8 ms·

I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open

I would turn your logic around and say, everywhere we are able to look, we find evidence that life is more likely than expected. Until the 1990's it was an open question whether any other star had planets; as soon as we got the tools to test that, we found they were ubiquitous. As soon as we got the right instruments to Mars, we found signs of moving water, methane sources, and complex organic molecules in what is basically an Earth-like old lake bed. The moment PCR technology made it possible to do the search, we found a massive 'dark biome' extending many kilometers into the Earth's crust. When you immediately find strong pieces of circumstantial evidence the moment you acquire the tools to start looking for something, the correct conclusion to draw is not "we have yet to find a shred of evidence", but that further searching is likely to be highly worthwhile.

superposeur 3y ago
These factors are what I call the “trappings of life”. It is a completely open question (and I mean completely) how likely life is to arise spontaneously when these factors are present. One single instance of life elsewhere or successful abiogenesis in the lab would change that, but we have neither.
- malfist 3y ago
  We've barely started looking. It's like picking up one piece of hay, not finding a needle and declaring there's no needle in the haystack.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    No is declaring that there is no needle in the haystack. Please actually read my post.
    - stouset 3y ago
      “I just want to be clear that we’ve definitely not actually found life. We’ve found likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies everywhere, have plausible theories on how to go from precursors to bootstrapping, and see life in every corner of the planet we have explored. But just to be clear we haven’t actually found life anywhere else yet.” Yeah, we know. So what then was the point of your post?
      - superposeur 3y ago
        Well, perhaps you know that none of the recent findings are evidence of life, but in my conversations with others I have perceived a great deal of confusion on this point, even among scientifically literate colleagues. Also, the fact that we have zero understanding of the probability of abiogenesis is, in my experience, a greatly under-appreciated fact. I speculate that the way findings are reported contributes to this confusion. Also, at risk of incurring a flame, I'll gently point out that you are folding into this confusion and reinforcing it with your language: "likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies" ... we absolutely do not know that these conditions are "likely" precursors, which is a statement about a probability we know nothing about and as for "habitable" we do not actually know anything about whether or not a body is habitable in the sense of likely to spontaneously form life.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      absence of evidence is not evidence of absence sorry your life has created this crusade of rhetorically reminding people about the absence is evidence
      - superposeur 3y ago
        Not in general, just on this particular point. Because, in my opinion, we as a scientific community are currently flush with the (very cool) unexpected discovery of so many exoplanets and it is somewhat distorting our collective thinking about life and its origins.
        creer 3y ago
        We SHOULD (be flush and distorted). We can be realistic AND enthusiastic about it. Some technically challenging work was done and achieved results FAR FAR beyond expectations. That is a result worthy of changing outlook. Before, the outlook was on statistical grounds (the universe is so vast that there has to be). Now this outlook has been justified a billion billion times over. It's certainly time to be far more ambitious and inverse the presumptions that we had before. I.e. before, "there had to be - some, somewhere" and now, "there is most likely all over the place".
        idlewords 3y ago
        You can make the less charged argument that expanding the search for life has in every case so far led to extremely interesting scientific discoveries. So as a pragmatic strategy, it has legs regardless of where you stand on the question of life origins.
      - hesk 3y ago
        Provided you're actively and systematically looking for evidence, then absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
        malfist 3y ago
        But we've not even started doing that yet. None of the mars rovers have landed anywhere close to where we think is must likely to currently harbor life due to fear of contamination. We've just now learned how to analyze atmospheres of exoplants. 5 years ago, we couldn't see exoplanets smaller than jupiter. A decade ago, we couldn't see exoplanets at all.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments. We don’t yet have confidence about the exact mechanism on Earth but based on those experiments it’s likely (& generally currently accepted as the most likely mechanism AFAIK) that the boundary layer of volcanoes (probably underwater) + some crucial initial elements being available causes life to form “spontaneously”. Given the elements required and their overall availability in the universe, it’s also highly likely these conditions reproduce quite readily & life is generally quite abundant. Similarly, significant levels of intelligence within animals seems like quite a common occurrence as well (great and lesser apes, elephants, octopuses, dolphins, wolves etc). Whether or not intelligence + physiological evolution + social evolution to take advantage of that intelligence to build things cooperatively is a huge unknown of course although I think it’s inevitable. On the other