5 ms·

I would be surprised if even our concept of cells translates that easily. Unless of course both forms of life share the same origin, but that just raises more

I would be surprised if even our concept of cells translates that easily. Unless of course both forms of life share the same origin, but that just raises more questions.

Balero 8y ago
I think it might work quite well actually. They could certainly not work with any of the biological systems as ours, such as proteins and fats etc. But I think it is likely that there would be internal subdivisions in a complex life-form. This is however likening, branches in trees, to cells in an organism, to crystals in a rock.
jerf 8y ago
Cells are a pretty fundamental structure. Sci-fi can have fun with undifferentiated masses of protoplasm like The Blob, but there's a lot of reasons to expect that cell walls are going to be pretty fundamental on one level or another. Without them, instead of isolating the task of giving permission to enter and exit the life form to one structure, everything in the life form has to be capable of doing so. It is exceedingly unlikely that this is a good trade. I would also say that before you start drawing up crazy ideas about alternate structures that you should check your own body first; we already have a lot of variants on the theme! Blood is a liquid that has a lot of cells in it. There's a lot of other such circulatory fluids that have cells within them, but are not "cellular" in the sense that they contain nothing but cells. White blood cells do interesting things with cell walls, as does the immune system in general. Cells have structure well beyond just little cubes already, like nerve cells, etc. Personally I find that when one tries to come up with some funny sci-fi idea for an alternate life form, either A: it's physically implausible or B: something, somewhere on Earth is already doing something very like it, and I don't see middle ground very often.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
This is the thing I also always wonder about. Consider that about 60% of a banana's DNA is shared with us. And for cats it's 90%. That's just really stupefying to think about. But the more important point here is that I think it is literally impossible for us to even imagine what life that had no genetic similarity to us would even begin to be like. We just have no basis for comparison whatsoever since we are all so closely related. Though yeah, genetic similarity implying exogenesis would also be an equally interesting result. Would that similarity be organic/natural in nature, or might we just be some species' lab experiment? Perhaps they seeded us with their same genetic origins to discover more about their own evolution and development. This is an experiment I'm certain we'll eventually carry out ourselves. So many interesting possibilities.
- jacobush 8y ago
  But how quickly did they get started in that case? I mean, the ago of the Earth is quite a nice chunk out of the timeline since the Universe got started.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    200,000 years ago we did not exist as a species. 2500 years ago stabbing each other with iron weapons was literally cutting edge technology. In the past 200 years we have invented: production automobile, airplanes, space flight, launched probes into interstellar space, computers, the internet, ... We have discovered relativity, quantum mechanics, galaxies, ... Assuming we are able to survive, imagine where we'll be in 200k years. Actually you can't. It's just impossible to even begin to try to imagine that. On that scale we'll likely have even begun to experience evolutionary speciation as we settle different regions of space and end up with extended periods of relative isolation. And now consider that this entire timeline is but 400k years. That's not even a blink in the eye of the cosmos.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacobush 8y ago
      It took billions of years before complexity started. We don't even know if that is a long time or a short time. We may be among the first.
      - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
        Absolutely. The point I was making there is that imagine there was another perfect clone of our solar system that was identical in every single way and its timeline was 99.995% identical to ours. Intuitively you'd think that they'd probably be at, more or less, the same point in their development. But that 0.005% is the difference between between glorified monkeys and widespread civilizations launching objects and people into space. And if we add another 0.005% to where we are now, everything we know leads us to believe that the change will be even more extreme since our current technological trajectory remains on a very sharp exponential curve upwards with no reason to expect it to end. As an aside these numbers are also based on the age of the Earth. Looking at the age of the universe would probably be more reasonable and would lead to even more extreme results.

I would be surprised if even our concept of cells translates that easily. Unless of course both forms of life share the same origin, but that just raises more questions.

Balero 8y ago

I think it might work quite well actually. They could certainly not work with any of the biological systems as ours, such as proteins and fats etc. But I think it is likely that there would be internal subdivisions in a complex life-form. This is however likening, branches in trees, to cells in an organism, to crystals in a rock.

jerf 8y ago

Cells are a pretty fundamental structure. Sci-fi can have fun with undifferentiated masses of protoplasm like The Blob, but there's a lot of reasons to expect that cell walls are going to be pretty fundamental on one level or another. Without them, instead of isolating the task of giving permission to enter and exit the life form to one structure, everything in the life form has to be capable of doing so. It is exceedingly unlikely that this is a good trade. I would also say that before you start drawing up crazy ideas about alternate structures that you should check your own body first; we already have a lot of variants on the theme! Blood is a liquid that has a lot of cells in it. There's a lot of other such circulatory fluids that have cells within them, but are not "cellular" in the sense that they contain nothing but cells. White blood cells do interesting things with cell walls, as does the immune system in general. Cells have structure well beyond just little cubes already, like nerve cells, etc. Personally I find that when one tries to come up with some funny sci-fi idea for an alternate life form, either A: it's physically implausible or B: something, somewhere on Earth is already doing something very like it, and I don't see middle ground very often.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

This is the thing I also always wonder about. Consider that about 60% of a banana's DNA is shared with us. And for cats it's 90%. That's just really stupefying to think about. But the more important point here is that I think it is literally impossible for us to even imagine what life that had no genetic similarity to us would even begin to be like. We just have no basis for comparison whatsoever since we are all so closely related. Though yeah, genetic similarity implying exogenesis would also be an equally interesting result. Would that similarity be organic/natural in nature, or might we just be some species' lab experiment? Perhaps they seeded us with their same genetic origins to discover more about their own evolution and development. This is an experiment I'm certain we'll eventually carry out ourselves. So many interesting possibilities.

jacobush 8y ago
But how quickly did they get started in that case? I mean, the ago of the Earth is quite a nice chunk out of the timeline since the Universe got started.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  200,000 years ago we did not exist as a species. 2500 years ago stabbing each other with iron weapons was literally cutting edge technology. In the past 200 years we have invented: production automobile, airplanes, space flight, launched probes into interstellar space, computers, the internet, ... We have discovered relativity, quantum mechanics, galaxies, ... Assuming we are able to survive, imagine where we'll be in 200k years. Actually you can't. It's just impossible to even begin to try to imagine that. On that scale we'll likely have even begun to experience evolutionary speciation as we settle different regions of space and end up with extended periods of relative isolation. And now consider that this entire timeline is but 400k years. That's not even a blink in the eye of the cosmos.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobush 8y ago
    It took billions of years before complexity started. We don't even know if that is a long time or a short time. We may be among the first.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      Absolutely. The point I was making there is that imagine there was another perfect clone of our solar system that was identical in every single way and its timeline was 99.995% identical to ours. Intuitively you'd think that they'd probably be at, more or less, the same point in their development. But that 0.005% is the difference between between glorified monkeys and widespread civilizations launching objects and people into space. And if we add another 0.005% to where we are now, everything we know leads us to believe that the change will be even more extreme since our current technological trajectory remains on a very sharp exponential curve upwards with no reason to expect it to end. As an aside these numbers are also based on the age of the Earth. Looking at the age of the universe would probably be more reasonable and would lead to even more extreme results.