Viruses and Viruses Interacting with the Fundamental Force of Nature

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Dryson, Feb 18, 2020.

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  1. StarCruiser

    StarCruiser Commodore Commodore

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    Houston, we have a problem...
    I don't think there's any point in TRYING to explain anything to you. You appear to believe you know everything and everyone else has no clues...

    I fail to find any reason why these threads continue to exist. Random speculation, with out a clear purpose or understanding of scientific principles serves no purpose...
     
  2. Asbo Zaprudder

    Asbo Zaprudder Admiral Admiral

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    I foresee the demise of this and other threads, if not the entire forum, by a form of virus that appears to be spreading out of control.
     
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  3. Dryson

    Dryson Commodore Commodore

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    I don't think there's any point in TRYING to explain anything to you. You appear to believe you know everything and everyone else has no clues...

    I fail to find any reason why these threads continue to exist. Random speculation, with out a clear purpose or understanding of scientific principles serves no purpose...


    I never said that I believe to know everything, you said that. Most of the time humans really don't a have clue, other than what is three feet in front of their nose or Earth based. There is no way that any book based science, from any reputable source can say for certain that bacteria doesn't or never fed on the primordial forces of nature.

    The simple reason being, humanity hasn't even left the Universe. Therefore there is no way for any reputable scientist to say with certainty that they know how life survived billions of years ago in Post-Big Bang.

    Science is not reading the same set of science books over and over that were written a 100 years ago to determine without any interpretation what the entire Universe, galaxy, let alone our solar system really is without first leaving the Earth to conduct real research.

    Science is slowing becoming the apathetic crutch of humanity.
     
  4. Spot261

    Spot261 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    No, it's merely that you aren't discussing science. You don't even seem to know what science is.

    Again, if we cannot test something science has nothing to say on the matter. If we have no reason to suspect something we can't justify forming hypotheses about it. That process of forming paradigms and emergent models from which hypotheses are derived and then tested is how science works, it is what the word means.

    You have no reason to expect that bacteria live on dark matter, we don't even know what dark matter is. It's just a useful term for all the stuff we can't see but know must be out there to balance the books on gravity.

    We can't get there because we don't have anything like the resources or technology to even make the attempt, much less the theoretical grounding to justify looking even if we do find a way to bypass relativity and traverse the distances involved. I've already explained to you why your imagined ecosystem of two organisms, of which only one is active, is not (and cannot be) viable. That doesn't require science, it's a simple matter of mathematics and not particularly advanced mathematics at that.

    If you want to write sci fi, go ahead and post in in the relevant section, but this is not in any way informative or even suggestive of real or possible research.
     
  5. Dryson

    Dryson Commodore Commodore

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    Viruses and bacteria are intelligent as they have desire and want, otherwise they wouldn't have the need to replicate themselves in as many cells as possible.

    https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201105

    Water is a critical molecule for human life, and, because it is abundant in the interstellar medium, it also plays an important role in the life of molecular clouds and the stars and planets that form in them. Radiation from water vapor helps to cool a collapsing cloud of material, allowing it to dissipate heat and thereby shrink until a new star can develop. Water ice acts as a glue on dust grains, helping them coagulate into planetesimals and then, it is thought, into planets. Liquid water transports molecules on planetary surfaces where they can facilitate complex chemistry.

    https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/su201105

    Water in molecular clouds plays an important role as radiation from water vapor in the molecular cloud helps cool a collapsing cloud of material, allowing it to dissipate heat and thereby shrink until a new star can develop.

    Within these molecular clouds would exist life forms capable of surviving in space without the need for oxygen but could create oxygen as a bi-product of consuming other elements within the slowly collapsing molecular cloud. As rocky planets, such as Earth became cooler themselves due to water settling on the rocky planet as the molecular cloud collapsed into a new star, the life forms within the watery regions of the molecular cloud settled on the rocky planet. With new elements to feed on the life forms in the molecular cloud adapted and evolved to become something new. New forms of life excreting new forms of excrement that other newly adapted and evolved forms of bacteria fed as well. The process continuing until plant life evolved to use the excreted bio-mass in the soil to grow from. Thus bacteria that once existed molecular clouds settling on planets to eventually become sentient life.


