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seems like he's thinking in the same space as Andreas Wagner, who writes about these ideas in his book, "arrival of the fittest". Wagner also talks about the "

seems like he's thinking in the same space as Andreas Wagner, who writes about these ideas in his book, "arrival of the fittest". Wagner also talks about the "probability space" of organic molecules being too high for life to emerge through true randomness. For even the simplest components of life, like the citric acid cycle, to come into existence is something like everybody in the world hitting the lottery number every day for a billion years. or something. I don't remember how he brings his theory down to earth because I didn't finish the book, but a cool thing to think about.

quacked 3y ago
I am a little religious (deist and Quaker background) so it's easy for me to hand-wave away the origins of life as divine, but I often think about how life could have arisen completely randomly. This line: > everybody in the world hitting the lottery number every day for a billion years. or something. is something I totally agree with, but the amusing confounding factor is that if "time" is infinite, then this exact scenario would happen infinity times. Whatever the origins of life are, I'm certainly glad to be here.
- FrontierPsych 3y ago
  >if "time" is infinite And if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass every time he hopped. But back to reality, there is not infinite time and matter. All that heat death of the universe and everything. The arrow of time. Just becaues the concept of infinity exists, doesn't mean something can happen. For example, I have started reading James Joyce's Ulysses probably a dozen times how and have never been able to get more than a few pages into it. I know if there was infinity time, I'd never be able to get more than a few pages into that book. It's mathematically proven.
- chasd00 3y ago
  yeah on a long enough timeline all probabilities = 1
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  Yet the earth is widely believed to be only a few billion years old!
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Enter the anthropic principle. Our Earth is one planet out of some hundreds of billions of planets the galaxy likely has, out of however many billions of galaxies are there. Earth is just the planet (likely one of many planets) that won the lottery.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Early terrestrial chemistry can't have stayed random for too long though - given the goldilocks conditions of multiple energy sources (solar, geothermal), mechanical agitation (lunar tides) and abundant water facilitating mixing/migration of chemicals. Chemical complexity must gave progressed fairly quickly, especially in environments (e.g. thermal vents, seashores) where factors like these were more pronounced. The precursors to instruction-based biochemical factories like modern cells would have started out with things as simple as catalysts that favored certain reactions, and gradually grew in complexity (maybe via multi-product catalysts?) to encode the production of more and more specific chemical products. The story here would be one of ever-increasing chemical complexities and ever-increasingly complex cells/proto-cells. Chemical products, and cycles, that may have been infinitely unlikely to have been created under initial conditions of randomness would eventually become incorporated into the chemistry of the cell whose production was encoded for and inevitable. Complexity would have grown with simpler biochemicals being combined into more complex ones, simple/shorter cycles growing into longer ones, etc.
14 3y ago
Some theories theorize that the universe is infinite in size. Recent observations with the JWST suggest that parts of the universe formed much to quickly for the Big Bang to explain their existence suggesting that parts of our universe already existed when the bang happened so possibly parts of the universe were carried over from a time before the Big Bang. Both of these could explain beating the odds because if something is infinite it will eventually experience every single state of possibility even the seemingly impossible. The universe may actually be millions of timescales older then we understand. It’s all very fascinating to ponder.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  It’s a tautology that we would never be able to observe the infinite. But plugging infinity into the equations makes everything, and nothing, possible. E.g. if there is an infinite sequence of events required to get to this moment of time, it’s impossible to be experiencing this moment.

quacked 3y ago

I am a little religious (deist and Quaker background) so it's easy for me to hand-wave away the origins of life as divine, but I often think about how life could have arisen completely randomly. This line: > everybody in the world hitting the lottery number every day for a billion years. or something. is something I totally agree with, but the amusing confounding factor is that if "time" is infinite, then this exact scenario would happen infinity times. Whatever the origins of life are, I'm certainly glad to be here.

FrontierPsych 3y ago
>if "time" is infinite And if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass every time he hopped. But back to reality, there is not infinite time and matter. All that heat death of the universe and everything. The arrow of time. Just becaues the concept of infinity exists, doesn't mean something can happen. For example, I have started reading James Joyce's Ulysses probably a dozen times how and have never been able to get more than a few pages into it. I know if there was infinity time, I'd never be able to get more than a few pages into that book. It's mathematically proven.
chasd00 3y ago
yeah on a long enough timeline all probabilities = 1
kevinventullo 3y ago
Yet the earth is widely believed to be only a few billion years old!
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Enter the anthropic principle. Our Earth is one planet out of some hundreds of billions of planets the galaxy likely has, out of however many billions of galaxies are there. Earth is just the planet (likely one of many planets) that won the lottery.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Early terrestrial chemistry can't have stayed random for too long though - given the goldilocks conditions of multiple energy sources (solar, geothermal), mechanical agitation (lunar tides) and abundant water facilitating mixing/migration of chemicals. Chemical complexity must gave progressed fairly quickly, especially in environments (e.g. thermal vents, seashores) where factors like these were more pronounced. The precursors to instruction-based biochemical factories like modern cells would have started out with things as simple as catalysts that favored certain reactions, and gradually grew in complexity (maybe via multi-product catalysts?) to encode the production of more and more specific chemical products. The story here would be one of ever-increasing chemical complexities and ever-increasingly complex cells/proto-cells. Chemical products, and cycles, that may have been infinitely unlikely to have been created under initial conditions of randomness would eventually become incorporated into the chemistry of the cell whose production was encoded for and inevitable. Complexity would have grown with simpler biochemicals being combined into more complex ones, simple/shorter cycles growing into longer ones, etc.

14 3y ago

Some theories theorize that the universe is infinite in size. Recent observations with the JWST suggest that parts of the universe formed much to quickly for the Big Bang to explain their existence suggesting that parts of our universe already existed when the bang happened so possibly parts of the universe were carried over from a time before the Big Bang. Both of these could explain beating the odds because if something is infinite it will eventually experience every single state of possibility even the seemingly impossible. The universe may actually be millions of timescales older then we understand. It’s all very fascinating to ponder.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
It’s a tautology that we would never be able to observe the infinite. But plugging infinity into the equations makes everything, and nothing, possible. E.g. if there is an infinite sequence of events required to get to this moment of time, it’s impossible to be experiencing this moment.