9 ms·

And probably unlikely for the same material to occur naturally.

culopatin 6y ago
Well, how likely is that we even exist to begin with? And how likely is that we are alive because of a ball of hydrogen and helium really far away?
- unwoundmouse 6y ago
  bruv this some gamblers fallacy shyt
  - posterboy 6y ago
    well it is, but it's an accurate response to somebody already engaged in it. It is the GP who finds it "probably unlikely" without any indication of actual probabilities, chiefly rounding down from a haphazard guess, after all.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  One very unlikely thing happening doesn't make another unlikely thing any more likely.
  - gibolt 6y ago
    No, but it does show how significantly unlikely things can happen given enough time and billions of moving variables.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    It doesn’t seem to just be one very unlikely thing, but a huge series of unlikely things...
    - p1mrx 6y ago
      The universe is pretty big, and there are lots of places where unlikely things didn't happen. When the next unlikely thing happens, it most likely won't happen here.
      - vagrantJin 6y ago
        Carbon based life is unlikely in the universe and yet here we are. Watching tiktok. Just can't rule anything out.
        computerfriend 6y ago
        There's an obvious observation bias here though.
        vagrantJin 6y ago
        Yes. Yes there is.
- ajuc 6y ago
  It's pretty likely. There's at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, most of them have planets. Billion of years passed since the Big Bang. If some chemical process can create life it's very likely that somewhere it did.
  - erichocean 6y ago
    Scientists who have done the math disagree. It's a major current issue. It's extremely difficult to produce useful proteins from random DNA chains. As in, if I took all of the atoms in our galaxy, paired each with random DNA, and allowed you to pick just one (blindfolded), only one of those DNA strands would contain the DNA necessary to produce a valid/useful protein. Literally every other atom has garbage DNA/proteins. The human body contains between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. DNA looks far more like "information" than it does like random bits written to disk. It's analogous to trying to find an x86 program of at least 160 instructions that computes a valid mathematical function by randomly splatting 1s and 0s to disk and then "running" the "code". Eh, maybe it'll eventually happen, but you can see how hard it actually is in practice. Heat-death-of-the-Universe hard. Give a long enough timeframe, even unlikely things will happen. However, the Universe isn't very old—which is why it's a major current issue.
    - sveme 6y ago
      Well, that's why an RNA first world is most likely. RNA can act catalytically as RNAzymes.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      This assumes a perfect random distribution though. What if amino acids and proteins are in fact likely to arise naturally and in favorable circumstances? There was an article recently (~1-2 months) on HN about a supercomputer/AI discovering new chemical pathways for part of this process, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I think it was about forming amino acids. I'm no expert on this subject (the opposite really, I've slept through chemistry), but my experience with large-scale simulations has been that a surprising number of them converge to the same final result given the same starting parameters even if most processes within them are perfectly random. The bigger the simulation, the more likely they are to give you stable results. And the universe is pretty damn huge. So I like to believe the creation of the foundations of life is in fact more-or-less inevitable in our universe, in turn increasing the chance of useful proteins etc. forming.
- mocar 6y ago
  How likely is that an observer can observe their own unlikely existence given that the observer does exist against all the odds?
- simias 6y ago
  If you ask yourself this question, then 100%. You need to exist to even consider the unlikelihood of your existence. But as far as I know the existence of naturally occurring superconductors is a completely independent probability, so it doesn't really make sense to use one to justify the other. Are there naturally occurring superconductors somewhere in the universe? I mean, without doing any calculations I'm tempted to say almost certainly yes. Do they exist somewhere in the Earth? As far as we know, extremely unlikely.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
I don't know, this isn't some esoteric ceramic, it's hydrogen sulfide and methane, both of which occur in nature. You may be interested to know that the same logic applied to concentrations of U-235 needed to run a fission reactor turns out to be false: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oklo-reactor https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oklo-reactor In modern industry, getting enough U-235 to run a reactor requires separating and enriching the ore, but this happened by chance in the distant past.
- njarboe 6y ago
  The key to why the Oklo reactor was possible was not that a natural process separated U-235 from U-238 from a Uranium ore, but that the reactor existed 1.7 billion years ago. U-235 has a half life of about 700 million years so the ratio of U-235 to U-238 in naturally occuring Uranium decreases over time. U-235 was about 3.1% of Uranium in ores 1.7 billion years ago and is what can be used in some reactors today. Uranium ore today has only about %0.72, so an Oklo type natural reactor could not form on today's Earth. See [1] for a good description; the atlasobscura article is poor and factually incorrect in places. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
- brlewis 6y ago
  But in a molten core, won't hydrogen sulfide and methane bubble out from the center, leaving only iron and heavier elements and compounds in the super high pressure depths?
  - Balgair 6y ago
    Very likely. But more studies would be needed. The best phase diagram for H2S and methane that I could find only went up to ~140 barr. Though there were some interesting papers on clathrates and methane in the kilo-barr range, but I'd not think those were interesting for deep earth experiments. The deep earth is ~3.3 mega-barr, for comparison. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrogen-sulfide-H2S-properties-d_2034.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrogen-sulfide-H2S-prop... https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/methane-d_1420.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/methane-d_1420.html

