9 ms·

I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is

• tcfunk 10y ago
  Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.
  • inetknght 10y ago
    There are a lot of people who shoot down science questions. In my experience, my questions have frequently (!) yielded results different from the normal. Now, as an adult entering middle agedness, I think less of such people and actively disassociate myself from them.
  • knightofmars 10y ago
    I'm not saying the following is what happened in your situation. As an anecdotal insight, I have friends who are K thru 8 school teachers teachers and they have to be extremely careful with this type of question. The reason is religion, specifically Christian religion. If they misstep and posit a view that contradicts a child's parent's religious views then they are, best case scenario, going to hear about it or, worst case scenario, going to have parents form a group whose sole purpose is ousting the teacher from the school. From my soap box, the religious self-policing, to me, is one of the more disconcerting aspects of the education system in the United States. As a personal observation, if a parent is worried that a single teacher providing an intentionally unbiased perspective on a philosophical topic is going to challenge a child's beliefs to the point where it overcomes a family's and church's indoctrination then it isn't the new perspective that's the problem. To this day I believe that "core curriculum" should include logic and philosophy with an emphasis greater than all other topics.
    • nkrisc 10y ago
      Critical thinking is the greatest threat to religious indoctrination as it relies on the acceptance of teachings as fact from authorities at face-value without question. If a child learns to be skeptical and questioning, they'll never learn to believe something that can't be supported given the currently available evidence, or may very well be contradicted by it.
      • smdz 10y ago
        Critical thinking is good - but kids can ask questions that are very difficult to answer (but we think of those as common knowledge) For example: This question > Why is 1+0 = 1 and not 10 Attempt to find an answer will generate more questions and it is a journey down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to do that. And upto high-school I learnt things that were based on assumptions that I kept questioning. Internet brought be some peace in my college years. Unfortunately, nowadays internet is also filled with fake/wrong/hoax/biased stuff.
        • pmalynin 10y ago
          Because zero is an additive identity. Might as well teach your kid number theory.
          • platz 10y ago
            > rabbit hole
            • pmalynin 10y ago
              But why not go down a rabbit hole with a child, I feel it could be a wonderful experience that will challenge your beliefs and that of the kid. I don't really get the fascination with ignoring these type of questions: "Dad why is the sky blue" - "Eat your ice cream Timmy".
              • 10y ago
  • tmahle 10y ago
    That's a shame! I've had the privilege of having and hearing many great discussions with scientists and their answer is almost always quite humble on this, but perhaps requires a bit of lateral thinking to arrive at. The idea is that yes, life could take forms we haven't thought of or forms that are extremely different from the life we see on Earth, but two things stop that from being studied as much as we might hope given how fundamentally interesting the concept is. First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.' I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!
• hammock 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
• marmshallow 10y ago
  Post from a few months ago: "Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994455
• Stanleyc23 10y ago
  You mean like the silicon based rock creatures in that one star trek episode? :)
  • CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    That was the Horta in the original series. It finally said "No kill I" after Spock mind melded with it. "The Devil in the Dark" Season 1 Episode 25
  • wfn 10y ago
    How about cellular automata simulating (spoiler) complex life forms in many dimensions, implemented in large polysaccharide constructions? :) (Greg Egan's "Wang's Carpets", later incorporated as a chapter into his "Diaspora".) http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997&pg=1 http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997&pg=1 (http://archive.is/ocAgN http://archive.is/ocAgN)
    • pavel_lishin 10y ago
      I always found that to be a little sad. iirc, the Carpets in the story are completely deterministic - while there is life there, it will always unambiguously lack free will. (Though I suppose they'll never know it.)
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
• arunix 10y ago
  Perhaps not what you meant, but the sun has a birth, a lifetime during which it throbs with 'life' and a death. Meanwhile the Earth has a heart (core), blood (mantle), skin (crust) etc, it also throbs with 'life' unlike many other dead worlds out there. Neptune is very much 'alive' compared to Uranus etc ...
• Balgair 10y ago
  Define: life ;)
  • alfonsodev 10y ago
    Yes, exactly, an example : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallest_organisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallest_organisms > Many biologists consider viruses to be non-living because they lack a cellular structure and cannot metabolize by themselves.
  • funkyy 10y ago
    Anything that goal is to look for the source of energy. This must be an actual goal and such a being must be oriented around this. I think this would create a simple definition.
• Kalium 10y ago
  > I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? We assume so! But we restrict our scarce looking-for-life resources to conditions where we know life can exist.
• jhedwards 10y ago
  If you enjoy pondering this question you should definitely check out the works of Stanislaw Lem. One of the main themes of his work is that alien life would be fundamentally different from life as we know it and that human consciousness, bound by the concepts that we use to understand our own world, would be unable to comprehend it. His novels contain a lot of imaginative examples of that kind of alien life, the most famous perhaps being the planet in Solaris.
• simonh 10y ago
  There are many very good reasons to expect a lot of the life in the universe to resemble ours at least in its chemistry. That's because, perhaps aside from dark matter, we know what elements the observable universe is made of and we know the chemistry and physics of those elements pretty well. Of these elements, we know that carbon chemistry is the richest and most complex of any of them by several orders of magnitude. Also the temperature range in which that chemistry reaches its peak complexity is the temperature range of Earth. This isn't anthropomorphism and it's hard to see any bias in play. This is simple extrapolation from the physics and chemistry of the universe we can observe within the some 14bn light years range visible to us. Of course there may be many different possible realisations if that chemistry. There may be many possible alternative structures other than DNA for things like heredity and alternative building blocks to proteins and such, but if there are such alternatives they are orders of magnitude more likely to be based on carbon chemistry than anything else. If you rank the elements in the observable universe in order if prevalence, other than Helium you get the same answer as if you rank the elements in order if prevalence in our bodies. We are made of the most common materials anywhere in the universe. In terms of composition there is nothing special about us at all. Finally, it's hard to see how natural selection or evolution are special to the conditions on Earth. There no real reason to believe that these would not apply to any other form of life. So it's absolutely important that we try to be objective and keep an open mind. There may be much about the universe we don't know. I've already mentioned dark matter. But from what we do know, there are good reasons to look for life in worlds somewhat like our own.
  • SophosQ 10y ago
    Silicon is a close contender to Carbon as evidenced by the creation of a bacterial enzyme that efficiently incorporates silicon into simple hydrocarbons[1]. [1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/researchers-take-small-step-toward-silicon-based-life http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/researchers-take-smal...
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I recommend you read 'The Vital Question' it touches on this topic. The short answer is that if you define 'life' to be engines which convert energy into additional engines then yes there is life outside our perception of biological life, but at that point 'life' is just 'chemistry'. And 'engine' is defined to be a self-contained collection of elements that you can feed energy into.[1] [1] I know not as crisp as it should be, but read the book its really interesting. Especially when you get to the point talking about geo-chemistry and bio-chemistry being the same thing pretty much.
• Razengan 10y ago
  > Even stuff like mars rover could be engineered to mine, manufacture and duplicate - eventually creating a colony of rovers that populate the planet and consume the planet's resources. That's one of my favorite thought experiments in approaching the definition of life: Suppose we build some robots with AI, and send them into space, and they land on some planet. Those robots can mine raw materials and build other robots like themselves. They're able to learn and teach each other, and improve their design and invent new things on their own. Fast forward a few hundred years. That planet now hosts a civilization of robots, with their own culture, planning their own excursions into space. To an external observer searching for Life™ and Intelligence™ in the cosmos, what would make our robot civilization fail to be qualified as such?