it's a near zero possibility" and all I'm saying is that's foolish. Up until 1970 biology believed ALL life derived it's energy from the sun directly or indirectly (either gets its energy via photosynthesis or eats that life to get the energy it's chemically stored from it) and this thread would have both of you saying yeah, it's possible life could be based on something other than photosynthesis but it's so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. Then we go deep enough in the ocean and discover that there is chemosynthesis based life in an ecosystem that is deadly to every other form of life. Even when it was first discovered marine biologists assumed they ate "sea snow", the bits of organic photosynthesis based bits of dead crap that drifts down to the ocean floor. Nah, the reaction wouldn't have been the same. It would have been something along the lines of "we have no evidence these things exist, but the idea that life could derive its energy from something other than the sun at least conceptually could be possible." We just hadn't encountered evidence of it existing. Some hypothetical "dark matter life", on the other hand, doesn't even really make sense as a concept. Your argument is very similar to people who, when discussing faster-than-light travel, say "but 150 years ago we thought airplanes were impossible!" as argument in favor of FTL being possible (I'm referring to things actually moving that fast, not stuff involving wormholes or something). There's a big difference between not yet knowing how to do something and something not making sense on a more fundamental level. There's a lot of pseudoscience that we can't disprove. This doesn't mean it's valid or worth serious consideration. If we ever encounter even a tiny sliver of evidence that something like "dark matter life" could exist, then it would be worth looking into further. Until then, there are plenty of other things we can actually meaningfully research. edit: Ah, here's an example of the sort of argument I was talking about! The Belgian posted:The position is hardly one of extreme optism. Just look at how far we've come these last 500 years. That's a blink of an eye, not only on a cosmological scale; but even on the scale of biological life. Further, there's no sign of our advancement slowing down, on the contrary. You're making the completely illogical assumption that, because we've discovered how to do a lot of things, it must therefore be possible to do literally anything as long as we have enough time to research it. This doesn't make sense. There are probably many things that really aren't possible for humans to do in this universe. And when it comes to space travel specifically, there have been very few advancements after we initially figured out how rockets work (and the other stuff required for our early space exploits). We solved a bunch of engineering problems, but we aren't even the tiniest bit closer to something like interstellar travel. If you wanted to graph out "our progress towards interstellar travel", it would be something like a line (whether linear, expontential, etc, it doesn't matter) going up and then just planing out. We're not on some huge upward trend in that field. The fact that we've made all this progress over such a short time actually hurts your argument significantly. It would be more convincing if humans continued to make huge technological advances over 10,000 years, but it's entirely possible that everything we've learned over the past few hundreds years has been the equivalent of grabbing all the low-hanging fruit after making a few key discoveries. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 17, 2016 |
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Jan 17, 2016 04:41
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The Belgian posted:There's been advancement in space exploration, but yes, that as slowed down recently. To me, there seem to be two big reasons for this: I guess it depends upon the field, but I'm thinking of biology/genetics as an example (which is the only field I'm that familiar with). In the past couple decades we've made absolutely massive strides, but it isn't the sort of thing that you can expect to go on indefinitely (and indeed there are already signs that the massive gains from the advent of sequencing/our ability to analyze genomic/genetic data will slow down). In this case, technological advancement has resulted in us being able to generate massive amounts of data, but computing power isn't sufficient to analyze this data beyond a certain extent (and shows no signs of reaching the point where it will be). Even when we use super expensive clusters, individual analyses still often take like a week. It's a situation where, after developing this technology, we went "oh poo poo there's so much cool stuff we can learn now!" but ended up realizing "jesus gently caress how in the world will we ever be able to make sense of a lot of this." There's also another important issue more related to the scientific community/society itself that I'll mention at the end of this post after the *. It's entirely possible that we'll continue to see these massive increases in our knowledge/technology for another hundred years or even longer; my point is just that it's been a relatively short time since we became able to do things like harness electricity or build microprocessors, and that it isn't unrealistic to attribute a lot of recent growth to the fact that these things opened up a lot of doors towards obvious areas of study. Regarding space travel specifically, I think it's entirely likely that we could travel through our own solar system, but anything beyond that represents such a massive gap that we can't really extrapolate bridging that gap. Even if we managed to build one of the theoretical spaceships that could travel such a distance within a human lifetime, there are still problems that we have no conceivable solution to. It just isn't logical to point towards this period of growth as a sign that growth will continue indefinitely. Our universe is how it is, and if there exist hard limitations to what humans can accomplish then no amount of research will change that. We have what is likely a distorted view due to living in a period of great growth. Sort of like if someone's only frame of reference for the stock market was the roaring 20's, except instead of the growth period only being <10 years having it being a few hundred years. *It's also very important to consider the way the scientific community operates. Using biology as an example (again just because I'm familiar with it), scientists are generally very hesitant to put effort towards solving the more difficult problems, because it is much more difficult to get funding towards them. It's much easier to get funding towards researching some gene that we already know has some connection Alzheimer's or something. My coworker actually did a very interesting study on this. He ended up finding out that an overwhelming majority of scientific studies focus on a small minority of genes, even if you narrow it down to only genes we know to be highly expressed somewhere (I think he used some important brain regions as an example). You end up with a ton of studies that just do simple GWAS's (genome wide association studies, where you look across the entire genome to see what region a particular trait is associated with), even though in most cases these studies are insufficient to actually prove a causal relationship. In reality, there is an extremely complex system/network of variables that affect various traits, but many (probably most) studies will just control for a few other variables and call it a day, either because they want a positive result or because the biologist simply lacks the knowledge of statistics/mathematics to do such a thing. My point here is that even if it might technically be possible to make far more scientific progress, the way our society/economy is structured makes it very unlikely (and there are zero signs of this changing). While we might be able to accomplish a bunch of amazing things if the government suddenly deciding to reallocate some large portion of military funding towards research while simultaneously having the scientific community rework how it values research that doesn't necessary provide "major" results, there is no sign of this actually happening. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Jan 18, 2016 |