hand, how long life sticks around on a planet once it forms is an open question - it’s not clear if a life ecosystem that’s stable for billions of years is likely and I suspect there’s probably a small amount of filtering that happens where planets become inhospitable rather “quickly” and can’t support life for multiple billions of years (e.g. there were probably several events in our history where it could have collapsed). Our type of society is probably much much rarer because you need access to mineral and energy deposits to go through each technological phase. For example, because of all the mining we’ve done, if humanity were to disappear it’s highly likely the Earth would not sustain another technological society because all the “easy to get to” deposits of crucial metals & things like oil are gone and there’s no way to bootstrap a technological society (it’s possible other kinds of resources could be developed to build other kinds of technology so who knows). I think based on our existing body of knowledge, life is likely extremely plentiful throughout the universe at one point in time or another. Some form of intelligent life is highly likely wherever we find any life that manages to stick around through bilions of years. A highly technological adept species of life though is highly likely an extreme rarity and a planet gets one shot at developing it. Whether any manages to escape their home planet remains an open question that likely only we will manage to answer over the next thousands of years if we make it that far.
  - ghaff 3y ago
- idlewords 3y ago
  The other part of the open question is how easily life is able to spread across worlds. This is why it's so vital to go look at Mars without contaminating the search. If life spreads easily (whether within the solar system or more widely), then we'll likely find traces of life there that look a lot like our own. If life arises easily, but doesn't spread easily, we may find traces of very un-earthlike biochemistry. And if life is rare, we'd expect to find nothing. Any of the three results would have huge implications. And then rinse and repeat on Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and so on. And find a way to look at exoplanet atmospheres and chase stuff that comes in from outside the solar system. Even negative results will add enormously to our understanding.
  - addicted 3y ago
    At this point isn’t Mars already contaminated?
    - idlewords 3y ago
      No, almost certainly not. There are individual living microbes and spores on the various landers, but unlike the microbiome that would travel with a human mission, they're not viable and have no mechanism to get to somewhere where they'd be viable.
      - RajT88 3y ago
        I mean, you say that, but also this story was a thing that happened: https://www.cnet.com/science/sea-plankton-found-on-the-outer-surface-of-the-iss/ https://www.cnet.com/science/sea-plankton-found-on-the-outer...
        vel0city 3y ago
        The leading theory is air currents from the planet slowly contaminated the station over the decades, not contamination before launch. It's also then still pretty protected by radiation still being so close to Eath. Our probes go through pretty tight clean room packaging, shed almost all their outside layers before leaving Earth orbit while still being very toasty, and then get blasted by intense radiation for months and are finally separated by some pretty massive distances on the planet.
- creer 3y ago
  idlewords was specifically mentioning that we have (found life elsewhere). It was pretty clear to people that there would be no life 750 metres inside the earth crust below another 700m of ocean: too hot, no light, pressure, bla, bla. - And plenty was found. Of course it's an easy counter "Still Earth, haha! Doesn't count". So yes, it's back to the point that whenever we have developped tech to go look, we have found "whatever the tech could find". Except - for now - TV serials radio waves. That's true. And bacteria on Mars. Yes it's a glib way to put it but it's not an unfair answer to that criticism.
- NotSammyHagar 3y ago
  I went to a biology/astronomy talk where there was a researcher working on the sequence of chemical changes on the early earth without much water or atmosphere would need to create dna base pairs. It was stunning because they basically had a sequence of things and geological discoveries point toward the precursor chemicals being available. It's not that dna was just there. This is not "life arising spontaneously". This is chemicals in an environment where they eventually build dna base pairs. Then after millions of years, perhaps you get microbes and go from there. Meanwhile we are getting water on earth from comets crashing down.
  - superposeur 3y ago
    The “eventually build dna base pairs” (that continue self replicating) is the uncertain and possibly ludicrously improbable step. See for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 which argues for a probability per exoplanet small enough that it hasn’t happened a second time in the observable universe. On the other hand, one of the self-organizing proposals cited elsewhere in this thread may turn out to be correct and the probability may be much higher. The point is that, while there are some cool ideas on the table, everything hinges on the particular value of this probability (not just a qualitative story of how life might have arisen) and we don’t know what it is. Still relevant: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-...
    - NotSammyHagar 3y ago
      Sorry, I didn't see your posting before. The person speaking at the astronomy on tap presentation made it seem much more likely, basically given expected conditions on pre-biotic earth, very likely in a million year timeframe. I'm a software engineer so I don't readily admit I don't know what I'm talking about. Are you in the field and can maybe elaborate on your skepticism? This fellow was pretty certain they've worked out several likely possible paths. This was last year.
