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If you assume that a storm put together a Boeing 707 randomly, and there are many storms in the Universe, then yes there will be a good chance for there being B

If you assume that a storm put together a Boeing 707 randomly, and there are many storms in the Universe, then yes there will be a good chance for there being Boeings all over. Not to creatroll the discussion, but the probability of occurrence for each individual independent event that led up to what is life on Earth, in each branch of the tree of life, on each evolutionary path, is so low that number of planets in the Universe multiplied by all the milliseconds in the history of the Universe will not get very far toward reasonable chances. Take, for instance, a protein of 100 aminoacids. 23^100 possibilities, to put it naively, yields a quite low probability. And there a many types of proteins needed for life. IF one knows of any study that touches seriously on this topic, I'd happily want to know and be corrected!

narag 8y ago
I can't cite you a study, but every time I've read about life appearance, the authors believed that the primitive forms were much simpler. Once the current more effective forms evolved, the original ones disappeared or got assimilated.
dogma1138 8y ago
Well the question is just how physics plays into this. Proteins are not random because we have laws of physics that govern their structure and even if they were then once you have a protein which is self replicating and it’s better at doing that job in its environment that’s all you need, “natural selection” does not need life it just needs a process that is iterative, repeatable and is dependent on its environment. Overall life might be an inevitable outcome of our universe as our universe is predisposed to create carbon and life is the most efficient process of hydrating carbon we currently know off if increasing entropy is a natural lawful state of the universe it will be predisposed for creating life to serve that purpose. That said it’s unclesr if complex and not to mention intelligent life is a predisposition or an anomaly as out of the nearly 4 billion years life existing on Earth and now it seems it started only a few 100Ms of years after the early bombardment period technological intelligence evolved so late into the game that it might have been a fluke. Other types of intelligence exist we have pretty darn smart animals but despite many of them predating mankind and our ancestors none of them has ever evolved further.
- cristianpascu 8y ago
  I didn't say anything about proteins being random. But words of hundreds of letters, out of 23 possible letters, come in many, many, many combinations. All governed by laws of physics. Not to mention the many ways a protein could fold, not all ways being useful, but are still possible. The search space, as I said, is huge.
  - kamaal 8y ago
    The search space is huge if only some one intelligent is sitting there and trying it out one take at a time. In reality its chemical reactions. And there are only a few ways in which they happen.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry however the number of combination that would be the most effective in a given task and environment is fairly limited and natural selection makes this search very easy because anything that isn't suitable for that environment and the task of surviving even if it's a simple protein would die out.
      - kamaal 8y ago
        >>The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry Again search/combination space argument suggests there is a process that resets to 0 and moves to the last possible state incrementally, and that process repeats endlessly until a desirable state is reached, avoiding previously reached final states. The problem with the above argument is words like 'reset', 'desirable state'. In reality there is no 'search space'. Its really uni directional chemical reactions that go on, each one happening now was due to the reactions before. These reactions go on until you reach a set of chemicals that either just don't react with each other, or the chemical reactions just continue seemingly forever. Out come of some these reactions could be life.
        8y ago
kamaal 8y ago
No process is ever this random. Its not like the infinite money theorem. Infinite monkey take 1, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no Infinite monkey take 2, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no ... Infinite monkey take n, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no In reality its more like what happens before effects what comes later. This is different in the case of Boeing because there is a degree of non-reactive stuff coming together there. In case of Amino acids and subsequent formation of life its just chemistry, and that gets progressively complicated. And this process is happening between the most commonly naturally occurring elements. So these triggers and process would have happened in almost every star system.
mcguire 8y ago
The Earth is 4.5B years old. Evidence of life appears 260M-1B years later, with the earliest date given by the current earliest equivocal findings and the latest by direct fossil evidence. A naive 1-in-23e100 calculation is probably the wrong way to go about it. After all, the probability of any poker hand is 1-in-2.6M.

narag 8y ago

I can't cite you a study, but every time I've read about life appearance, the authors believed that the primitive forms were much simpler. Once the current more effective forms evolved, the original ones disappeared or got assimilated.

dogma1138 8y ago

Well the question is just how physics plays into this. Proteins are not random because we have laws of physics that govern their structure and even if they were then once you have a protein which is self replicating and it’s better at doing that job in its environment that’s all you need, “natural selection” does not need life it just needs a process that is iterative, repeatable and is dependent on its environment. Overall life might be an inevitable outcome of our universe as our universe is predisposed to create carbon and life is the most efficient process of hydrating carbon we currently know off if increasing entropy is a natural lawful state of the universe it will be predisposed for creating life to serve that purpose. That said it’s unclesr if complex and not to mention intelligent life is a predisposition or an anomaly as out of the nearly 4 billion years life existing on Earth and now it seems it started only a few 100Ms of years after the early bombardment period technological intelligence evolved so late into the game that it might have been a fluke. Other types of intelligence exist we have pretty darn smart animals but despite many of them predating mankind and our ancestors none of them has ever evolved further.

cristianpascu 8y ago
I didn't say anything about proteins being random. But words of hundreds of letters, out of 23 possible letters, come in many, many, many combinations. All governed by laws of physics. Not to mention the many ways a protein could fold, not all ways being useful, but are still possible. The search space, as I said, is huge.
- kamaal 8y ago
  The search space is huge if only some one intelligent is sitting there and trying it out one take at a time. In reality its chemical reactions. And there are only a few ways in which they happen.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry however the number of combination that would be the most effective in a given task and environment is fairly limited and natural selection makes this search very easy because anything that isn't suitable for that environment and the task of surviving even if it's a simple protein would die out.
    - kamaal 8y ago
      >>The possible search space and possible combination can be huge even with chemistry Again search/combination space argument suggests there is a process that resets to 0 and moves to the last possible state incrementally, and that process repeats endlessly until a desirable state is reached, avoiding previously reached final states. The problem with the above argument is words like 'reset', 'desirable state'. In reality there is no 'search space'. Its really uni directional chemical reactions that go on, each one happening now was due to the reactions before. These reactions go on until you reach a set of chemicals that either just don't react with each other, or the chemical reactions just continue seemingly forever. Out come of some these reactions could be life.
      - 8y ago

kamaal 8y ago

No process is ever this random. Its not like the infinite money theorem. Infinite monkey take 1, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no Infinite monkey take 2, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no ... Infinite monkey take n, Atlas Srugged written? yes : no In reality its more like what happens before effects what comes later. This is different in the case of Boeing because there is a degree of non-reactive stuff coming together there. In case of Amino acids and subsequent formation of life its just chemistry, and that gets progressively complicated. And this process is happening between the most commonly naturally occurring elements. So these triggers and process would have happened in almost every star system.

mcguire 8y ago

The Earth is 4.5B years old. Evidence of life appears 260M-1B years later, with the earliest date given by the current earliest equivocal findings and the latest by direct fossil evidence. A naive 1-in-23e100 calculation is probably the wrong way to go about it. After all, the probability of any poker hand is 1-in-2.6M.