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How might life migrate through the universe?
- bediger4000 3y agoIt may not need to migrate. At some point between the Big Bang and now, the entire universe was habitable. Temperatures between 0C and 100C would have been the norm for some period, and the universe would have been much smaller than today. If RNA originated during that period, life may just be almost everywhere.
- ahazred8ta 3y ago> Temperatures between 0C and 100C At that time in the early universe, there were no carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen atoms, and no planets with water. Life could only get started several million years after the first supernovas made heavy atoms.
- bediger4000 3y agoAlas, this is disputable: https://arxiv.org/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/1312.0613
- appplication 3y agoLink seems to be incorrect
- umeshunni 3y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613
- ahazred8ta 3y agoHow so? The 0°-100° era was between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang. There were no stars or planets during this period. There were no primordial elements heavier than lithium. Heavier elements were not created until several hundred million years later, after the first supernovas. "At some point around 200 to 500 million years, the earliest generations of stars and galaxies form" -- Before that, there were no oxygen atoms. The guy who wrote that arxiv paper did not know that there were no heavy elements. Please explain what process you think created oxygen atoms before 10My. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#The_Dark_Ages_and_large-scale_structure_emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#The...
- dekhn 3y ago"The guy" is a well known astrophysicist (astrophysicists frequently refer to anything othe than Hydrogen and Helium as "metals"). his article starts out saying early supernovas (very, very early) would be required and the stars would need to be enormous. He cites various estimates of the early universe to support this.
- ThalesX 3y ago> Microscopic ice crystals and dust, for example, containing bacteria and spores capable of withstanding the conditions in space, can spread into space from areas of a planet’s upper atmosphere. I've given this some thought before. I like the idea of mushrooms being all around the cosmos due to their adaptability and the resistance of spores. Also, the universe might actually belong to viruses.
- epiccoleman 3y agoWatch this space for news on my hip new Colorado startup which fires psilocybe spores into space in the hopes of freaking the aliens right the fuck out. Monetization strategies are still unclear but I think we've got something here.
- quinnjh 3y agoMonetization will figure itself out. What’s important is growing your user base, then you can look at a small fee of $5 a month (more for enterprise options) What’s exciting is the market is potentially very large, and hitherto uncontacted
- vkou 3y agoThe problem with mushrooms and viruses is that they can only feed on/reproduce by infecting living things.
- tlb 3y agoI think most fungi can feed on a sugar solution. Sugar molecules can arise on a planet with no life, just by regular chemical reactions. So there could be a planet out there growing earth mushrooms.
- randomopining 3y agoLife is just structured matter. It gains consciousness that has a goal of propogating and increasing the structure of the universe. This is a movement from disorder towards perfect order, perfect stillness.
- darkerside 3y agoIt's a temporary striving towards perfect order within a larger system that trends towards maximum disorder.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoPerhaps its not temporary but an eternal balance?
- darkerside 3y agoHeat death of the sun would beg to differ
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe article discusses seeding life at a galactic scale, which is beyond our sun. At some point you’re talking about intergalactic space. Further, the expansion of space and the necessity of a universal heat death is a theory, and is in no way proven.
- tmountain 3y agoDoubtful given the laws of thermodynamics and the rate at which the universe is expanding. Heat death seems to be an inevitable conclusion at some point.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoWe’ve not established the rate of expansion, if it’s accelerating, what rate it’s accelerating, or even if space is expanding. It seems likely but not proven or nailed down. Further, it’s not known if it’s possible to manipulate the expansion, such that you could create a local pocket of non expanding space. At the moment galactic space is likely not expanding, and space around black holes wouldn’t expand for an extraordinarily long time. It does seem inevitable, but it also seems that way from our current point of knowledge. Nothing says the story ends with our current understanding.
- nologic01 3y agoIt would be nice to somehow constrain these possibilities. Mesh the various generations of stellar populations with the time for interstellar travel under various scenarios, with the time it has taken for the sequences of more complex living structures to evolve etc. Are there any catalysts that are much faster diffusing than being reinvented locally? Maybe there is a paper about that already or we dont know enough to derive something useful from such constraints. The concept of carbon life as a universal and migratory phenomenon is certainly appealing. The question is whether the few pieces of the puzzle we have already sketch anything concrete about the many missing pieces.
- sproketboy 3y ago[dead]
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI think less interesting than life originating elsewhere is that this line of reasoning means earth is seeding life throughout the galaxy in real time. It’s fully possible that we are the first life in the universe, after all the first life would look up and wonder why the universe seemed unpopulated. Well - assuming all this adds up to life populated planets being able to seed other life potentially populated planets, we may be the first and only life in the galaxy, but we won’t likely be the last. We’ve been spewing life filled ice and dust into space for quite some time.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoBarring absurd circumstances, so would the 2nd through the 10th life in the universe think this. After all, for them, there's barely any more existing life than for the 1st. And, if instead we narrow it such that "the first life would think this for the first 100 years of its awareness that there might be more life out there"... Then it also becomes true for the 11th through the 100,000th life born, because the first 100 years is also the almost certainly a low level of technology and of just not having spent enough time looking. Thus, the fact that we say "it looks empty" does not do us any good in determining whether we are #1 or #100,000, or even higher still. It sucks that we will be extinct soon, and didn't get to figure out which number (roughly) we are.
- influx 3y agoIf only we could put a colony on Mars...