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Jan 18, 2016 00:49
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Friendly Tumour posted:...Of a single cell. Just because you can exert changes to a couple hundred cells in a reactor doesn't mean you have infinite power over an organism. Besides that little hurdle, whatever social changes that might be brought about by practical gene therapy are going to be defined by the economic systems they will operate in. And looking at the direction global capitalism is heading (ie authoritarian and inegalitarian), methinks CRISPR is going to remain a plaything of the corporations for the next few decades at least. In addition to what this poster is saying, the ability to make these changes doesn't change the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, we don't know what changes need to be made (because the systems involved are simply too complex for us to analyze properly). I mean, it's still potentially a huge deal and will help people who have conditions that are relatively straight-forward (in terms of their biological/genetic cause) in addition to facilitating a lot of additional research. But it won't really solve the more fundamental problems when it comes to medical applicability. I honestly have no idea how we'll ever be able to deal with the complexity inherent in some of these systems. We can cut computation time by improving the algorithms we use, but even then it's still prohibitively computationally intensive to ever control for more than a handful of other variables. And while this is often sufficient to get a useful or informative result (whether in terms of research or medicine), it probably isn't going to be sufficient to pin-point the specific causes of any particular complex condition/trait. By "prohibitively computationally intensive", I mean that we'll basically never be able to do this stuff (without some presently inconceivable advance in technology), even after accounting for our recent/projected growth in computation (which we can't really expect to continue forever due to physical constraints). I'm completely open to someone disagreeing with me here; this is just the impression I get from talking with various scientists I work with and seems to more or less be the consensus among anyone who deals with computational biology/bioinformatics (though there are some people who more or less "drink the kool-aid" of their own grant applications sometimes). Anyways, going back to the general point my earlier post dealt with, I'm using biology as an example of the fact that growth - no matter how great - does not in any way imply that we'll be able to solve all the problems we encounter. There may be things we can never do. Obviously we should operate on the assumption that it's worth attempting to do these things, since we aren't blessed with the knowledge of which specific things are impossible. But there's certainly no rule saying that anything is technologically possible given enough time and effort, yet many people seem to have what amounts to faith that "science" will inevitably figure out all this stuff. When people say things like "but we used to think _____ was impossible!" they're forgetting about all the things we used to think were impossible that we still think are impossible; it's a confirmation bias thing where they're cherry-picking examples to prove their point (that something is probably possible even if we presently think it isn't). Yes, some things we used to think were impossible turned out to be possible; this does not mean that it is likely that any given thing we believe to be impossible is actually possible. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 10:30
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McDowell posted:Given these conditions life only started once in the first couple billion years of the earth and moon existing Wait, what? Why is it necessary that life only started once? Why couldn't it have started many times in different places and just taken a while to successfully spread/survive? It seems very doubtful that there was zero life and then suddenly life appeared in one single place and from there spread across the entire world, especially given that countless locations would have the same building blocks and be subject to the same environmental conditions.
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Feb 3, 2016 21:02
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^^^ Yeah, I'm not doubting that. I'm saying that it seems entirely possible that this common ancestor could have formed multiple times and not immediately successfully spread. The same building blocks and environmental conditions were in many different places, so this seems very possible.OwlFancier posted:Not necessarily, it seems quite probable that life, a thing broadly defined by its ability to spread from small numbers, once existent, would spread across the planet. It can spread, but it can also be pretty easily wiped out if it hasn't yet spread to a significant extent. What you're saying seems to imply that if we put any organism into an environment where it can technically survive, that it would always successfully adapt and spread throughout the entire area, when this obviously isn't the case. Like, one possibility is that life, once spread beyond a particular threshold, can freely expand across a much larger area, but it might still take a while for it to reach that threshold. It's sort of like how someone can start a bunch of tiny fires, but not all of them are in an environment that will allow them to turn into large-scale forest fires (but the ones that do can continue more or less indefinitely once they reach that size).
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Feb 3, 2016 21:18
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:10 |
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The Larch posted:If life is formed from multiple abiogeneses, then it does not have a common ancestor. By definition. To clarify, I don't mean that life began and then continued to evolve from multiple starting points. I mean that there could have been multiple "false starts." Also, and this is just a question - when a universal ancestor is referred to, is that referring to one specific individual, or just to a particular species of organism? If the former, then I agree that it would indicate that all life did come from one specific abiogenesis. But if it's the latter, it is certainly not inconceivable that the exact same species could form in multiple places. I guess the part of this that is bothering me is that the same building blocks were all over the place. It's not like there was this one specific puddle somewhere that had stuff in it that couldn't be found anywhere else on the planet. The only explanation that seems like it would make "the very first life to appear in one specific location also lead to all future life" make sense is if the chance of life forming was just so extremely low that it only happened once even across the entire planet and millions of years. But from what I understand it seems like it isn't *that* hard for the conditions necessary for life to be met. For the record, don't interpret this post as me trying to argue that you're wrong. I think that you're probably correct, but I'm just not sure how a single common individual ancestor across the entire planet is something likely to occur. OwlFancier posted:I'm saying that if you put an organism in an environment in which it can technically survive, there is a greater chance of an example of that organism still being there in 1000 years then most other things of similar complexity but which are not alive. But environments change over time. I definitely don't see any reason, given what we currently know at least, to think that the very first instance of life would have definitely survived and not gone extinct. poo poo happens; some abrupt weather change could easily wipe out some organism that hasn't yet spread over a large enough area.
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Feb 6, 2016 12:03
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