    Life - the ability to ingest an element, convert that element using a chemical process to create a usable source of energy and then through another chemical process, convert the unneeded remainder of the original element into excrement that would be used by another life form.

    The last time I checked, a rock has never taken a 8472 on anyone. Therefore it if 8472's, then it is a life form with intelligence.


    The Vulcans say that "Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide."

    I seriously doubt that the Vulcan's meant for someone to wear a bucket of cement on their head. It makes breathing somewhat difficult.

    If it troubles you to know that humans ingest the excrement of plants in the form of oxygen, then I suggest not breathing.
     
  6. Asbo Zaprudder

    Asbo Zaprudder Admiral Admiral

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    I think I've had enough excrement for today. I'm outta here.
     
  7. Spot261

    Spot261 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The Vulcans don't say anything.

    They don't exist, nor do species 8472.

    Does it not ring alarm bells that every organism you mention in your post is imaginary?

    Yet again, you CANNOT have a two organism ecosystem with one being dormant. The end result is one preys on the other until it exhausts it's food source. If it exists entirely on the excrement of the other then that also is a finite resource.

    It is a self limiting system.

    Please stop embarrassing yourself.
     
    Last edited: Feb 29, 2020
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  8. Dryson

    Dryson Commodore Commodore

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    https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17390-why-microbes-are-smarter-than-you-thought/

    [SIZE=5]Communication[/SIZE]
    Bacteria talk to each other with chemicals. They do so for a host of reasons, some of them hard to understand unless you are another bacterium (or a dedicated bacteriologist), but one of the most straightforward is demonstrated by Bacillus subtilis

    [SIZE=5]Decision-making[/SIZE]
    Many single-celled organisms can work out how many other bacteria of their own species, are in their vicinity – an ability known as “quorum sensing”.

    Each individual bacterium releases a small amount of a chemical into the surrounding area – a chemical that it can detect through receptors on its outer wall. If there are lots of other bacteria around, all releasing the same chemical, levels can reach a critical point and trigger a change in behaviour.
     
  9. Spot261

    Spot261 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I presume you've read Orson Scott Card?
     
  10. Dryson

    Dryson Commodore Commodore

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    https://www.nasa.gov/feature/experiments-in-space-how-will-bacteria-adapt-in-microgravity

    The MVP Cell-02 mission will be studying how organisms evolve and adapt in a harsh space environment. Dr. Craig Everroad (PI) and team (Brad Bebout, Ph.D.; Jessica Koehne, Ph.D.; Antonio Ricco, Ph.D) are sending the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to a controlled environment onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Over the course of three weeks, the team will watch cultures of B. subtilis adapt and evolve over 1,000 generations of growth in their specifically modified environmental hardware. Research from this experiment will help scientists understand the effects of the spaceflight environment on microbial evolutionary processes.

    “The spores stay in stasis for quite a while and it’s easy to wake them up with only a drop of growth media,” said Dr. Everroad. “In addition, you want to have something with high tolerance and not needing to have diligent care and attention, as astronauts have other duties and expectations,” he explained.

    No, I won't ever read anything written by OSC.

    Based on what NASA has found bacteria travelling through space would be spore form until they came in contact with a drop of growth media and revive. If Dark Matter does contain growth media and spores came in contact with the growth media in the Dark Matter, the spores could become active.
     
  11. Spot261

    Spot261 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    He's not everyone's cup of tea but interestingly the Ender Series actually feature a virus much like the ideas you describe, which communicates between it's own individual organisms and intentionally restructures existing biospheres.

    Unfortunately OSC's grasp of evolutionary theory is shaky and suggests that all organisms would inherently tend to act towards a Gaia like optimisation of the biosphere, essentially having "natural" evolution driven by the need to regulate the effects of climate shifts rather than a more mechanistic, intentionless (and realistic) conventional view of gene selection.
     
