Drake Equation, Abiogenesis and Aliens

[Sorn]

So's law.

Why would you think that the last word "yet" implies anything about what you just wrote.

yes, a bit of a mix up there as i edited the post, but 'yet' means that there are currently insurmountable barriers otherwise they would be able to create life. Its the 1st thing any scientist would do and get a nobel prize out of it.

The truth is that they can't because there still exists insurmountable barriers (ie they don't know how to do it) otherwise it would be done. Unless of course one of those processes requires a particle accelerator, or a nuclear detonation, or a process involving a million amps of hundreds of degrees.

Any process that can produce a living organism can not be done under so much heat, pressure, toxicity, radiation or other extreme that it could not easily be done today in a good high school lab (or university lab) but yet it does not happen.

Its because they don't know how it happens.

 

[Sorn]

Except, we know that stars and planets form spontaneously because they are a lower energy state than a dusty gas cloud.

Well, clearly the energy density of a star is orders of magnitude greater than a dust cloud. If you were to suddenly materialize in a dust cloud you would quickly freeze, but if you materialized inside a star, you would be instantly vaporized. Two completely different results due to 2 completely different energy densities.
A star is still relatively simple, you just bring a lot, a real lot, of matter together (and simple molecules at that) and nuclear processes then take hold and do the rest.

A cell needs a large number of complex molecules to form and you can't have half a cell, its all or nothing.

Also, many stars form because a shock wave hits the gas cloud, collapsing it, in other words, energy is added to what was otherwise a stable gas cloud.
This doesn't preclude the fact that some gas clouds may collapse under gravity also but it takes a long, long time for that energy that is dispersed over a very wide area to become concentrated, nothing spontaneous about it.

 

[Sorn]

No, this is a common error. Complexities like life are dependent on the entropy gradients made by low-entropy sources of free energy, and are known as 'dissipative systems' because they convert low entropy energy into high entropy energy more efficiently than simple systems. Thermodynamics drives the development of complexity when free energy is available.

For every high energy, high-frequency photon (from UV radiation to visible light) impinging on Earth, around 20 low energy low frequency (infrared) photons are radiated; that change in entropy drives everything from ocean currents and weather to life. Consider how heat affects chemical reactions - how complex self-sustaining oxidation reactions like fire (and life) consume low entropy energy sources and convert their energy to high entropy heat and motion.

When you pull the plug in your bath, complex self-sustaining complexities like swirls and vortices appear, and the flow through the hole becomes complex (turbulent) because, by pulling the plug, you convert the potential energy of the bathwater into the free kinetic energy of motion, and vortices & turbulence dissipate the kinetic energy of fluids more efficiently than smooth flow. When the bath is almost empty and the energy gradient reduces below a certain threshold, the vortices reduce or disappear and the flow becomes laminar; there is no longer enough free energy to drive complexity, and the energy that remains is dissipated much more slowly.

Interesting post, but yet nobody has reproduced life.
The problem with life is that it is very complex, its one thing to have eddies and vortices form (which are short lived), its quite another to have the complex machinery of a cell form quickly, fully and for long enough to take hold and thrive.
A cell is a very sophisticated piece of nano-engineering, and no-one has demonstrated how such an ordered state can arise by chance or by natural processes all occurring at the same time roughly.

An airplane can clearly exist, but no airplane is made by natural processes, its just too complex.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

yes, a bit of a mix up there as i edited the post, but 'yet' means that there are currently insurmountable barriers otherwise they would be able to create life. Its the 1st thing any scientist would do and get a nobel prize out of it.

The truth is that they can't because there still exists insurmountable barriers (ie they don't know how to do it) otherwise it would be done. Unless of course one of those processes requires a particle accelerator, or a nuclear detonation, or a process involving a million amps of hundreds of degrees.

Any process that can produce a living organism can not be done under so much heat, pressure, toxicity, radiation or other extreme that it could not easily be done today in a good high school lab (or university lab) but yet it does not happen.

Its because they don't know how it happens.

JFYI, 'insurmountable' means 'impossible to surmount'; the correct usage here would be 'unsurmounted barriers', meaning barriers that have not yet been surmounted.

A major problem is that we don't know in what conditions life arose on the early Earth, and we don't know the precise chemistry involved. We do have a rough idea of the general conditions at the time, but the number of possible environments within those general conditions that might support chemical activity of the kind thought necessary is huge, as is the possible variety of available chemical resources, the variations in conditions over time, and so-on. The diversity includes volcanic pools, hydrothermal vents, various clays, tidal pools, etc. This makes the conditions to research a matter of informed guesswork - which has been surprisingly productive to date, given the vast environmental landscape to be searched. Some things just take time.

