when did life start and continue on the planet?

OneLargeToe

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Michali said:
I can no longer be in awe of (what I call) ignorant people, but of people who take their life for granted even though they agree that they are just really lucky. "Just roll with it as long as you have something to roll on". But what if what your rolling for hasn't any worth. Which is living with no purpose.

I define my purpose in life to live as best as I can, grow as a person, help others and hopefully have a positive influence on people around me. I would say that's pretty worthwhile. Whether there is an afterlife or not is irrelevant.

One last bit about being "lucky". You sit all cozy in your computer chair, but few realize the pain and suffering that occured to get you there. Our ancestors weren't so "lucky". Imagine living every day of your life in fear of being eaten. We as humans have the luxury of sitting at the top of the food chain. But imagine what it's like for other creatures: I'm sure they aren't thinking what luck it is to be alive. They're probably constantly looking over their shoulder thinking how much this sucks. :p
 
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lucaspa

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pudmuddle said:
1 in 21 million is nothing compared to the chance ( and yes natural selection depends on chance) of life appearing out of nothing. You're not thinking nearly big enough. Even if you could prove that life on this planet was the result of a series of genetic accidents, which you can't, you still have to explain how the universe, or possible many universes came about. Nothing happens without a first cause.
I don't much believe in luck...

WOW!! This may hold the record for the most amount of misinformation crammed into the smallest number of words.

1. Natural selection is NOT chance.
2. Natural selection does NOT produce life from non-life. That happens by chemistry and isn't chance either.
3. Life is NOT the result of "genetic accidents". The origin of life is chemsitry and the diversity of life is due to evolution by natural selection.
4. Why do we have to explain how the universe came about? For what? Methinks you have confused science with atheism again.
5. First cause does not have to be deity. There are 4 other hypotheses besides deity that will produce the universe.
 
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LorentzHA

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Plan 9 said:
Originally Posted By: obediah001

Hay too, if things evolve: there are single cell life forms but NO 2 cell life forms or thre I understand.





I concur. This drone's cortical array nearly imploded from attempting to make sense of it. Of course, the effect was intensified by earlier "wager" posts.

:D Yes, I had to intesify the affect. Thanks for posting Seven, I am a big fan and would be happy to be assimilated.
 
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Michali

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I think the only thing I can see being possible other than the deity one is that the universe has always existed. Or maybe these are the only two I understand.

I think the quantum physics one is also something like I once thought. How far can you "zoom" into matter until you figure out what it really is. What if an atom is just a universe. And our universe is just an atom in a larger universe.
 
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Michali said:
I think the only thing I can see being possible other than the deity one is that the universe has always existed. Or maybe these are the only two I understand.
probably more a case of you not understanding :p don't worry, most people don't.
I think the quantum physics one is also something like I once thought. How far can you "zoom" into matter until you figure out what it really is. What if an atom is just a universe. And our universe is just an atom in a larger universe.

well that's not really true. the smallest distance that has a physical meaning is a planck length... umm... 10^-43m I think. pretty small. the universe thing would kind of deny the meaning of the word "universe"
 
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LorentzHA

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Plan 9 said:
In Obediah's defense, people rarely attempt to pull the wool over others' eyes by pretending to be from Thayer, which is indeed a small town in Missouri.

That is what I thought! When he said he was from South Central Missouri, I believed him. Everyone else insists troll. I am not convinced. He also mentioned he dropped out of school in the 11th grade. To me that was too much information for him to be a troll. But I am the minority on this issue they claim troll. I was fooled once before so I am believing he's a troll. (Big doubts though).
 
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LorentzHA said:
That is what I thought! When he said he was from South Central Missouri, I believed him. Everyone else insists troll. I am not convinced. He also mentioned he dropped out of school in the 11th grade. To me that was too much information for him to be a troll. But I am the minority on this issue they claim troll. I was fooled once before so I am believing he's a troll. (Big doubts though).

He might be genuine, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck......
 
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lucaspa

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Michali said:
I think the only thing I can see being possible other than the deity one is that the universe has always existed. Or maybe these are the only two I understand.

I think the quantum physics one is also something like I once thought. How far can you "zoom" into matter until you figure out what it really is. What if an atom is just a universe. And our universe is just an atom in a larger universe.

No Boundary is more complex than simply saying "the universe always existed". That statement is more like Steady State.

You are aware, aren't you, that matter pops into and out of existence in vacuum all the time? These so-called virtual particles last about 10^-20 seconds. But they are real for all that. The types of of virtual particles include photons, electrons, protons, mesons, etc.
 
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Michali

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lucaspa said:
No Boundary is more complex than simply saying "the universe always existed". That statement is more like Steady State.

You are aware, aren't you, that matter pops into and out of existence in vacuum all the time? These so-called virtual particles last about 10^-20 seconds. But they are real for all that. The types of of virtual particles include photons, electrons, protons, mesons, etc.

