9 ms·

First Support for a Physics Theory of Life

98 points by robinhouston 9y ago

meri_dian 9y ago
>"The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”" This makes sense. Life exists here on earth, I believe it got here through natural processes, and so it seems that life should be expected in the right circumstances. But this begs the question, has life arisen independently from other existing life in the last 4 billion years? All known life shares the same fundamental genetic code and appears to descend from a single common ancestor. Are we to believe that the founder population of all life on earth, from which the GCA hailed, is the only instance of life on earth arising directly from inanimate matter? Or has life arisen independently between 4 billion years ago and now, just to be out-competed by existing life forms? Or were conditions just right 4 billion years ago to allow for the spontaneous generation of local-entropy reducing molecular agents (which evolved into life), and ever since conditions have been wrong for the generation of life?
- lend000 9y ago
  If self-replicating organisms did spontaneously emerge multiple times in history (which is possible, although I think many, including England, overestimate the statistical likelihood of complex things coming together so perfectly), they were likely eaten immediately by more refined life forms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
  - hetman 9y ago
    I never understood this line of thinking (it kind of reminds me of the sci-fi trope of the killer virus from outer space). In order for two life forms to be able to interact significantly at a bio-chemical level (let alone eat each other), one would imagine their bio-chemistry would have to be highly compatible. That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent abiogenesis events.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Yes, I immediately thought of the final scene of Anathem, when I read GP comment.
    - gnaritas 9y ago
      > That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent abiogenesis events. Not at all, you're presuming there are many different ways life could work, that might not be the case at all. It's entirely possible there's only one or very few possible recipes for life so no matter how many abiogenesis events occur, they produce the same kind of life. A simple analogy, wood burns, fire is fire, you don't expect every different occurrence of fire in nature to produce a new and incompatible type of fire. Life could be the same, it could be that anywhere carbon based life forms it's basically the same basic recipe and thus biologically compatible with all other forms of carbon based life.
      - didgeoridoo 9y ago
        > It's entirely possible there's only one or very few possible recipes for life so no matter how many abiogenesis events occur, they produce the same kind of life. Presumably this is even MORE likely if the independent lifeforms both emerged in similar physical & chemical environments.
        gnaritas 9y ago
        Agreed.
    - didgeoridoo 9y ago
      Is this necessarily true though? Abiotic synthesis of amino acids is a thing. Might Organism T1 and Organism T2 still be composed of similar basic building blocks, even if they don't share organic ancestry?
    - Retra 9y ago
      They don't have to eat each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event The vast majority of life on Earth has been wiped out simply because other life created inhospitable conditions for them. Even if multiple events created life, if the wrong life is created, it will die.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Also I don't understand how the straightforward rebuttal to Jeremy England's thesis is addressed: Since the primordials soup times, we also have energy hitting inanimate matter. On this planet. And also we have the other planets in our solar system. Why aren't we finding lots of bacteria being spontaneously generated everywhere?
  - api 9y ago
    The world is absolutely crawling with bacteria and fungi that will consume any precursors or early proto-life. RNA and protein sequences are delicious. Anything new is going to just get immediately eaten by the better adapted more advanced lifeforms that are everywhere, even in the deep crust, in arctic ice, and in the deepest parts of the ocean. There are no sterile places left.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      That's a wishful explanation. So everywhere and in every instance, DNA-based life went and devoured all other life? Really? OK, so what about on Mars?
      - xenadu02 9y ago
        You misunderstand. It isn't that a novel form of primitive life arises then gets eaten; the building-blocks necessary for a novel form of life to arise get eaten before those building-blocks have much chance of interact at all. From what we can tell it would probably take many millions of years of chemical interactions in the appropriate conditions after being seeded with carbon-based molecules from comet/space impacts (since carbon compounds seem to be relatively common). It seems likely that life will spread and adapt somewhat quickly since it is usually easier to find new resources than enter an arms-race over existing resources. That leaves a very narrow window of time (in evolutionary terms) for life to arise >1 time independently then evolve enough to be on equal footing with the other form(s). It also seems far more likely that if this very rare event takes place one of two things happen: 1. One form of life has a head-start in the arms race and overtakes the other, completely wiping it out 2. The two forms of life are compatible enough to exchange genetic material because they evolved from the same raw building blocks deposited on the planet; though it mostly fails to produce viable offspring in a few cases the forms successfully cross and the new third form of life successfully outcompetes its progenitor forms. As for Mars, it seems likely that life never evolved there at all. The next best explanation seems to be life never got beyond single-cell organisms and struggled to eek out a short existence. Before Mars dried out and/or the massive hemisphere-shattering impact struck and erased what traces of life once existed.