Well, how likely is that we even exist to begin with? And how likely is that we are alive because of a ball of hydrogen and helium really far away?

unwoundmouse 6y ago
bruv this some gamblers fallacy shyt
- posterboy 6y ago
  well it is, but it's an accurate response to somebody already engaged in it. It is the GP who finds it "probably unlikely" without any indication of actual probabilities, chiefly rounding down from a haphazard guess, after all.
roywiggins 6y ago
One very unlikely thing happening doesn't make another unlikely thing any more likely.
- gibolt 6y ago
  No, but it does show how significantly unlikely things can happen given enough time and billions of moving variables.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  It doesn’t seem to just be one very unlikely thing, but a huge series of unlikely things...
  - p1mrx 6y ago
    The universe is pretty big, and there are lots of places where unlikely things didn't happen. When the next unlikely thing happens, it most likely won't happen here.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
      Carbon based life is unlikely in the universe and yet here we are. Watching tiktok. Just can't rule anything out.
      - computerfriend 6y ago
        There's an obvious observation bias here though.
        vagrantJin 6y ago
        Yes. Yes there is.
ajuc 6y ago
It's pretty likely. There's at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, most of them have planets. Billion of years passed since the Big Bang. If some chemical process can create life it's very likely that somewhere it did.
- erichocean 6y ago
  Scientists who have done the math disagree. It's a major current issue. It's extremely difficult to produce useful proteins from random DNA chains. As in, if I took all of the atoms in our galaxy, paired each with random DNA, and allowed you to pick just one (blindfolded), only one of those DNA strands would contain the DNA necessary to produce a valid/useful protein. Literally every other atom has garbage DNA/proteins. The human body contains between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. DNA looks far more like "information" than it does like random bits written to disk. It's analogous to trying to find an x86 program of at least 160 instructions that computes a valid mathematical function by randomly splatting 1s and 0s to disk and then "running" the "code". Eh, maybe it'll eventually happen, but you can see how hard it actually is in practice. Heat-death-of-the-Universe hard. Give a long enough timeframe, even unlikely things will happen. However, the Universe isn't very old—which is why it's a major current issue.
  - sveme 6y ago
    Well, that's why an RNA first world is most likely. RNA can act catalytically as RNAzymes.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    This assumes a perfect random distribution though. What if amino acids and proteins are in fact likely to arise naturally and in favorable circumstances? There was an article recently (~1-2 months) on HN about a supercomputer/AI discovering new chemical pathways for part of this process, but I can't seem to find it anymore. I think it was about forming amino acids. I'm no expert on this subject (the opposite really, I've slept through chemistry), but my experience with large-scale simulations has been that a surprising number of them converge to the same final result given the same starting parameters even if most processes within them are perfectly random. The bigger the simulation, the more likely they are to give you stable results. And the universe is pretty damn huge. So I like to believe the creation of the foundations of life is in fact more-or-less inevitable in our universe, in turn increasing the chance of useful proteins etc. forming.
mocar 6y ago
How likely is that an observer can observe their own unlikely existence given that the observer does exist against all the odds?
simias 6y ago
If you ask yourself this question, then 100%. You need to exist to even consider the unlikelihood of your existence. But as far as I know the existence of naturally occurring superconductors is a completely independent probability, so it doesn't really make sense to use one to justify the other. Are there naturally occurring superconductors somewhere in the universe? I mean, without doing any calculations I'm tempted to say almost certainly yes. Do they exist somewhere in the Earth? As far as we know, extremely unlikely.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

I don't know, this isn't some esoteric ceramic, it's hydrogen sulfide and methane, both of which occur in nature. You may be interested to know that the same logic applied to concentrations of U-235 needed to run a fission reactor turns out to be false: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oklo-reactor https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oklo-reactor In modern industry, getting enough U-235 to run a reactor requires separating and enriching the ore, but this happened by chance in the distant past.

njarboe 6y ago
The key to why the Oklo reactor was possible was not that a natural process separated U-235 from U-238 from a Uranium ore, but that the reactor existed 1.7 billion years ago. U-235 has a half life of about 700 million years so the ratio of U-235 to U-238 in naturally occuring Uranium decreases over time. U-235 was about 3.1% of Uranium in ores 1.7 billion years ago and is what can be used in some reactors today. Uranium ore today has only about %0.72, so an Oklo type natural reactor could not form on today's Earth. See [1] for a good description; the atlasobscura article is poor and factually incorrect in places. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
brlewis 6y ago
But in a molten core, won't hydrogen sulfide and methane bubble out from the center, leaving only iron and heavier elements and compounds in the super high pressure depths?
- Balgair 6y ago
  Very likely. But more studies would be needed. The best phase diagram for H2S and methane that I could find only went up to ~140 barr. Though there were some interesting papers on clathrates and methane in the kilo-barr range, but I'd not think those were interesting for deep earth experiments. The deep earth is ~3.3 mega-barr, for comparison. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrogen-sulfide-H2S-properties-d_2034.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrogen-sulfide-H2S-prop... https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/methane-d_1420.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/methane-d_1420.html