pfdietz

30 ms·

871.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Again, implausible purity there. I'll add the tetramers used as the components are also much larger than the nucleotides in the Ryugu paper, so would be present in much lower concentrations.
872.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Of course it's helpful, unless one has the ridiculous idea that democracies can't make mistakes. Yes, voters are acting in their own interests, or at least what they perceive to be their interests at the time. This can lead to ba
873.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
No, the problem is the government has artificially restricted housing supply and this has driven up prices. It's not a market failure, it's a government failure.
874.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
The problem is it can't drive prices below what the free market would dictate? Talk about praising with faint damns.
875.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
They didn't discover nucleotides on this asteroid.
876.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
I also asked about other things you have conveniently forgotten to mention there. The overarching falsehood is that identification of biologically relevant molecules at 200 ppb levels, in a soup of tens of thousands of other chemicals, move
877.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Massively Overpowered reports: "Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad. The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been aroun
878.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
If you look at the paper, the nucleobases were present at concentrations of about 1 nanomole per gram. So, maybe 200 ppb by mass for each. They are in a sea of other random organic stuff that is at best tangentially relevant to life as w
879.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Ryugu showed an estimated ~20,000 different organic molecules. It's not that surprising that the nucleobases would be among them, along with all sorts of chemicals not relevant to life. https://www.science.org/doi&#x2F
880.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
There's a tremendous amount of confidently stated bullshit on the issue of OoL that I have long since lost all patience with. What's your problem with the debunking of falsehood?
881.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> The frequency of an asteroid impact on Earth is ~500,000 years. Surely you could make this figure be anything you want just by scaling up or down the size of an object you call an asteroid. So as stated it's meaningless.
882.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> There is no known way in which nuclear radiation could have been the source of energy for the first living beings. Nuclear energy is a source of energy for some current living beings, though. Underground ecosystems live on hydrogen pr
883.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Yes, and also that if the population becomes small enough it becomes impossible to sustain an industrial society due to lack of scale.
884.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> However, I would not describe those as small. The majority of the interplanetary bodies that orbit the Sun and which fall from time to time on Earth as meteorites are far too small to have ever had conditions for the appearance of life
885.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
That's not replication, that's polymerization. There's nothing template-directed about it, and as far as I can tell the experiment depends on pure initial conditions (the guanosine monophosphate is not mixed with a plethora
886.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Since nucleobases contain neither sugars nor phosphates, no they can't.
887.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> no source of energy Asteroids early in the solar system would be very radioactive due to short lived isotopes formed during the formation of the solar system. The existence of these isotopes is known from the patterns of decay product
888.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
People make the inference that "early occurence of life" implies "life must be easy to start". But that inference requires the assumption that the chance of OoL (origin of life) remains mostly constant with time. An al
889.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Amazon sells 67% of all e-books in the US and 50% of all print books. Amazon isn't trapped with the big 5; the big 5 are trapped with Amazon.
890.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> This second claim does not make sense. The meteorites rich in water and organic substances are extremely easily vaporized during atmospheric entry or during the impact with the surface and their content of organic substances would deco
891.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
The conditions, while not requiring enzymes, are still highly artificial.
892.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
RNA can replicate in highly artificial conditions that would seem to already require life to occur.
893.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
There is some skepticism now that the LHB was real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZfzbEtKF9o
894.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
> effectively banned This simply isn't true. Not as much may have been invested in said research, but that's more a reflection of the lack of a business case for such things. They are not a magical panacea to all of nuclear&#
895.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Why do you think Amazon couldn't do that?
896.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Paperbacks have declined for me because of my eyes.
897.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
"Good"? Ok, if it makes you feel better. But scientifically, it doesn't do much.
898.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
All it means is you can say "if life is rare, it's not because these specific small chemicals can't be produced". Which is a rather weak thing to say. It doesn't imply life isn't rare, or that further advanc
899.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
The real risk is the TFR never rises and population drops until complex society cannot be maintained. Or perhaps some weird minority with higher TFR takes over the world, what I call the "Amish Scenario".
900.
by pfdietz 8mo ago
Finding exponentially decreasing amounts of specific chemicals is about as informative as finding short words in strings of random letters.

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