- api 9y ago
  > has life arisen independently from other existing life in the last 4 billion years? It depends on how you define life. If viruses are a life form then you have one. If self-replicating meta-structures composed of multiple different species interacting such as lichen count as separate life forms made of other life then that might count too. On the more far-out side of theoretical biology people have proposed culture/memes and the modern high-tech economy as a new form of life that has emerged from previous life. If solar power (or fusion) becomes ubiquitous and it learns to recycle nearly all its waste it will become an ecologically self-sufficient form of life, and if AI ever gets good enough to have machines designing and producing machines it could "fork" and become a completely independent form of life.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    Viruses are completely dependent on the rest of life, and so was their origin. They use the same DNA, RNA and proteins as everything else. They certainly didn't arise independently.
- chongli 9y ago
  appears to descend from a single common ancestor A universal common ancestor does not imply that there was only one organism at that time. All humans share a common female ancestor dubbed Mitochondrial Eve. [0] She was not the only woman in the world when she was alive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
lend000 9y ago
Regarding the latter half of this article, I see no reason why there is a need to distinguish information processing from evolution -- it just so happens that complex self-replicating structures can compete better when they respond to information, and so they are evolutionarily favored. The real challenge is modeling evolution mathematically. I don't see why Darwinian evolution is often considered a property of life, as opposed to life being the prime example of the fundamental, logical algorithm of evolution. That is, any self-replicating, changing system will tend toward competitiveness in its environment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
joobus 9y ago
> Since then, England, a 35-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been testing aspects of his idea in computer simulations. Claiming life was created because a computer said so will convince no one requiring physical proof. The bar for evidence is too low with this experiment.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  But it could at some point provide the key ingredients and conditions to replicate it. Lacking a laboratory of Earth's scale one could use supercomputing (at some point, we're not there yet) to figure out necessary and sufficient conditions, after which hopefully any chemistry student could replicate in the lab with that knowledge. Seems sci-fi now, but I could imagine this happening in a few decades.
- ingenuous2 9y ago
  Some people believe that a lower bar is more achievable, and will provide learning, feedback, and encouragement to surpass a higher bar.
ABCLAW 9y ago
Forgive me if I'm dense, but I read the article twice and don't see how this is anything more than a well known fact getting some science journalism coverage to seem important. Is the big news here that someone in physics has applied a crude model to the very well understood theory of abiogenesis? We've literally ran this experiment in vitro. With real chemicals. I'm not sure how the entropic basis of the theory provides any insight beyond 'capacity for work can generate things that have capacity for work', which we knew. The big question isn't, and wasn't, whether a system with primordial chemicals could generate self-replicating reactions and structures - you could figure that out by looking in a mirror. It's what those primordial cycles actually were. Edit: Looks like the dude's former supervisor working in chem isn't full of shit like the rest of the article is: Shakhnovich said, but “Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.” TLDR - might be interesting in niche modeling field, but has nothing to do with origins of life.
- api 9y ago
  There's no well understood theory of abiogenesis. For something to be a theory it must be supported by repeatable experiment and/or repeatable observation. The difference between hypothesis and theory is very important. There are many good hypotheses on abiogenesis but until someone demonstrates rudimentary repeatable abiogenesis in the lab without "hand-holding" interventions then it's not a theory. (Or alternately finds a way to observe strong evidence for abiogenesis and how it occurred in the fossil record in a reproducible way that is specific enough to rule out other explanations for the same data.)
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Your general description is correct, but your specific application is not; because you've implicitly in the latter limited empirical confirmation such as to juatify the label theort to direct observation or indirect observation that admits no other explanation. Neither is required, and the latter would move it beyond theory to irrefutable fact, as an observation “that is specific enough to rule out other explanations”, obviously, rules out all other explanations.)
svachalek 9y ago
Here's a key paragraph that really walks back a lot of the language in the first half of the article. Here he's just stating physics may be much friendlier to the initial conditions for abiogenesis than previously believed: “In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess” based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life- or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.”
- m_mueller 9y ago
  I still like the article a lot, it gives the right amount of details to get me interested in the topic and starting a hunt for information on google scholar.
