Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

Why is this even still a question... every single time you boil a pot of water convection rolls form. According to equilibrium thermodynamics it is vanishingly improbable that Avogrado's numbers worth of molecules will conspire together to act in a coordinated fashion to form those rolls... yet it happens every time.

The convection rolls win out over diffusion because they dissipate heat faster and there is only so much heat. Life is no different. A structured low entropy process that dissipates energy faster than diffusion - there's no paradox or anything about emergent complexity.

The fundamental concepts here are pretty simple and any discussion concerning P(life) need to start by understanding what life is in the first place and how it can arise.

Point being: life isn't a rare thing or a mystery, anywhere in the universe you find energy gradients you'll find life.

There just isn't a conversation to have here. If we're alone it's because we're first. But we are almost certainly not alone. The universe is just really fucking big.

Just because "a structured low entropy process that dissipates energy faster than diffusion" will win out every-time doesn't answer the question about how a self-replicating structured low entropy process will form in the first place. Once life starts then it will explode, but the problem is how to get life actually started.

Perhaps life is easy to start, but is also easily out-competed by non-living self-replicating organisms.

"non-living self-replicating organisms" Sounds like a contradiction to me ;)

Lots of things are self-replicating that we would not consider "living". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replication

Not claiming my above comment was the greatest argument ever, I didn't spend that much time on it - but that is precisely what the argument is about.

I am arguing that the formation of life is not a rare thing at all.

I want to understand this argument better. Are you claiming that any "structured low entropy process that dissipates energy" is alive? How are you defining life?

I may be putting words into the parent's mouth here, but I think the argument is just analogical. That there are emergent effects to physical processes that are difficult/nearly impossible to predict from basic physical law. And therefore we should withhold judgement about the difficulty of life forming, given that we so far have a limited understanding of the relevant physics.

Nah I mean it pretty literally. You are very right that the necessary physics isn't really there, this is a really difficult thing to state rigorously.

However I would argue that the underlying reasoning emerges out of fairly fundamental physics.. and that while difficult to state rigorously the core idea is kindof... obvious... to anyone with a strong physics background...

Pretty much. I define life as any self-sustaining structured low entropy process that dissipates energy faster than diffusion. The low entropy part basically means that such a configuration is vanishingly improbable under _equilibrium_ statistical mechanics.

Under this definition convection rolls, viruses and eukaryotes are all alive.

this is a great comment, but what about Venus ? It has an energy gradient, so why no life ?

We don't know if there is no life there, we've never been.

Almost every time we've assumed that an environment on Earth was "too harsh" to sustain life we have been proven wrong. We have no model for something that might live on the surface of Venus or below, but there could be something in the clouds.

“We’ve never been”

As a species walking on the surface, no.

But we have sent probes there as far back as the 60s.

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