Abiogenesis and life on Earth - thoughts and pet theories?

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I watched a YouTube video the other day that posited that life started on Mars and was transferred to Earth by meteorite. Even if we were to investigate this hypothesis directly on Mars, we would probably be unable to falsify it. Too much time has passed. The best we might ever manage is to assign probabilities based on the available evidence. What counts as life in any case? Some RNA world scenarios probably do as the NASA definition of life is "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution".

Further discussion here and in the papers referenced therein:

Defining Life - PMC

Any definition is intricately connected to a theory that gives it meaning. Accordingly, this article discusses various definitions of life held in the astrobiology community by considering their connected “theories of life.” These include certain ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Candleicious Ghost]

I watched a YouTube video the other day that posited that life started on Mars and was transferred to Earth by meteorite. Even if we were to investigate this hypothesis directly on Mars, we would probably be unable to falsify it. Too much time has passed. The best we might ever manage is to assign probabilities based on the available evidence. What counts as life in any case? Some RNA world scenarios probably do as the NASA definition of life is "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution".

Further discussion here and in the papers referenced therein:

Defining Life - PMC

Any definition is intricately connected to a theory that gives it meaning. Accordingly, this article discusses various definitions of life held in the astrobiology community by considering their connected “theories of life.” These include certain ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

When I was a kid I thought Mars many a long time ago might have been the mythical Garden of Eden. We just got exiled to Earth and Mars died

 

[Unicron]

"Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own business and don't do anything weird."

The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

"Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own business and don't do anything weird."

The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

While the protostomes were doing that, some of us deuterostomes were evolving ever bigger brains, not inconveniently wrapped around our oesophagus - although our eyesight was hampered by the inefficient layout of the nerves in our retinae - that allowed us to create weapons and technology to exterminate ourselves and anything that fed us, displeased us, or merely for shits and giggles, while imagining that one or more magic sky fairies had created and ordained all this.

 

[Will The Serious]

that allowed us to create weapons and technology to exterminate ourselves and anything that fed us, displeased us, or merely for shits and giggles

That is a survival strategy based on the idea that there isn't room for everyone. If nature doesn't cull us, we are capable of culling ourselves.

May the most ruthless win, because who wants to live in a world of tolerant and accommodating creatures?

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

That is a survival strategy based on the idea that there isn't room for everyone. If nature doesn't cull us, we are capable of culling ourselves.

May the most ruthless win, because who wants to live in a world of tolerant and accommodating creatures?

Game theory suggests that cooperation is a more successful strategy and it is widely practiced in nature. Perhaps it should be more widely taught if we want to avoid a future similar to that depicted in Fallout?

 

[Will The Serious]

Leadership roles tend to go to the psychologically magalomanic personalities. Perhapse, if Socrates and other Greek philosophers were taught to us better, we would have more sane people who felt a greater sense of responsibility to step into those roles. I, for one, would never consider it sane to want to seek public office. That's prima facie evidence of deep psychosis.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Candleicious Ghost]

some of you might like this video. Just ignore the baity title. They do that on purpose the content was somewhat interesting

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Will The Serious]

Endosymbiosis
Just throwing this out there. The story of Lynn Margulis is quite interesting, and, unfortunately, very believable in the scientific community, too.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Endosymbiosis
Just throwing this out there. The story of Lynn Margulis is quite interesting, and, unfortunately, very believable in the scientific community, too.

When I first heard of the notion back in the 1960s, I had no problem with it. Scientific orthodoxy does make you work extremely hard to establish a new paradigm, however. I guess nerds don't like someone who isn't them showing that everything they've been professing for years is hokum. See also continental drift, later rebranded as plate tectonics.

The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were well understood. It is said, by the Guide, that such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.

The physicists encountered repeated failures while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars. They eventually announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning in this way: "If such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must have finite improbability. So all I have to do, in order to make one, is to work out how exactly improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!" He did this and managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. Unfortunately, shortly after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, he was lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists on the ground that he has became the one thing they couldn't stand most of all: "a smart arse".

from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The nucleus of eukaryotic cells might owe its existence to a virus.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Candleicious Ghost]

When I first heard of the notion back in the 1960s, I had no problem with it. Scientific orthodoxy does make you work extremely hard to establish a new paradigm, however. I guess nerds don't like someone who isn't them showing that everything they've been professing for years is hokum. See also continental drift, later rebranded as plate tectonics.


from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The nucleus of eukaryotic cells might owe its existence to a virus.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

Well humans do spread everywhere like one