strainer 9y ago
As a fair example of structure coalescing from randomness and simple physics,I have to hawk this* example called 'bloop' from my web 3d physics project. It is a cloud of gravitating bodies with a simple 'sticky' force between close neighbours, the strength of which varies like breeze. I find it reminiscent of the old 'bag in the wind' video. [*] https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12 https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12 I come upon things like this while playing with and debugging different forces. One very early, imploding world with simple gravity, created a surprising 'aleph-like' blob of flickering shapely artifacts. It blew my socks off but it was before proper version control and I'd have to do archeology to recreate it. Better to keep improving the physics and see what can pop up next ...
- rytill 9y ago
  Cool demo. Reminds me of a music visualizer.
  - strainer 9y ago
    Thanks. Adding sounds is on my list :)
graycat 9y ago
> He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might foster self-replication. (As he explained it in 2014, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”) Then the atoms will become happy and try to do more of that to become more happy? My BS detector is screaming loudly. First, this stuff about the second law of thermodynamics leaves me cold: > the second law of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly spreads and the entropy of the universe always increases. (The second law is true because there are more ways for energy to be spread out among particles than to be concentrated, so as particles move around and interact, the odds favor their energy becoming increasingly shared.) BS. That argument has a huge, hidden assumption, that we are looking at an inert gas in a bottle. So, there are no chemical reactions, etc. Then there are lots of possible configurations. Try that with some sticky ping pong balls and soon will have just a solid clump with only configuration. Try that with a lot of billiard balls, and soon they will arrange themselves on the bottom of the container with a lot of hexagons and tetrahedra, that is, with a relatively few number of configurations. So, to discuss how life began, let's f'get about the second law. Instead, we know that we can cook chemicals and get amino acids. Why? Because get chemical reactions where the atoms stick together, and it would take energy to split them apart again. Then if we cook for a few hundred million more years, we can get a configuration that can consume energy from its environment and reproduce itself. Then we are off to the races because what took a billion years to do the first time now just takes the time to reproduce. Then with small errors in the reproduction process and lots of reproduction, we get forms of life that are better at extracting energy from the environment and reproduce faster; soon that life form becomes relatively common, in that sense, dominates. Eventually we get a very creative farmer and expert with domestic animals, stone, wood, and metal with a very fertile wife, and they have lots of kids who also do really well. There are some questions and issues, but IMHO the model for the second law of inert atoms of a gas in a bottle is nearly irrelevant.
empath75 9y ago
When I was in vegas, the thought occurred to me that cities were structures designed to dissipate economic energy. Money flows into vegas through the big casinos and gradually works its way out through the rest of the city, forming vortexes and whirlpools of economic activity, of lower and lower intensity as you move out from the city center, until it gradually fades out into desert.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  Interesting. How does this interact with the idea of trickle-down economics?
  - gonvaled 9y ago
    Trickle down is a completely uninteresting tautology: money is used by the wealthy, so it "trickles down". The more interesting question is if, while tricling down, people improve their life quality. Far from true.
    - RangerScience 9y ago
      Oh I agree! But the idea of wealth concentration that then tapers out as a function of distance from the city center bears at least a superficial resemblance. Perhaps why one works and the other doesn't is that personal wealth accumulation IS like water: it'll get stuck in local maxima, etc - whereas city wealth accumulation is more like sand; as it piles on top you get landslides that distribute.
RangerScience 9y ago
I wonder if there's a way to adapt this to AI / machine learning. To my uneducated eye, there's a distinct similarity between the "breaking and reforming" of [simulated] physical bonds, and the training of a neural net. If you consider your training data (or other "external sensors") as the environmental forcing factors... do you process "information" instead of "energy"?
sleavey 9y ago
The article seems to suggest he's simulating a "soup" of many different molecules and seeing which combinations lead to sustained reactions. Nick Lane's book "The Vital Question" [1] discounts the primordial soup idea (that life arose in tidal pools or streams near volcanos due to the right chemical mixture being present in the water at that time) and suggests underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents as the location of the first formation of life. The hydrothermal vents produced (see also his recent paper [2]) alkaline fluids which mixed with acidic seawater within micropores provided by the geological structures of a particular type of vent. This, he hypothesises, led to proton gradients which are essential for life. Of course, both these guys are experts at the top of their fields, at respected institutes. I possess neither of those qualities. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812 https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Comp... [2] http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-vents-2/ http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydro...

