Just Add Water - planetary life may be ubiquitous

[SelfSim]

I just don't understand what it means to say the universe 'is a neural network'. I suspect that what they are really saying is that it is possible to find aspects of the mathematics that describe the universe that have parallels with the mathematics that describe neural networks... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think their intention goes beyond producing just some esoteric math though .. (see the quote below (my emboldened bit) from the 'Discussion' section of their paper).

My point in bringing this up however, is that the evidence is that models are how we acquire knowledge and what 'they are trying to find out', (your words there), is which model best explains what we mean by 'universe' or 'nature' ... and never 'things' which exist independently from those models.
In this instance, the model of their universe is a 'neural network' model.

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works.

What they haven't realised yet though, is how 'the world around us actually works', if they were asked to describe what they mean by that, would generate their 'neural network' model.

(Fyi): they go on:

With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks. Unfortunately (or fortunately) it is easer said than done. It turns out that the dynamics of neural networks is so complex that one can only understand it in very specific limits. The main objective of this paper was to describe the behavior of the neural networks in the limits when the relevant degrees of freedom (such as bias vector, weight matrix, state vector of neurons) can be modeled as stochastic variables which undergo a learning evolution. In this section we shall briefly discuss the main results and implications of the results for a possible emergence of quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers from a microscopic neural network.

 

[Astrophile]

If there was 12 earth-like planets inside our solar system, why would life form on any of them? (Saturn has 82 moons in similar orbits)

The satellites of Saturn are not in similar orbits; the most distant satellite is more than 150 times as far from the planet as the closest one. Also there is a very large range in diameters, from Titan, with a diameter of 5150 km, to micro-satellites or moonlets with diameters of less than 10 km.

I am not a biologist, and therefore can't answer your question why life would form on any planet.

 

[The happy Objectivist]

Water is in lots of places which, (thus far), exhibit no signs of recognizable life (eg: Mars' surface, the Moon ..).

I think Ganymede is supposed to have more water than Earth and it has a liquid Iron core. I wonder if there are any deep sea vents like the ones here on Earth teeming with life?

 

[SelfSim]

I think Ganymede is supposed to have more water than Earth and it has a liquid Iron core. I wonder if there are any deep sea vents like the ones here on Earth teeming with life?

The ones 'teaming with life' here, are also connected by ocean currents to places that are abundant with mobile lifeforms (and have been for a very long time).

I suppose its a testable hypothesis though .. Might have to wait a long time for the technologies needed to execute those tests(?)

 

[The happy Objectivist]

The ones 'teaming with life' here, are also connected by ocean currents to places that are abundant with mobile lifeforms (and have been for a very long time).

I suppose its a testable hypothesis though .. Might have to wait a long time for the technologies needed to execute those tests(?)

I see, so the lifeforms came from elsewhere than the vents. I mean they originated someplace else and found their way down there. That makes sense. But I have read of hypotheses that life could have started at those vents and moved up to shallower water. It's fun to speculate, isn't it? I think NASA is in the planning stages of a mission to Europa to melt down through the ice and lower a probe. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I remember watching the first space shuttle launch when I was a boy. Imagine someday sitting around the TV to watch the first pictures back from the probe?

 

[SelfSim]

I think NASA is in the planning stages of a mission to Europa to melt down through the ice and lower a probe. I hope it happens in my lifetime. I remember watching the first space shuttle launch when I was a boy. Imagine someday sitting around the TV to watch the first pictures back from the probe?

I think the Mars Insight lander's 'mole' provided a few lessons:

On January 14, 2021, NASA announced that, as the final attempt to bury the "mole" had failed, the team had given up, with the heat probe portion of the mission declared to be over ...
Although unsuccessful, the mole's operations did teach the mission team a lot about the soil at the Insight site, about conducting excavation/drilling on Mars, and about operating the lander's robotic arm. The mole-rescue effort that used the arm in ways that were unplanned before the mission.

Happy talk(?) .. Maybe or maybe not .. but either way, one has to wonder why the same or similar design issues might not also plague a much more distant (and far more complex) and less site-surveyed probe experiment on sub-surface Europa?

 

[loveofourlord]

The ones 'teaming with life' here, are also connected by ocean currents to places that are abundant with mobile lifeforms (and have been for a very long time).

I suppose its a testable hypothesis though .. Might have to wait a long time for the technologies needed to execute those tests(?)