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  12. Dryson

    Dryson Commodore Commodore

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    Of course organisms would instinctively act to protect their biosphere. If you lived in a biosphere where humans were mucking up your environment causing your species to die off, wouldn't you find a way to regulate the effects of climate shifts to reduce the number of species causing yours to die off?

    If a large group of viruses suddenly realized that their numbers were dwindling and that they could no longer hear the song of their entire viral species using quorum sensing, wouldn't you think they would do something about it?
    Most of the time the viruses will go into spore mode until the environment is more favorable. Just like the Tardigrade goes into a type of hibernation until the environment is more favorable.

    Eventually though, one of the viruses is going to have an, evolutionary snap, if you will. Instead of simply becoming spores and cowering away from the fight, the virus would come after humanity inflicting severe causalities in the human populace until us humans got their message. At that point though the virus would have developed human emotional traits, such as ego and hate. Traits that are merely chemical stimulus to begin with, traits would make the evolved virus part of natural selection, rather sentient natural selection.

    Natural Selection - the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

    In this aspect an organism has adapted to survive its environment by becoming a spore until more favorable conditions exist to produce more offspring.

    Sentient Natural Selection - the process whereby organisms that have adapted to their environment and have survived for millions of years by producing offspring plan and devise ways to completely eradicate another organism totally that is limiting the organism from producing offspring.

    In this aspect an SNS organism has adapted to survive its environment by systematically eradicating another SNS organism that is threatening its offspring, while the SNS organism is producing offspring as well as the SNS organism going into spore mode to ensure its species will survive the environment. When the environment, war, is finished or comes to a stand still, spores of the SNS organisms begin reproducing, hoping to gain an advantage over the other SNS organism for dominance.

    Most of the time viruses and bacteria go into a state of dormancy based on climate reasons mostly, too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. The SNS organism however would adapt and even possible change the effects of climate in their favor. One area could be that the virus develops a new means of producing a lot of methane gas that would cause humans, for example, to slowly suffocate over time. Thus the SNS organism would adapt and control its environment to ensure that the organism effecting the SNS organisms environment, in this case, humans, are eradicated.

    Most viruses seek out environments in which their produce offspring. The really nasty ones are able to effect the climates to reign supreme. Once viral supremacy has been achieved the SNS organism would go into a state of dormancy as it returns to a pre-war level of Natural Selection.
     
  13. Spot261

    Spot261 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Nope. An organism acts to enhance the survival of a genome based on selection pressures which have shaped it's behaviour in the past. The long term impact of those behaviours on the wider biosphere may well be catastrophic, the genes which make up the organism cannot "predict" outcomes the way you suggest.

    That's exactly what is happening. Humans are slowly rendering the biosphere inhabitable for themselves. Species are dying out daily because they have no mechanism to respond, nor a means of realising they even need to. Each organism sees what is in front of it, not the bigger picture. Evolution is blind by definition.

    "Realising" something requires cognition. It requires interconnected networks of information processing within the organism.

    Some species such as ants can effectively become adaptive as an emergent property but only within pre established parameters. They cannot collectively conceptualise abstract ideas or "think" about the world around them.

    Viruses possess no mechanism to develop abstract thought or cognition, they have no self awareness and cannot plan. They can only adapt or die and that is a function of genetic variance, not intelligence.

    They have no message to send, they are not aware we exist, they are not a political entity.

    Human emotions cannot exist without an incredibly complex neural system which viruses lack.

    Yes.

    Not a process with a grand design or one over which species can exert executive or forward thinking control, especially not single celled lifeforms even if they do have rudimentary ability to communicate. What communication has been observed is akin to worker bees dancing to illustrate the location of pollen, a code. Not complex language to express novel concepts.

    In which case it cannot feed and thus incompatible with your proposed tardigrade ecosystem.

    Species do not do this outside of sci fi.

    We are the closest observed facsimile of such a concept and we are far from being able to claim that we have planned our own evolution or devised ways to compete with rival species on an evolutionary scale by our own volition.
     
  14. { Emilia }

    { Emilia } Cute but deadly Moderator

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    Since this thread isn’t actually about science, I’ll go ahead and lock it.
     
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