98 points by robinhouston 9y ago

>"The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”" This makes sense. Life exists here on earth, I believe it got here through natural processes, and so it seems that life should be expected in the right circumstances. But this begs the question, has life arisen independently from other existing life in the last 4 billion years? All known life shares the same fundamental genetic code and appears to descend from a single common ancestor. Are we to believe that the founder population of all life on earth, from which the GCA hailed, is the only instance of life on earth arising directly from inanimate matter? Or has life arisen independently between 4 billion years ago and now, just to be out-competed by existing life forms? Or were conditions just right 4 billion years ago to allow for the spontaneous generation of local-entropy reducing molecular agents (which evolved into life), and ever since conditions have been wrong for the generation of life?

lend000 9y ago
If self-replicating organisms did spontaneously emerge multiple times in history (which is possible, although I think many, including England, overestimate the statistical likelihood of complex things coming together so perfectly), they were likely eaten immediately by more refined life forms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
- hetman 9y ago
  I never understood this line of thinking (it kind of reminds me of the sci-fi trope of the killer virus from outer space). In order for two life forms to be able to interact significantly at a bio-chemical level (let alone eat each other), one would imagine their bio-chemistry would have to be highly compatible. That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent abiogenesis events.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yes, I immediately thought of the final scene of Anathem, when I read GP comment.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    > That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent abiogenesis events. Not at all, you're presuming there are many different ways life could work, that might not be the case at all. It's entirely possible there's only one or very few possible recipes for life so no matter how many abiogenesis events occur, they produce the same kind of life. A simple analogy, wood burns, fire is fire, you don't expect every different occurrence of fire in nature to produce a new and incompatible type of fire. Life could be the same, it could be that anywhere carbon based life forms it's basically the same basic recipe and thus biologically compatible with all other forms of carbon based life.
    - didgeoridoo 9y ago
      > It's entirely possible there's only one or very few possible recipes for life so no matter how many abiogenesis events occur, they produce the same kind of life. Presumably this is even MORE likely if the independent lifeforms both emerged in similar physical & chemical environments.
      - gnaritas 9y ago
        Agreed.
  - didgeoridoo 9y ago
    Is this necessarily true though? Abiotic synthesis of amino acids is a thing. Might Organism T1 and Organism T2 still be composed of similar basic building blocks, even if they don't share organic ancestry?
  - Retra 9y ago
    They don't have to eat each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event The vast majority of life on Earth has been wiped out simply because other life created inhospitable conditions for them. Even if multiple events created life, if the wrong life is created, it will die.
EGreg 9y ago
Also I don't understand how the straightforward rebuttal to Jeremy England's thesis is addressed: Since the primordials soup times, we also have energy hitting inanimate matter. On this planet. And also we have the other planets in our solar system. Why aren't we finding lots of bacteria being spontaneously generated everywhere?
- api 9y ago
  The world is absolutely crawling with bacteria and fungi that will consume any precursors or early proto-life. RNA and protein sequences are delicious. Anything new is going to just get immediately eaten by the better adapted more advanced lifeforms that are everywhere, even in the deep crust, in arctic ice, and in the deepest parts of the ocean. There are no sterile places left.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    That's a wishful explanation. So everywhere and in every instance, DNA-based life went and devoured all other life? Really? OK, so what about on Mars?
    - xenadu02 9y ago
      You misunderstand. It isn't that a novel form of primitive life arises then gets eaten; the building-blocks necessary for a novel form of life to arise get eaten before those building-blocks have much chance of interact at all. From what we can tell it would probably take many millions of years of chemical interactions in the appropriate conditions after being seeded with carbon-based molecules from comet/space impacts (since carbon compounds seem to be relatively common). It seems likely that life will spread and adapt somewhat quickly since it is usually easier to find new resources than enter an arms-race over existing resources. That leaves a very narrow window of time (in evolutionary terms) for life to arise >1 time independently then evolve enough to be on equal footing with the other form(s). It also seems far more likely that if this very rare event takes place one of two things happen: 1. One form of life has a head-start in the arms race and overtakes the other, completely wiping it out 2. The two forms of life are compatible enough to exchange genetic material because they evolved from the same raw building blocks deposited on the planet; though it mostly fails to produce viable offspring in a few cases the forms successfully cross and the new third form of life successfully outcompetes its progenitor forms. As for Mars, it seems likely that life never evolved there at all. The next best explanation seems to be life never got beyond single-cell organisms and struggled to eek out a short existence. Before Mars dried out and/or the massive hemisphere-shattering impact struck and erased what traces of life once existed.
api 9y ago
> has life arisen independently from other existing life in the last 4 billion years? It depends on how you define life. If viruses are a life form then you have one. If self-replicating meta-structures composed of multiple different species interacting such as lichen count as separate life forms made of other life then that might count too. On the more far-out side of theoretical biology people have proposed culture/memes and the modern high-tech economy as a new form of life that has emerged from previous life. If solar power (or fusion) becomes ubiquitous and it learns to recycle nearly all its waste it will become an ecologically self-sufficient form of life, and if AI ever gets good enough to have machines designing and producing machines it could "fork" and become a completely independent form of life.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  Viruses are completely dependent on the rest of life, and so was their origin. They use the same DNA, RNA and proteins as everything else. They certainly didn't arise independently.
chongli 9y ago
appears to descend from a single common ancestor A universal common ancestor does not imply that there was only one organism at that time. All humans share a common female ancestor dubbed Mitochondrial Eve. [0] She was not the only woman in the world when she was alive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