      - 3y ago
njoubert 3y ago
Great comment! Indeed there is a recent Nature paper that's causing a lot of discussion that is investigating that missing link between the physics of matter and the emergence of the natural selection and evolution processes that give rise to life. this is a really fascinating area! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
- creer 3y ago
  That link (going from basic chemical to bootstrapped evolution) is an entire field of research. Not one paper now and then. Labs, money, researchers building on each other's work... Just want to point out.
  - dayjaby 3y ago
    Any good (starter) books on this?
    - creer 3y ago
      I have passed on the request to one of the scientists.
fastball 3y ago
You call these factors "circumstantial evidence", but they are only circumstantial evidence if our ideas about what allows/causes/etc life are correct, which we have not validated at all. If we can't promote abiogenesis in a lab our understanding is clearly limited, which is itself surprising. How many other processes in nature have we observed and not been able to replicate ourselves (or at least make progress towards replicating)?
donny2018 3y ago
“England has developed a hypothesis of the physics of the origins of life, that he calls "dissipation-driven adaptation."[3][5] The hypothesis holds that random groups of molecules can self-organize to more efficiently absorb and dissipate heat from the environment. His hypothesis states that such self-organizing systems are an inherent part of the physical world.[7]” If Jeremy England’s hypothesis is true, then life shouldn’t be unique but rather inevitable, as life in general would be the way for matter to better dissipate heat, and better turn low entropy into high entropy. In fact, if you watch what life is doing in terms of physics, then it’s obvious that all it does is consume low entropy (stored chemical energy, heat from heat baths), and dissipates it around very efficiently. Even we, humans are more and more good at it: we take hydrocarbons chemical energy and turn it into work and heat. It’s not enough for us, we now consume energy stored in atomic bonds, and turn it into work and heat. We capture concentrated sunlight and also turn it into work and heat, etc. Essentially, we are doing what we are supposed to do as a function of physical matter: we produce more entropy.
- xorbax 3y ago
  I don't think that's Jeremy England's idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life Henry Adams first put it to print in the 1910s, and Schrödinger did a fine turn on it and wrote a whole book in the 40s. The idea that life exists as the most efficient method to facilitate thermodynamic equilibrium is older than the neutron.
- subroutine 3y ago
  It seems like a more fundamental phenomenon would be the ability to self replicate. I imagine some organic compounds forming a primitive vesicle in a relatively calm lagoon. As the vesicle collects more organics it gets too large and eventually blebs off a small vesicle (primordial fission). The heartiest vesicles that can replicate fastest tend to survive the longest and produce the most copies. Evolution takes it from there.
- noduerme 3y ago
  >> better turn low entropy into high entropy. I took a double take and thought you'd made a typo, because I've never heard that assessment before. I see what you're saying about dissipating heat and work... but life organizes. Most of that wasted heat from any organism is the result of its processing, consolidating and transmitting information. Which is probably the only counter-entropic (extropic) process we can observe in the universe. My view has always been that life fights against entropy.
tzimo 3y ago
I would turn this argument around and say if life elsewhere is more likely, than it should be more likely that life from beyond has found us. If the likelihood of life elsewhere is so high that it has to be true, to me it would also be true that life should have found us by now
- jamiek88 3y ago
  I really don’t think people are talking about intelligent life here.
addicted 3y ago
We’ve also found water on the moon. And we know at least one Jupiter satellite has water. So that’s at least 4 bodies in the solar system that have water and all the bodies where we have successfully landed more than 1 rover have or had water (earth, moon, mars). Every body where we could have discovered water, we have discovered water. Seems like bayes theorem indicates that water is also probably highly available in the universe.
- idlewords 3y ago
  [flagged]
hutzlibu 3y ago
"we find evidence that life is more likely than expected" But only after we really lowered our expectations in the first place. I have an old book, about the Viking Mars lander, describing the technical details, before the rover succesfully landed on mars. It is full of optimism and a strong expectation, that it will find evidence of at least bacteria. And before we had strong telescopes and rockets, there was a strong expectation, that Mars has developed life. We know, that bacteria can survive in stasis mode on asteroids - yet we have not found life on any other planet.
- kortilla 3y ago
  Those original expectations weren’t based on evidence though.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> we find evidence that life is more likely than expected The easy steps for abiogenesis keep getting easier and easier. Meanwhile, we keep having absolutely no idea of the difficulty of the hard steps. Yes, technically that means life is easier than we expected, by some completely insignificant margin.