 

[Hans Blaster]

I'm going to reply to your points out of order...

Well, clearly the energy density of a star is orders of magnitude greater than a dust cloud. If you were to suddenly materialize in a dust cloud you would quickly freeze, but if you materialized inside a star, you would be instantly vaporized. Two completely different results due to 2 completely different energy densities.
A star is still relatively simple, you just bring a lot, a real lot, of matter together (and simple molecules at that) and nuclear processes then take hold and do the rest.

A cell needs a large number of complex molecules to form and you can't have half a cell, its all or nothing.

Also, many stars form because a shock wave hits the gas cloud, collapsing it, in other words, energy is added to what was otherwise a stable gas cloud.
This doesn't preclude the fact that some gas clouds may collapse under gravity also but it takes a long, long time for that energy that is dispersed over a very wide area to become concentrated, nothing spontaneous about it.

Shock waves certainly *aid* star formation, but they are not required. The key element is whether a clump of gas is unstable to collapse. This is the Jeans instability and if the mass of the cloud is greater than the Jeans mass (derived by basic properties like density and temperature) it *will* collapse. It does so spontaneously, though not instantly. (It takes much longer than your lifetime.) It isn't the "added energy" from the shock that aids collapse, but the compression of the gas that makes more parts of it unstable after passage of the shock. The injected energy of the shock actually heats the gas which works against collapse, but the gas is transparent and can quickly cool.

The energy density is irrelevant. Stars are stable because the gravitational energy is negative and larger in magnitude than the thermal and other energies. The total energy of a star is negative, or it would not stay bound. (The total energy of the Jeans unstable cloud is also negative, but less negative than the star it will form.)

Stars may be simpler than modern cells, but they do have structure that forms without external input. Convective layers, compositional gradients, burning regions, etc. In some ways stars are like the primitive proto-cells that origin-of-life researchers think came about spontaneously and then started replicating and evolving. Since stars don't replicate, they don't pass traits on to offspring and all stars are formed de novo from gas clouds and they don't get more sophisticated with each "Generation".

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Interesting post, but yet nobody has reproduced life.

That is not an argument against complex processes being thermodynamically favourable under suitable conditions. We've discovered how many, if not most, of the structures and processes necessary to the simplest life can arise but we've yet to join the dots. These things take time.

The problem with life is that it is very complex, its one thing to have eddies and vortices form (which are short lived), its quite another to have the complex machinery of a cell form quickly, fully and for long enough to take hold and thrive.
A cell is a very sophisticated piece of nano-engineering, and no-one has demonstrated how such an ordered state can arise by chance or by natural processes all occurring at the same time roughly.

The complex machinery of cells today took billions of years to evolve. But the first replicators to evolve may not have been enclosed in a cell membrane at all. They may have been self-reproducing autocatalytic molecules or chemical cycles - the basic sequences of known metabolic cycles have been shown to spontaneously occur given suitable conditions. Enclosure in cell membranes may have come later.

The relatively simple machinery of the first cells may have taken a million years or more to come together, in the ever-shifting environmental conditions of a whole planet. We've been looking seriously at what might be involved for about 70 years... Patience is required.

An airplane can clearly exist, but no airplane is made by natural processes, its just too complex.

It's not complexity that's the problem there.

 

[Sorn]

JFYI, 'insurmountable' means 'impossible to surmount'; the correct usage here would be 'unsurmounted barriers', meaning barriers that have not yet been surmounted.

A major problem is that we don't know in what conditions life arose on the early Earth, and we don't know the precise chemistry involved. We do have a rough idea of the general conditions at the time, but the number of possible environments within those general conditions that might support chemical activity of the kind thought necessary is huge, as is the possible variety of available chemical resources, the variations in conditions over time, and so-on. The diversity includes volcanic pools, hydrothermal vents, various clays, tidal pools, etc. This makes the conditions to research a matter of informed guesswork - which has been surprisingly productive to date, given the vast environmental landscape to be searched. Some things just take time.

I was using insurmountable as that is what the poster I was replying to was using and i was merely pointing out that if there were no insurmountable barriers to creating life in a lab then someone would have done it by know.
Of course there can be barriers that have yet to be surmounted but whether they get surmounted or turn out to be insurmountable is yet to be seen. My money is many will not be surmounted in our lifetime so may turn out to be insurmountable.