No boundary- all I know is the title. I'll look up the rest later.

Where does this matter come from? That's really interesting to me. I thought matter could neither be created nor destroyed. Is this true in most cases except this case?

How did they find that out?
 
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OneLargeToe

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Michali said:
Where does this matter come from? That's really interesting to me. I thought matter could neither be created nor destroyed. Is this true in most cases except this case?

How did they find that out?

Virtual particles, from what I understand, are created from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. They pop in as positive and negative pairs and annihilate each other, I believe. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

How did they find this out? I think the Casimir Effect is a good example of it:

http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/6
 
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lucaspa

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Michali said:
No boundary- all I know is the title. I'll look up the rest later.

Hawking's A Brief History of Time has a lot of it. Some of the assumptions behind it are found in Kitty Ferguson's The Fire in the Equations. You should read that one anyway if you are interested in the interface of science and religion. Very readable.


A new variant of No Boundary (with all the technical math) can be found at:
1. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/inf_lowden.html
2. http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/hawking1/[/font]

Where does this matter come from? That's really interesting to me. I thought matter could neither be created nor destroyed. Is this true in most cases except this case?

How did they find that out?

Remember that matter and energy are the same? Well, energy is "borrowed" from the vacuum to make this short lived matter. Add energy (as in a particle accelerator) and you make virtual particles permament.

They found them by putting strips of gold foil very close together. Remember that matter is also a wave and these virtual particles behave like waves with a wavelength. Now, if the strips of foil are close enough together, only particles with a wavelength less than the separation can come into existence between the strips of foil. Meanwhile, virtual particles of any wavelength can pop into existence outside the strips of foil. Since there are more virtual particles outside the strips of foil than between them, the impact of the particles tends to push the strips of foil together. The amount of electric charge needed to hold the strips a constant distance apart measures the virtual particles.

3. C Seife, The subtle pull of emptiness. Science, 275 (Jan. 10): 158, 1997. Describes recent experiment demonstrating the Casimir effect.
3a. Physical Review Letters -- November 23, 1998 -- Volume 81, Issue 21 pp. 4549-4552 http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/...cvips&gifs=yes&jsessionid=2476841006384468984 Paper documenting Casimir Effect
7. P Yam, Exploiting zero-point energy. Scientific American, 279: 82-101, Dec. 1997. Another confirmation of the Casimir effect, including attempts to tap it for energy.
8. LM Krause Excerpt: the physics of virtual particles. Natural History 107: 16, Feb. 1998.
 
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lucaspa

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OneLargeToe said:
Virtual particles, from what I understand, are created from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. They pop in as positive and negative pairs and annihilate each other, I believe. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

They do not come into existence as pairs. Look at your Casimir effect article and you see that you don't have annhiliation going on. Just a different amount of virtual particles outside the two parallel mirrors than inside.

Now, Hawking in his explanation of how black holes can emit energy does make use of virtual matter/antimatter pairs, with the antimatter particle being drawn into the black hole. However, in the experiments such pairs are not observed.
 
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Michali

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OneLargeToe said:
Virtual particles, from what I understand, are created from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. They pop in as positive and negative pairs and annihilate each other, I believe. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

How did they find this out? I think the Casimir Effect is a good example of it:

http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/6

The link was an interesting read, but it didn't explain how matter suddenly exists out of nothing. The fluctuations occur because of already existing matter in the vaccum or on the outside of the vaccum. So in a true void, where there is absolutely nothing (absence of radiation, matter, light, gravitational pull, and electrical forces), there will be no fluctuations. We are trying to think of an existence where there isn't anything in the universe. This may be a beginning for existence, if everything always existed.
 
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Michali

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lucaspa said:
Remember that matter and energy are the same? Well, energy is "borrowed" from the vacuum to make this short lived matter.

How is energy borrowed from the vaccum itself? Does it borrow from the walls on the outside of the vaccum? What if there are no walls or anything at all, and there is absolutely no energy in this peice of space? Existence was like this before an effect occured in the cause and effect ladder.
 
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lucaspa

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Michali said:
How is energy borrowed from the vaccum itself? Does it borrow from the walls on the outside of the vaccum? What if there are no walls or anything at all, and there is absolutely no energy in this peice of space? Existence was like this before an effect occured in the cause and effect ladder.

We don't know exactly how energy is borrowed from the vacuum. We can only see the effects. No, not from the "walls outside the vacuum", since the same effect would happen in deep space where there are no walls.

Apparently, there is no piece of space with zero energy.

Now, what you are saying in this post and the previous one is that virtual particles are appearing in an existing spacetime. However, at the Big Bang spacetime itself comes into existence.

The answer is that one of the attractions of String Theory is that the calculations show that spacetime itself can be a quantum fluctuation (virtual particles are quantum fluctuations). So now we have the theoretical means to get a spacetime out of quantum fluctuations.
 
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