lend000 9y ago

Regarding the latter half of this article, I see no reason why there is a need to distinguish information processing from evolution -- it just so happens that complex self-replicating structures can compete better when they respond to information, and so they are evolutionarily favored. The real challenge is modeling evolution mathematically. I don't see why Darwinian evolution is often considered a property of life, as opposed to life being the prime example of the fundamental, logical algorithm of evolution. That is, any self-replicating, changing system will tend toward competitiveness in its environment.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

joobus 9y ago

> Since then, England, a 35-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been testing aspects of his idea in computer simulations. Claiming life was created because a computer said so will convince no one requiring physical proof. The bar for evidence is too low with this experiment.

m_mueller 9y ago
But it could at some point provide the key ingredients and conditions to replicate it. Lacking a laboratory of Earth's scale one could use supercomputing (at some point, we're not there yet) to figure out necessary and sufficient conditions, after which hopefully any chemistry student could replicate in the lab with that knowledge. Seems sci-fi now, but I could imagine this happening in a few decades.
ingenuous2 9y ago
Some people believe that a lower bar is more achievable, and will provide learning, feedback, and encouragement to surpass a higher bar.

ABCLAW 9y ago

Forgive me if I'm dense, but I read the article twice and don't see how this is anything more than a well known fact getting some science journalism coverage to seem important. Is the big news here that someone in physics has applied a crude model to the very well understood theory of abiogenesis? We've literally ran this experiment in vitro. With real chemicals. I'm not sure how the entropic basis of the theory provides any insight beyond 'capacity for work can generate things that have capacity for work', which we knew. The big question isn't, and wasn't, whether a system with primordial chemicals could generate self-replicating reactions and structures - you could figure that out by looking in a mirror. It's what those primordial cycles actually were. Edit: Looks like the dude's former supervisor working in chem isn't full of shit like the rest of the article is: Shakhnovich said, but “Jeremy’s work represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.” TLDR - might be interesting in niche modeling field, but has nothing to do with origins of life.

api 9y ago
There's no well understood theory of abiogenesis. For something to be a theory it must be supported by repeatable experiment and/or repeatable observation. The difference between hypothesis and theory is very important. There are many good hypotheses on abiogenesis but until someone demonstrates rudimentary repeatable abiogenesis in the lab without "hand-holding" interventions then it's not a theory. (Or alternately finds a way to observe strong evidence for abiogenesis and how it occurred in the fossil record in a reproducible way that is specific enough to rule out other explanations for the same data.)
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Your general description is correct, but your specific application is not; because you've implicitly in the latter limited empirical confirmation such as to juatify the label theort to direct observation or indirect observation that admits no other explanation. Neither is required, and the latter would move it beyond theory to irrefutable fact, as an observation “that is specific enough to rule out other explanations”, obviously, rules out all other explanations.)

svachalek 9y ago

Here's a key paragraph that really walks back a lot of the language in the first half of the article. Here he's just stating physics may be much friendlier to the initial conditions for abiogenesis than previously believed: “In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess” based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life- or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.”

m_mueller 9y ago
I still like the article a lot, it gives the right amount of details to get me interested in the topic and starting a hunt for information on google scholar.