For life to have arisen naturally, given all the possible environments and conditions, would require an amazing lining up of circumstances and even if God didn't just click his fingers together then He could well have orchestrated the lining up of the circumstances which otherwise would have about as much chance of happening naturally as a sand castle being formed by wind/s blowing over sand dunes.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... i was merely pointing out that if there were no insurmountable barriers to creating life in a lab then someone would have done it by know.

That simply doesn't follow. As I said, research takes time; the fact that we don't yet have definitive answers for many problems under study doesn't mean there are insurmountable barriers to getting those answers.

Results don't happen instantaneously. Most research programs have a staged approach where there is a planned step-by-step progression. At a building lot, you'd look pretty silly if you pointed at house foundations being laid and told the builders there are clearly insurmountable barriers to building that house otherwise they'd have finished it by now...

Of course there can be barriers that have yet to be surmounted but whether they get surmounted or turn out to be insurmountable is yet to be seen. My money is many will not be surmounted in our lifetime so may turn out to be insurmountable.

That's possible; we don't yet know.

For life to have arisen naturally, given all the possible environments and conditions, would require an amazing lining up of circumstances and even if God didn't just click his fingers together then He could well have orchestrated the lining up of the circumstances which otherwise would have about as much chance of happening naturally as a sand castle being formed by wind/s blowing over sand dunes.

Well, the more research that's been done on this, the more complex systems we've discovered that self-assemble, and the clearer it has become that the availability of free energy drives the development of complexity; so I'd say there is increasing confidence that a plausible route will be discovered.

It's also worth remembering that there was an entire planetful of varying environments with all the necessary resources and millions of years for complex chemistry and chance to play out. Of course, there's also the Anthropic Principle.

Oh, and the argument from incredulity is fallacious...

 

[Sorn]

That simply doesn't follow. As I said, research takes time; the fact that we don't yet have definitive answers for many problems under study doesn't mean there are insurmountable barriers to getting those answers.

Results don't happen instantaneously. Most research programs have a staged approach where there is a planned step-by-step progression. At a building lot, you'd look pretty silly if you pointed at house foundations being laid and told the builders there are clearly insurmountable barriers to building that house otherwise they'd have finished it by now...

Yes, there are no known (or recognized as such) insurmountable barriers yet, but that doesn't mean there won't be.
But at the same time, even if there are no insurmountable barriers, that doesn't mean that we will ever know how life started.

Science has no choice but to say, until proven otherwise, it was from natural processes, which in and of itself practically excludes the possibility of insurmountable barriers, as its just a case of finding the right processes and in the right order.

However if God acted supernaturally to start life then those processes and their order may never be found. Even if He didn't, the right processes and order may still never be found. So how long would it take before it was classed as an insurmountable problem?. If 500 years into the future mankind still doesn't know and can't create life then would it be insurmountable then?

If God was involved in creating life there are 2 ways He could have done it:
1) by fiat, ie instantaneously
2) by ordering (as in arranging) nature so that processes that would have probabilities far too low to all occur in the right order do occur.

But i agree, more time should be allowed for research for now.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yes, there are no known (or recognized as such) insurmountable barriers yet, but that doesn't mean there won't be.
But at the same time, even if there are no insurmountable barriers, that doesn't mean that we will ever know how life started.

That's right. The best we are likely to do is demonstrate one or more ways it could have happened.

But it's good to hear you agree that your previous statement, "if there were no insurmountable barriers to creating life in a lab then someone would have done it by know" was mistaken.

Science has no choice but to say, until proven otherwise, it was from natural processes, which in and of itself practically excludes the possibility of insurmountable barriers, as its just a case of finding the right processes and in the right order.

This is a case of not being able to prove a negative - it doesn't matter how many times you fail to surmount a barrier, it doesn't mean the barrier is insurmountable.

Not everything is possible via natural processes, there are physical laws that set limits. But the laws we devise are provisional - what was impossible in classical physics, may not be under General Relativity, and quantum mechanics has taught us to be wary of what seems intuitively impossible - particularly 'insurmountable' barriers (e.g. quantum tunnelling).

But, of course, science can only deal with what is directly or indirectly observable, i.e. anything that has a discernable influence or effect. Claims about things that have no discernable effect or influence cannot be investigated and are, FAPP, irrelevant.