- Viliam1234 3y agoI think that Mars is overrated. It is smaller than Earth, and way more difficult to live there, so we would get like 30% extra space for 1000 times the cost per square meter. And then what? We do not have a third planet like that nearby. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Jupiter and Saturn are gas with no solid surface. Uranus and Neptune are ice. The next solar system is way too far. I suspect that if we ever get the ability to travel to the next solar system, it will probably be easier to just stay in space, and only use the planets to mine the resources. Even for that, asteroids may be more convenient. So, from this perspective, Earth is, and will remain, unique.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y agoThere is another option here, where organic precursors accumulate via some currently unexplored process. Really any system capable of creating themrodynamic disequilibrium and a chemical gradient could be an option. An example of this might be the freeze and thaw cycle of large planetoids. Swing close to the planet, warm up enough, move away, cool enough. Just a basic cycle (I believe the surface images of Pluto support the existence of such cycles). If volatile ices can have just enough warth to create bonds, there are many many many more of these types of objects than well places 'goldilocks' planets. Give it enough time and one will knock out of orbit and smash into a planet that does have adequate conditions for the development of life. Just a bunch of precursor chemistry to life, but plenty of it. I've tried to look into deep space volatile ice chemistry but haven't exactly found great resources. But it strikes me that if a simple extraplanetary mechanism for pre-life chemistry accumulation exists, well, then life is probably pretty much everywhere.
- aradox66 3y agoWe keep finding more and more complex biological precursors on extra planetary bodies. The interstellar medium, pretty primordial, seems to be filled with phospholipids: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101314118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101314118 We have found peptides on asteroids and in meteorites.
- andrewflnr 3y ago> precursor of phospholipids Not quite the same thing. Actual abundant phosphorus compounds would be quite surprising. Probably the end of the phosphorus-problem resolution of the fermi paradox, for one thing. But medium-small organic molecules aren't that big a surprise anymore.
- wizardforhire 3y agoI know its just a typo and an easy one to make at that, regardless themrodynamic is my new favorite word! I’m chomping at the bit to use it in conversation along with telepathetic. Sincerely, Thank you!
- dekhn 3y agoIt's still pretty amazing to me there is interplanetary mass exchange. There are little bits of Earth on Mars, right now.
- nico 3y agoThis an unpopular opinion If you just look around a little bit, you discover that the whole universe is alive There isn’t a single dead thing From that observation you can realize that life is already everywhere And just like energy, life is never created or destroyed, only transformed
- stubish 3y agoYes, when define 'life' that way, it is indeed everywhere. And a tautology.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> isn’t a single dead thing This is as profound as saying everything is dead matter. It’s poetic, but largely useless for gaining deeper understanding.
- nico 3y agoIt’s not about the depth, it’s about being conscious of it and acting on it We all “know” that our lives are completely dependent on, and intertwined with, our environment Yet, we mostly go about our days being oblivious to it, oblivious to our impact on the environment and its effect on us Why do you need to be dismissive instead of curious? Is there no value in exploring ideas? Or does someone just needs to be right?
- bowsamic 3y agoI don’t understand what you are referring to
- nico 3y agoWhat we call life is just a convenient definition for a normal daily life However, at the end of the day, it’s just an agreement There is no basic universal physical law that defines life If we allow ourselves to re-think the definition, or just do without We can create alternative models, think differently and discover new ideas
- alphanumeric0 3y agoWhat if you could seed probes, like the Breakthrough Starshot probes, with synthetic life that, upon reaching their destination, would develop into humanoids that would explore for you and send back data? That's a lot of ifs, but it would be an interesting way of exploring interstellar space in a much shorter time span.
- BinRoo 3y agodude, Earth is the starship, and we're the messengers
- teraflop 3y agoA version of this idea is explored in Greg Egan's short story "Glory": https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pdf https://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/files/GregEganGlory.pd...
- mock-possum 3y agoWhoa wow. I was kind of afraid that would be the ending. It’s too sad.
- xwdv 3y agoWhen this universe ends and a new one begins, we may be able to leave messages to the next universes through gravitational waves. This could allow a way for our minds to be decoded and recompiled in a new universe in some structure at least capable of knowing joy.
- axiomdata316 3y agoWait a sec... is that from the novel Death's End ? Lol
- xwdv 3y agoIt is from a real scientific theory about conformal cyclic universes.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoEven 5 bits of gravitational data is forbidden by thermodynamics because there is no way to encode the read head :)
- ggm 3y agoFred Hoyle did a lot of thinking about this, about the nature of anti-entropic processes and the emergence of lipids, because thats when you can build a wall from the surrounding water and really get down to business. His early "how about comets" work got laughed out of town. I think the laughter might be more hollow now, but there was a long winter for Hoyle in the Astronomy community, he was a little to "out there" for some people. I don't know for sure but I'm thinking he may have been very irritating to work with as well, not a lot of love around the FRS table.
- bowsamic 3y ago> about the nature of anti-entropic processes Can you say a little more about this? I know that life itself preserves the increase of entropy
- ggm 3y agoSomebody else before him, Leo Szilard, observed that most biological processes appear to contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics because they take/collect/leverage disparate energy and concentrate it locally in another form. Fred worked on that.
- bowsamic 3y agoIt was Schrödinger who most famously claimed that life decreases entropy and he immediately got a lot of crap for it and apologised. Biological processes increase entropy, but decrease the Gibb’s free energy. That’s usually the confusion
- sytelus 3y agoUnless laws of Physics can be broken it is not possible to migrate anything through the universe. Currently galaxies are moving away from each other at the speed of ~light. You can't just reach anywhere.
- fmeyer 3y agoIt’s a poetic way of viewing the possibility of life spreading throughout the cosmos: tiny cellular “ Noah’s arks” journeying across the vast oceans of space, potentially bringing life to new worlds.