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]

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[Candleicious Ghost]

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

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[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