However if God acted supernaturally to start life then those processes and their order may never be found. Even if He didn't, the right processes and order may still never be found. So how long would it take before it was classed as an insurmountable problem?. If 500 years into the future mankind still doesn't know and can't create life then would it be insurmountable then?

If God was involved in creating life there are 2 ways He could have done it:
1) by fiat, ie instantaneously
2) by ordering (as in arranging) nature so that processes that would have probabilities far too low to all occur in the right order do occur.

Sure, God could affect the process at any point and hide the evidence; or God could precision-guide every part of it; or God could have created the universe last Thursday, complete with an apparent multi-billion year history.

The problem is that if God can do anything, that makes God a non-explanation - as I said in post #45 (read 'God' where I put 'creation'):

"I don't know how you judge a good explanation, but for me (and many scientists & philosophers), a good explanation should make testable predictions (so you can find out if it's wrong); it should have specificity, so it gives an insight into and understanding of the particular phenomenon it explains; it should preferably have some scope so that insight & understanding can be seen to apply to other phenomena; it should be parsimonious so that it introduces no unnecessary or unknown entities (Occam's razor); it should not raise more questions than it answers, particularly unanswerable questions, and it should preferably be consistent with our existing body of knowledge; finally, an explanation that can directly explain anything is not really an explanation at all.

Now, not all explanations can satisfy all of those criteria, but creation (if that means invoking some kind of 'creator'), is interesting in that it satisfies none of them. As I have said many times in these forums, I don't see how it is any better than saying it was 'Magic!'.

If you can make a reasonable argument for why the criteria above are not good ways to judge an explanation, or show how your creation explanation is a better explanation than the 'Magic!' explanation, then we can discuss the merits of the creation explanation."​

I am interested to know how you think God is a better explanation than "Magic!", or no explanation at all...

 

[Subduction Zone]

but if they understand the process and no insurmountable barriers are there, life should be being created in labs all over the place, including high school science labs.
I'd say that the process is not well enough understood and there are, currently, insurmountable barriers.

This is such a poor argument since "insurmountable barriers" are regularly overcome. Until the Wright brothers demonstrated controlled powered flight there were "insurmountable barriers" to controlled powered flight.

The fact that we cannot do something yet is not evidence against that activity. What you did was attempt to shift the burden of proof. That in itself is an admission that you are wrong. If you want to claim that there are insurmountable barriers the burden of proof is upon you.

 

[Subduction Zone]

n a similar way, imo, if life started spontaneously, it would have had to do the equivalent of a 'gravitational slingshot' around the 2nd law of thermodynamics in order to get that initial complexity and energy level that it needed to become self sustaining, as long as it could continue to consume a fuel to keep itself there.

I see that you do not understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics either. The SLoT does not say that matter has to get more random. By your understanding life itself is impossible. You are relying on an oversimplified and incorrect version of that law. The idea of things getting less organized applies to isolated systems. That is a system where energy cannot enter and leave. A system where matter cannot enter and leave. That simplified version does not apply to the Earth. Every day as the Earth rotates energy is entering and leaving different parts of the Earth. That is what makes life possible. That allows for local increases in complexity. Which is as I said lucky for you. You started out as a single cell and grew to what you are today. A massive increase in complexity. That was not a violation of the SLoT either.

 

[Estrid]

yes, a bit of a mix up there as i edited the post, but 'yet' means that there are currently insurmountable barriers otherwise they would be able to create life. Its the 1st thing any scientist would do and get a nobel prize out of it.

The truth is that they can't because there still exists insurmountable barriers (ie they don't know how to do it) otherwise it would be done. Unless of course one of those processes requires a particle accelerator, or a nuclear detonation, or a process involving a million amps of hundreds of degrees.

Any process that can produce a living organism can not be done under so much heat, pressure, toxicity, radiation or other extreme that it could not easily be done today in a good high school lab (or university lab) but yet it does not happen.

Its because they don't know how it happens.

Yup and nobody knew how to make an
airplane, many scoffed, said it can't be done.

Your central point in this is...?

 

[Estrid]

I see that you do not understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics either. The SLoT does not say that matter has to get more random. By your understanding life itself is impossible. You are relying on an oversimplified and incorrect version of that law. The idea of things getting less organized applies to isolated systems. That is a system where energy cannot enter and leave. A system where matter cannot enter and leave. That simplified version does not apply to the Earth. Every day as the Earth rotates energy is entering and leaving different parts of the Earth. That is what makes life possible. That allows for local increases in complexity. Which is as I said lucky for you. You started out as a single cell and grew to what you are today. A massive increase in complexity. That was not a violation of the SLoT either.