superposeur 3y ago

These factors are what I call the “trappings of life”. It is a completely open question (and I mean completely) how likely life is to arise spontaneously when these factors are present. One single instance of life elsewhere or successful abiogenesis in the lab would change that, but we have neither.

malfist 3y ago
We've barely started looking. It's like picking up one piece of hay, not finding a needle and declaring there's no needle in the haystack.
- superposeur 3y ago
  No is declaring that there is no needle in the haystack. Please actually read my post.
  - stouset 3y ago
    “I just want to be clear that we’ve definitely not actually found life. We’ve found likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies everywhere, have plausible theories on how to go from precursors to bootstrapping, and see life in every corner of the planet we have explored. But just to be clear we haven’t actually found life anywhere else yet.” Yeah, we know. So what then was the point of your post?
    - superposeur 3y ago
      Well, perhaps you know that none of the recent findings are evidence of life, but in my conversations with others I have perceived a great deal of confusion on this point, even among scientifically literate colleagues. Also, the fact that we have zero understanding of the probability of abiogenesis is, in my experience, a greatly under-appreciated fact. I speculate that the way findings are reported contributes to this confusion. Also, at risk of incurring a flame, I'll gently point out that you are folding into this confusion and reinforcing it with your language: "likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies" ... we absolutely do not know that these conditions are "likely" precursors, which is a statement about a probability we know nothing about and as for "habitable" we do not actually know anything about whether or not a body is habitable in the sense of likely to spontaneously form life.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    absence of evidence is not evidence of absence sorry your life has created this crusade of rhetorically reminding people about the absence is evidence
    - superposeur 3y ago
      Not in general, just on this particular point. Because, in my opinion, we as a scientific community are currently flush with the (very cool) unexpected discovery of so many exoplanets and it is somewhat distorting our collective thinking about life and its origins.
      - creer 3y ago
        We SHOULD (be flush and distorted). We can be realistic AND enthusiastic about it. Some technically challenging work was done and achieved results FAR FAR beyond expectations. That is a result worthy of changing outlook. Before, the outlook was on statistical grounds (the universe is so vast that there has to be). Now this outlook has been justified a billion billion times over. It's certainly time to be far more ambitious and inverse the presumptions that we had before. I.e. before, "there had to be - some, somewhere" and now, "there is most likely all over the place".
      - idlewords 3y ago
        You can make the less charged argument that expanding the search for life has in every case so far led to extremely interesting scientific discoveries. So as a pragmatic strategy, it has legs regardless of where you stand on the question of life origins.
    - hesk 3y ago
      Provided you're actively and systematically looking for evidence, then absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
      - malfist 3y ago
        But we've not even started doing that yet. None of the mars rovers have landed anywhere close to where we think is must likely to currently harbor life due to fear of contamination. We've just now learned how to analyze atmospheres of exoplants. 5 years ago, we couldn't see exoplanets smaller than jupiter. A decade ago, we couldn't see exoplanets at all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
vlovich123 3y ago
I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments. We don’t yet have confidence about the exact mechanism on Earth but based on those experiments it’s likely (& generally currently accepted as the most likely mechanism AFAIK) that the boundary layer of volcanoes (probably underwater) + some crucial initial elements being available causes life to form “spontaneously”. Given the elements required and their overall availability in the universe, it’s also highly likely these conditions reproduce quite readily & life is generally quite abundant. Similarly, significant levels of intelligence within animals seems like quite a common occurrence as well (great and lesser apes, elephants, octopuses, dolphins, wolves etc). Whether or not intelligence + physiological evolution + social evolution to take advantage of that intelligence to build things cooperatively is a huge unknown of course although I think it’s inevitable. On the other hand, how long life sticks around on a planet once it forms is an open question - it’s not clear if a life ecosystem that’s stable for billions of years is likely and I suspect there’s probably a small amount of filtering that happens where planets become inhospitable rather “quickly” and can’t support life for multiple billions of years (e.g. there were probably several events in our history where it could have collapsed). Our type of society is probably much much rarer because you need access to mineral and energy deposits to go through each technological phase. For example, because of