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Comment by excitom | Hacker News Reader

  Such an object would function as a sail—one powered by light, rather than by wind. The natural world doesn’t produce sails; people do.

What about jellyfish that move about the oceans pushed by wind?

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It's a weird statement that confuses the purpose of an object with what an object does. Purpose exists only in our heads; natural objects don't have one. There is no <purpose="sail"> tag attached to atoms.

In other words, anything that behaves as a sail would, can be called a sail. And there are plenty of objects around us that behave as sails, not made such by humans, or made so unintentionally.

Evolution derives purpose from experimentation. It is not intent driven design, it is experiment driven design, but many aspects of persistence through evolution are nonetheless purposeful. If an adaptation is significantly successful, it becomes prominent in the created population and there is a reason for it - that is the noun, purpose. This would be different if you said "have purpose" instead of "the purpose".

I disagree. "Purpose" connotes intent, and evolution has none. It's a glorified random number generator hooked to a feedback loop. The only "purpose" evolution has is in POSIWID sense - the purpose of a system is what it does[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Yeah, I can think of a lot of examples of sails in the natural world. Dandelion seeds, winged tree seeds, etc.

Ballooning spiders as well.

Even some spiders

Flying Squirrels?

I think the comment was poorly worded with “people” and should be “life” which is still an interesting thought.

Distinguishing between things produced by the natural world, and things produced by life seems like the type of communication strategy that would not help a general audience. I mean, I get what you mean, but 'natural' and 'organic' are taken to be synonyms in common usage.

Those are all lifeforms though. And the "sailing" mechanisms have purpose.

The example you are looking for is a lifeless thin slate of ice/rock that gets pushed by a force such as wind or water.

Or even more fun the idea than some pterosaurs were in fact sailers!

https://phys.org/news/2009-10-ancient-pterosaur-seas-video.h...

I think finding space jellyfish would also be a monumental discovery.

s/natural world/inorganic matter/

There are also rocks that do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

They are called "sailing" but they don't sail in the sense of this discussion.

I think by natural world the author meant non-biological.

If the object was biological, then it would be even more support for the existence of extraterrestrial life.

(Specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velella)

That is a very good example of a sail produced by a non human 'city'. Yep. Same shape and function.

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