I wish I could find the article, I remember hearing about it on I think skeptics guide to the universe, but they have potentially found life on earth not related to any other life. It's below the deep sea vents, they found chemicals or something that would be the byrpoduct of early life coming from vents that could show a colony of early life/bacteria deep below the earths surface, and if there is that, given how far removed it would be, and the isolation that it might be independently developed life, or life that some how got trapped. We have no real way of reaching them as they would be like a mile I think it was below, but it's potentially something.

 

[SelfSim]

I wish I could find the article, I remember hearing about it on I think skeptics guide to the universe, but they have potentially found life on earth not related to any other life. It's below the deep sea vents, they found chemicals or something that would be the byrpoduct of early life coming from vents that could show a colony of early life/bacteria deep below the earths surface, and if there is that, given how far removed it would be, and the isolation that it might be independently developed life, or life that some how got trapped. We have no real way of reaching them as they would be like a mile I think it was below, but it's potentially something.

I think you may have that report a little misconstrued(?)
Is it this one?: Deepest Life on Earth May Be Lurking 6 Miles Beneath Ocean Floor

To my knowledge, no 'independently developed life' has ever been found. All life on earth is evidently related (my underlines):

The team found chemical traces that could have been associated with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, although other organic processes can also produce these signatures, the researchers wrote in the paper. Other traces of organic matter with complicated chemical structures were also found, as well as tiny flecks of nickel-iron alloys that are often formed by primitive microbes in hydrothermal vent areas.

"We suggest, based on the similarities with molecular signatures of bacteria-derived biopolymers, that the organic matter may represent remnants of microbial life within or even below the mud volcanoes," the researchers wrote in the paper.

 

[loveofourlord]

I think you may have that report a little misconstrued(?)
Is it this one?: Deepest Life on Earth May Be Lurking 6 Miles Beneath Ocean Floor

To my knowledge, no 'independently developed life' has ever been found. All life on earth is evidently related (my underlines):

Thats the one I think, well the theory I heard was it could either be the source, or indepenant, it being 6 miles down, either the microbes came to us or they are independant, it's the closest were going to find to life not similar to ours on earth.

Yeah that just says it's remnants of life, doesn't say wether it's related to us, it's just the up to 6 miles down if it's really far down it's likley that it would be possibly different from us least in theory :> Either way it's kinda cool.

 

[SelfSim]

Thats the one I think, well the theory I heard was it could either be the source, or indepenant, it being 6 miles down, either the microbes came to us or they are independant, it's the closest were going to find to life not similar to ours on earth.

So they say:

At this tectonically active part of the ocean, ocean water, oceanic crust, mantle and sediments are all churned and transported into a region in the mantle called the forearc mantle. From there, fluids may seep through fractures and fissures into the oceanic plate and mantle lying on top of it. This combination of fluid and rock may have provided the Goldilocks environment needed for microbes to thrive, the researchers explained.

 

[SelfSim]

Yeah that just says it's remnants of life, doesn't say wether it's related to us, it's just the up to 6 miles down if it's really far down it's likley that it would be possibly different from us least in theory :> Either way it's kinda cool.

So also, from the linked article:

Mason, who headed up the recent research, expected to find life there, based on her previous study of microbes in basalt, the layer of the Earth's crust just upstairs from the gabbroic layer.

The shock came when she realized the microbes in the gabbroic layer were totally different from those that lived in basalt.

"We did not see any overlay in the microbial community at all, so that was a surprise," Mason told OurAmazingPlanet.

.. and so more surprises were in store:

Stephen Giovannoni, a professor and microbiologist at Oregon State University, said that of the bacteria Mason discovered, almost all seem to live on hydrocarbons (organic chemicals that are made up mostly of hydrogen and carbon), in particular, methane.

Giovannoni compared the newfound microbes to the oil-digesting organisms that seemingly consumed much of the oil also a hydrocarbon that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill earlier this year.

Interestingly:

Adding intrigue to the story, it appears the hydrocarbons these deep-dwelling microbes eat may be produced inside the Earth itself, in a mysterious process entirely independent of the power of the sun, the energy source for almost all life on our planet.

So, the discovered microbes are obviously recognisable as microbes in the first place and are comparable with already known oil dwelling microbes .. there's the relatedness ... right there.

Smells like adaption to a niche environment to me, (or the other way around).

Not independent from known life.