all the mining we’ve done, if humanity were to disappear it’s highly likely the Earth would not sustain another technological society because all the “easy to get to” deposits of crucial metals & things like oil are gone and there’s no way to bootstrap a technological society (it’s possible other kinds of resources could be developed to build other kinds of technology so who knows). I think based on our existing body of knowledge, life is likely extremely plentiful throughout the universe at one point in time or another. Some form of intelligent life is highly likely wherever we find any life that manages to stick around through bilions of years. A highly technological adept species of life though is highly likely an extreme rarity and a planet gets one shot at developing it. Whether any manages to escape their home planet remains an open question that likely only we will manage to answer over the next thousands of years if we make it that far.
- ghaff 3y ago
idlewords 3y ago
The other part of the open question is how easily life is able to spread across worlds. This is why it's so vital to go look at Mars without contaminating the search. If life spreads easily (whether within the solar system or more widely), then we'll likely find traces of life there that look a lot like our own. If life arises easily, but doesn't spread easily, we may find traces of very un-earthlike biochemistry. And if life is rare, we'd expect to find nothing. Any of the three results would have huge implications. And then rinse and repeat on Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and so on. And find a way to look at exoplanet atmospheres and chase stuff that comes in from outside the solar system. Even negative results will add enormously to our understanding.
- addicted 3y ago
  At this point isn’t Mars already contaminated?
  - idlewords 3y ago
    No, almost certainly not. There are individual living microbes and spores on the various landers, but unlike the microbiome that would travel with a human mission, they're not viable and have no mechanism to get to somewhere where they'd be viable.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      I mean, you say that, but also this story was a thing that happened: https://www.cnet.com/science/sea-plankton-found-on-the-outer-surface-of-the-iss/ https://www.cnet.com/science/sea-plankton-found-on-the-outer...
      - vel0city 3y ago
        The leading theory is air currents from the planet slowly contaminated the station over the decades, not contamination before launch. It's also then still pretty protected by radiation still being so close to Eath. Our probes go through pretty tight clean room packaging, shed almost all their outside layers before leaving Earth orbit while still being very toasty, and then get blasted by intense radiation for months and are finally separated by some pretty massive distances on the planet.
creer 3y ago
idlewords was specifically mentioning that we have (found life elsewhere). It was pretty clear to people that there would be no life 750 metres inside the earth crust below another 700m of ocean: too hot, no light, pressure, bla, bla. - And plenty was found. Of course it's an easy counter "Still Earth, haha! Doesn't count". So yes, it's back to the point that whenever we have developped tech to go look, we have found "whatever the tech could find". Except - for now - TV serials radio waves. That's true. And bacteria on Mars. Yes it's a glib way to put it but it's not an unfair answer to that criticism.
NotSammyHagar 3y ago
I went to a biology/astronomy talk where there was a researcher working on the sequence of chemical changes on the early earth without much water or atmosphere would need to create dna base pairs. It was stunning because they basically had a sequence of things and geological discoveries point toward the precursor chemicals being available. It's not that dna was just there. This is not "life arising spontaneously". This is chemicals in an environment where they eventually build dna base pairs. Then after millions of years, perhaps you get microbes and go from there. Meanwhile we are getting water on earth from comets crashing down.
- superposeur 3y ago
  The “eventually build dna base pairs” (that continue self replicating) is the uncertain and possibly ludicrously improbable step. See for instance https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0 which argues for a probability per exoplanet small enough that it hasn’t happened a second time in the observable universe. On the other hand, one of the self-organizing proposals cited elsewhere in this thread may turn out to be correct and the probability may be much higher. The point is that, while there are some cool ideas on the table, everything hinges on the particular value of this probability (not just a qualitative story of how life might have arisen) and we don’t know what it is. Still relevant: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/pssst-dont-...
  - NotSammyHagar 3y ago
    Sorry, I didn't see your posting before. The person speaking at the astronomy on tap presentation made it seem much more likely, basically given expected conditions on pre-biotic earth, very likely in a million year timeframe. I'm a software engineer so I don't readily admit I don't know what I'm talking about. Are you in the field and can maybe elaborate on your skepticism? This fellow was pretty certain they've worked out several likely possible paths. This was last year.
    - 3y ago

