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There is ~1M bacteria in a single drop of seawater. Now multiply that by (the ocean) and multiply the interactions by X billion years. It seems impossible for

by rsync 2y ago

There is ~1M bacteria in a single drop of seawater. Now multiply that by (the ocean) and multiply the interactions by X billion years. It seems impossible for a symbiosis like this not to have happened. No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.

latchkey 2y ago
Each grain of sand on earth represents 1 billion planets in the universe. https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1af4prs/if_you_wanna_try_wrapping_your_head_around_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1af4prs/if_you_w...
- Aloisius 2y ago
  There are 100 million times more bacteria in the ocean than there are stars in the universe. Which really should tell people how rare the development of mitochondria was if it has only happened once here.
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    It didn't necessarily happen only once; maybe we were left with the most successful instance.
    - hughesjj 2y ago
      Not even that. There could be better civilizations than us out there that either 1. Died off or regressed 2. Plateaued 3. Is sufficiently far away or stealthy enough for us not to notice them (whether intentionally or not) I've often thought about the whole communications bubble argument... I don't buy it. I'd imagine, like wifi, other civilizations will maximize their communication bandwidth, which essentially also maximizes entropy which looks like noise to us. Compression, encryption, redundancy, multiplexing over frequency and amplitude and time, directional antennas and signalling... That's what we've done in under 100 years. I know there's stuff like organic markers etc, but if machines are doing most of the heavy lifting I don't think that would matter. Same with stuff like hydrogen emissions lines. Whatever is abundant will be used for "settled" and "dead" solar systems alike.
dylan604 2y ago
The issue here is that the interactions over X billion years are not the same. Each event that happened on this rock would also need to happen else where to have the same evolutionary pressures applied.
crazygringo 2y ago
> No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty. That is simply not true. Events are classified by probabilities, and there are a whole lot of things with a probability a lot less than will happen across the whole ocean across however many billion years. All the higher-probability events will occur, yes. But a specific sequence of multiple extremely low-probability events? That then continues to replicate before it gets wiped out by chance? Not a certainty, absolutely not. Contrary to what you say, it matters very much exactly how low the odds are.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
beltsazar 2y ago
This is a such common logical fallacy that we should have name for it. > No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty. "No matter how low", really? Are you suggesting that your multiplication result is infinite? Otherwise, no matter how big the result is—even if it's Graham's number or TREE(3)—but as long as it's finite, there are odds so low that bring the outcome extremely unlikely. The thing is we don't know even a ballpark estimate of the odds, but you were saying like we have a lower bound of the odds. The universe is unfathomably huge, true, but we also don't know if abiogenesis is less unfathomably unlikely.

by rsync 2y ago

latchkey 2y ago

Each grain of sand on earth represents 1 billion planets in the universe. https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1af4prs/if_you_wanna_try_wrapping_your_head_around_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/1af4prs/if_you_w...

Aloisius 2y ago
There are 100 million times more bacteria in the ocean than there are stars in the universe. Which really should tell people how rare the development of mitochondria was if it has only happened once here.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  It didn't necessarily happen only once; maybe we were left with the most successful instance.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    Not even that. There could be better civilizations than us out there that either 1. Died off or regressed 2. Plateaued 3. Is sufficiently far away or stealthy enough for us not to notice them (whether intentionally or not) I've often thought about the whole communications bubble argument... I don't buy it. I'd imagine, like wifi, other civilizations will maximize their communication bandwidth, which essentially also maximizes entropy which looks like noise to us. Compression, encryption, redundancy, multiplexing over frequency and amplitude and time, directional antennas and signalling... That's what we've done in under 100 years. I know there's stuff like organic markers etc, but if machines are doing most of the heavy lifting I don't think that would matter. Same with stuff like hydrogen emissions lines. Whatever is abundant will be used for "settled" and "dead" solar systems alike.

dylan604 2y ago

The issue here is that the interactions over X billion years are not the same. Each event that happened on this rock would also need to happen else where to have the same evolutionary pressures applied.

crazygringo 2y ago

> No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty. That is simply not true. Events are classified by probabilities, and there are a whole lot of things with a probability a lot less than will happen across the whole ocean across however many billion years. All the higher-probability events will occur, yes. But a specific sequence of multiple extremely low-probability events? That then continues to replicate before it gets wiped out by chance? Not a certainty, absolutely not. Contrary to what you say, it matters very much exactly how low the odds are.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

beltsazar 2y ago

This is a such common logical fallacy that we should have name for it. > No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty. "No matter how low", really? Are you suggesting that your multiplication result is infinite? Otherwise, no matter how big the result is—even if it's Graham's number or TREE(3)—but as long as it's finite, there are odds so low that bring the outcome extremely unlikely. The thing is we don't know even a ballpark estimate of the odds, but you were saying like we have a lower bound of the odds. The universe is unfathomably huge, true, but we also don't know if abiogenesis is less unfathomably unlikely.