Not SLOT. Surely not SLOT again.

 

[Estrid]

I was using insurmountable as that is what the poster I was replying to was using and i was merely pointing out that if there were no insurmountable barriers to creating life in a lab then someone would have done it by know.
Of course there can be barriers that have yet to be surmounted but whether they get surmounted or turn out to be insurmountable is yet to be seen. My money is many will not be surmounted in our lifetime so may turn out to be insurmountable.

For life to have arisen naturally, given all the possible environments and conditions, would require an amazing lining up of circumstances and even if God didn't just click his fingers together then He could well have orchestrated the lining up of the circumstances which otherwise would have about as much chance of happening naturally as a sand castle being formed by wind/s blowing over sand dunes.

Amazing lineup.

Given 330,000,000 cubic miles of water and millions of years
and the speed with which chemical reactions regularly occur,
the huge variety of organic compounds that spontaneously
form, it should astonish nobody that anything that is not impossible
would occur.
If your immutable position is "impossibe" then there is no
point to any discussion, of course.
Just so long as you recognize there is no factual basis for
"Impossible".

And the numbers go opposite to
your sand castle thing.

 

[Ophiolite]

For life to have arisen naturally, given all the possible environments and conditions, would require an amazing lining up of circumstances

If you are able to describe the "lining up of circumstances" as amazing, you must be able to specify those circumstances and assign (rough) probabilities to their alignment. Otherwise you are just using bombast and rhetoric to present your point - it sounds good, but carries no weight. So, would you take the time to list those circumstances, along with the probablities for each allignment. Thank you in advance.

 

[SelfSim]

Seeing as we're discussing Abiogenesis hypotheses in the Science Forum, one legitimate question I've been pondering for a while, (along the Autocatalysis line of thinking), is how did these autocatalytic sets of self-replicating inorganic molecules achieve the high degree of fidelity necessary in order to move towards a more sustainable Evolutionary mode? (By 'fidelity' here, I mean: the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced before error correction/repair mechanisms).

A mostly laws-of-chemistry-principled preference for sustained, precise replication of a single reactionary product, over a number of generations, must have been no mean feat in a thermodynamically changing natural environment IMHO(?)

Perhaps suggests another law of thermodynamics specific to Abiogenesis?

PS: There's no right or wrong answer to this query here .. I know .. More research needed!

 

[Estrid]

Seeing as we're discussing Abiogenesis hypotheses in the Science Forum, one legitimate question I've been pondering for a while, (along the Autocatalysis line of thinking), is how did these autocatalytic sets of self-replicating inorganic molecules achieve the high degree of fidelity necessary in order to move towards a more sustainable Evolutionary mode? (By 'fidelity' here, I mean: the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced before error correction/repair mechanisms).

A mostly laws-of-chemistry-principled preference for sustained, precise replication of a single reactionary product, over a number of generations, must have been no mean feat in a thermodynamically changing natural environment IMHO(?)

Perhaps suggests another law of thermodynamics specific to Abiogenesis?

PS: There's no right or wrong answer to this query here .. I know .. More research needed!

I only did second semester o-chem, but that sounds at least feasible,
tho for my taste a new LOT seems a bit like special pleading.

In the event, if there's a simplest way to describe evolution
it might be something like " whatever works "

 

[SelfSim]

I only did second semester o-chem, but that sounds at least feasible, tho for my taste a new LOT seems a bit like special pleading.

In the event, if there's a simplest way to describe evolution it might be something like " whatever works "

A new ‘fourth Law' (OT) that is specific to the biosphere, would explain, (by way of evidence), the growth of diversity and complexity of information processing autocatalytic sets having certain thermodynamic properties.
There would be a clear distinction between 'thermodynamic information' and 'evolutionary information' (or niche favouring information).

'Special pleading': I'm not advocating this idea .. its a possible area of potentially valid investigation. (Some reviewed ideas have already been published on the concept).

 

[Ophiolite]

Perhaps suggests another law of thermodynamics specific to Abiogenesis?

I think Kaufman proposed this as a possibility. I'll dig out his books and see if I can confirm that. However, I'm not sure that it addressed the same aspect of abiogenesis as is concerning you.