njoubert 3y ago

Great comment! Indeed there is a recent Nature paper that's causing a lot of discussion that is investigating that missing link between the physics of matter and the emergence of the natural selection and evolution processes that give rise to life. this is a really fascinating area! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

creer 3y ago
That link (going from basic chemical to bootstrapped evolution) is an entire field of research. Not one paper now and then. Labs, money, researchers building on each other's work... Just want to point out.
- dayjaby 3y ago
  Any good (starter) books on this?
  - creer 3y ago
    I have passed on the request to one of the scientists.

fastball 3y ago

You call these factors "circumstantial evidence", but they are only circumstantial evidence if our ideas about what allows/causes/etc life are correct, which we have not validated at all. If we can't promote abiogenesis in a lab our understanding is clearly limited, which is itself surprising. How many other processes in nature have we observed and not been able to replicate ourselves (or at least make progress towards replicating)?

donny2018 3y ago

“England has developed a hypothesis of the physics of the origins of life, that he calls "dissipation-driven adaptation."[3][5] The hypothesis holds that random groups of molecules can self-organize to more efficiently absorb and dissipate heat from the environment. His hypothesis states that such self-organizing systems are an inherent part of the physical world.[7]” If Jeremy England’s hypothesis is true, then life shouldn’t be unique but rather inevitable, as life in general would be the way for matter to better dissipate heat, and better turn low entropy into high entropy. In fact, if you watch what life is doing in terms of physics, then it’s obvious that all it does is consume low entropy (stored chemical energy, heat from heat baths), and dissipates it around very efficiently. Even we, humans are more and more good at it: we take hydrocarbons chemical energy and turn it into work and heat. It’s not enough for us, we now consume energy stored in atomic bonds, and turn it into work and heat. We capture concentrated sunlight and also turn it into work and heat, etc. Essentially, we are doing what we are supposed to do as a function of physical matter: we produce more entropy.

xorbax 3y ago
I don't think that's Jeremy England's idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life Henry Adams first put it to print in the 1910s, and Schrödinger did a fine turn on it and wrote a whole book in the 40s. The idea that life exists as the most efficient method to facilitate thermodynamic equilibrium is older than the neutron.
subroutine 3y ago
It seems like a more fundamental phenomenon would be the ability to self replicate. I imagine some organic compounds forming a primitive vesicle in a relatively calm lagoon. As the vesicle collects more organics it gets too large and eventually blebs off a small vesicle (primordial fission). The heartiest vesicles that can replicate fastest tend to survive the longest and produce the most copies. Evolution takes it from there.
noduerme 3y ago
>> better turn low entropy into high entropy. I took a double take and thought you'd made a typo, because I've never heard that assessment before. I see what you're saying about dissipating heat and work... but life organizes. Most of that wasted heat from any organism is the result of its processing, consolidating and transmitting information. Which is probably the only counter-entropic (extropic) process we can observe in the universe. My view has always been that life fights against entropy.

tzimo 3y ago

I would turn this argument around and say if life elsewhere is more likely, than it should be more likely that life from beyond has found us. If the likelihood of life elsewhere is so high that it has to be true, to me it would also be true that life should have found us by now

jamiek88 3y ago
I really don’t think people are talking about intelligent life here.

addicted 3y ago

We’ve also found water on the moon. And we know at least one Jupiter satellite has water. So that’s at least 4 bodies in the solar system that have water and all the bodies where we have successfully landed more than 1 rover have or had water (earth, moon, mars). Every body where we could have discovered water, we have discovered water. Seems like bayes theorem indicates that water is also probably highly available in the universe.

idlewords 3y ago
[flagged]

hutzlibu 3y ago

"we find evidence that life is more likely than expected" But only after we really lowered our expectations in the first place. I have an old book, about the Viking Mars lander, describing the technical details, before the rover succesfully landed on mars. It is full of optimism and a strong expectation, that it will find evidence of at least bacteria. And before we had strong telescopes and rockets, there was a strong expectation, that Mars has developed life. We know, that bacteria can survive in stasis mode on asteroids - yet we have not found life on any other planet.

kortilla 3y ago
Those original expectations weren’t based on evidence though.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> we find evidence that life is more likely than expected The easy steps for abiogenesis keep getting easier and easier. Meanwhile, we keep having absolutely no idea of the difficulty of the hard steps. Yes, technically that means life is easier than we expected, by some completely insignificant margin.