strainer 9y ago

As a fair example of structure coalescing from randomness and simple physics,I have to hawk this* example called 'bloop' from my web 3d physics project. It is a cloud of gravitating bodies with a simple 'sticky' force between close neighbours, the strength of which varies like breeze. I find it reminiscent of the old 'bag in the wind' video. [*] https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12 https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12 I come upon things like this while playing with and debugging different forces. One very early, imploding world with simple gravity, created a surprising 'aleph-like' blob of flickering shapely artifacts. It blew my socks off but it was before proper version control and I'd have to do archeology to recreate it. Better to keep improving the physics and see what can pop up next ...

rytill 9y ago
Cool demo. Reminds me of a music visualizer.
- strainer 9y ago
  Thanks. Adding sounds is on my list :)

graycat 9y ago

> He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might foster self-replication. (As he explained it in 2014, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”) Then the atoms will become happy and try to do more of that to become more happy? My BS detector is screaming loudly. First, this stuff about the second law of thermodynamics leaves me cold: > the second law of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly spreads and the entropy of the universe always increases. (The second law is true because there are more ways for energy to be spread out among particles than to be concentrated, so as particles move around and interact, the odds favor their energy becoming increasingly shared.) BS. That argument has a huge, hidden assumption, that we are looking at an inert gas in a bottle. So, there are no chemical reactions, etc. Then there are lots of possible configurations. Try that with some sticky ping pong balls and soon will have just a solid clump with only configuration. Try that with a lot of billiard balls, and soon they will arrange themselves on the bottom of the container with a lot of hexagons and tetrahedra, that is, with a relatively few number of configurations. So, to discuss how life began, let's f'get about the second law. Instead, we know that we can cook chemicals and get amino acids. Why? Because get chemical reactions where the atoms stick together, and it would take energy to split them apart again. Then if we cook for a few hundred million more years, we can get a configuration that can consume energy from its environment and reproduce itself. Then we are off to the races because what took a billion years to do the first time now just takes the time to reproduce. Then with small errors in the reproduction process and lots of reproduction, we get forms of life that are better at extracting energy from the environment and reproduce faster; soon that life form becomes relatively common, in that sense, dominates. Eventually we get a very creative farmer and expert with domestic animals, stone, wood, and metal with a very fertile wife, and they have lots of kids who also do really well. There are some questions and issues, but IMHO the model for the second law of inert atoms of a gas in a bottle is nearly irrelevant.

empath75 9y ago

When I was in vegas, the thought occurred to me that cities were structures designed to dissipate economic energy. Money flows into vegas through the big casinos and gradually works its way out through the rest of the city, forming vortexes and whirlpools of economic activity, of lower and lower intensity as you move out from the city center, until it gradually fades out into desert.

RangerScience 9y ago
Interesting. How does this interact with the idea of trickle-down economics?
- gonvaled 9y ago
  Trickle down is a completely uninteresting tautology: money is used by the wealthy, so it "trickles down". The more interesting question is if, while tricling down, people improve their life quality. Far from true.
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    Oh I agree! But the idea of wealth concentration that then tapers out as a function of distance from the city center bears at least a superficial resemblance. Perhaps why one works and the other doesn't is that personal wealth accumulation IS like water: it'll get stuck in local maxima, etc - whereas city wealth accumulation is more like sand; as it piles on top you get landslides that distribute.

RangerScience 9y ago

I wonder if there's a way to adapt this to AI / machine learning. To my uneducated eye, there's a distinct similarity between the "breaking and reforming" of [simulated] physical bonds, and the training of a neural net. If you consider your training data (or other "external sensors") as the environmental forcing factors... do you process "information" instead of "energy"?

sleavey 9y ago

The article seems to suggest he's simulating a "soup" of many different molecules and seeing which combinations lead to sustained reactions. Nick Lane's book "The Vital Question" [1] discounts the primordial soup idea (that life arose in tidal pools or streams near volcanos due to the right chemical mixture being present in the water at that time) and suggests underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents as the location of the first formation of life. The hydrothermal vents produced (see also his recent paper [2]) alkaline fluids which mixed with acidic seawater within micropores provided by the geological structures of a particular type of vent. This, he hypothesises, led to proton gradients which are essential for life. Of course, both these guys are experts at the top of their fields, at respected institutes. I possess neither of those qualities. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/0393088812 https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Comp... [2] http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-vents-2/ http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydro...