Life has been found beneath hydrothermal vents for the first time
iflscience.com
iflscience.com
"Is a rock that gets stuck in your shoe just trying to travel?"
Does this theory have a name or a place I can ready more about it?
I think it’s fair to say earth is alive with a completely straight face, and it’s probably even important for more people to start seeing it this way.
In modern western societies we learn that we born into this world, and that our mind, body and soul are seperate entities.
Whereas other cultures and philosophies consider that we are part of the world, that we are born out of it but still connected.
The speeches for Watts are really about the increasingly unhealthy abstraction from this planet that is shaping our thinking.
Ideas that we can and should live on Mars or grow and eat artificial meat are just bonkers really. I’m all for science and advancement, but being restoring our connection to this planet is the answer. :-)
…live on Mars or grow and eat artificial meat…
Not sure what your train of thought was there.
I was typing on my phone and running out of time.
Broadly, it was a half baked thought that our Western culture heavily promotes ideas that are anti-Earth in a way.
Ideas for instance where Elon Musk is talking about saving humanity by getting to Mars, or creating artificial meat as a solution to our food crises.
These ideas suggest that the solution is to engineer our way out of a problem of our own making. The problem rhetoric being that Earth cannot support us.
This runs counter to the thinking that we are bound to this Earth because we are part of it. We are one and the same. So we should respect it and work with it.
Watts talks about seeing the Californian hills in the 60s, being carved up and houses being wedged in to the landscape in an artificial way. Where no consideration is given to working with the land, instead we try to dominate and shape it.
Like I say, it's a half baked idea that I'm not really expressing very well I don't think! :-)
I'd love others to straighten me out, or put me on the right path! :-)
I did laugh a while back when in one of Watts' talks he mentioned Plastics being the solution to Deforestation and Paper Wastage...
Engineering a solution to deforestation using plastics didn't work out so well for us.
Fast forward 50 years and it turns out that Humans just began using more of everything!
Like building roads to reduce traffic and you end up just promoting more car usage! :-)
They’re highly entertaining, and also deeply thought provoking. I know they helped shift how I see myself relative to the world quite a bit.
> Whereas other cultures and philosophies consider that we are part of the world, that we are born out of it but still connected.
> The speeches for Watts are really about the increasingly unhealthy abstraction from this planet that is shaping our thinking.
What makes you call one of those abstractions unhealthy, and the other (presumably) healthy?
IOW, why do you feel one is more valid than the other? To me, they are either both equally valid or equally invalid.
Just a pale blue dot, a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
-- Terry Pratchett, "Equal Rites"
He's touched on this in a couple of his earlier books, I think The Vital Question and one other, but in general all his works are relatively easy to read, and worth the effort.
> But free loader molecules that could infiltrate a metabolism and contribute nothing, but use it only for their own self-replication would also thrive.
Could you please explain the "mechanical" distinction between molecules that contribute to self-replication and molecules that contribute nothing during replication?
What does it mean to contribute?
Anywhy on to my attempt at answering your question:
If we could identify a set of molecules in the pores of vent rock back in the early pre-biotic earth, each with a distinct catalytic function, that were the using energy available, perhaps as electric charge, perhaps chemical energy and interacting to replicate that same set of molecules in neighbouring pores, then we could look at the actions of each molecule, and determine how each molecule participates in the chemical processes that result in the replication of the whole set of molecules. If a molecule is mutually dependent on on other molecules in the set for their mutual replication, I think we can call them a contributing part of the system. If a molecule depends on the other molecules to be replicated, but the replication of no other molecule is improved from its presence in the set, then it is not a contributing part of the system, but a freeloader.
I think this sets up two maximal strategies:
A system is most efficient if it has no freeloaders.
A molecule is most efficient if it can freeload.
I don't understand, the temp under the sand is 25C/75F? Or is that a typo?
>Using an underwater robot, the science team overturned chunks of volcanic crust, discovering cave systems teeming with worms, snails, and chemosynthetic bacteria living in 75 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) water.
The article is somewhat confusing but I think the surprising thing is that the ecosystem includes species that are known to be extremophiles that are part of vent ecosystems that have very different conditions than the newly-discovered below-the-vents ecosystems, and which it was previously unknown how they arrived at new vents, almost immediately when the vents form.
If you have ever seen where they put sand on a vibrating metal plate, and it creates symmetrical patterns, that's what I'm referring to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/p504b/cymatics_a...
It is still entirely possible that there is something (or some things) unique about Earth that are exceedingly rare in the Universe as a whole
The question then is: did it form there independently from life on earth, or does it have a common ancestor? If the former, then we can assert that the universe has to be teeming with life; then the Fermi paradox kicks in. If the latter, then we really have to think about things; did life form on earth and somehow find its way to Europa? Or did it come from somewhere else?
It's interesting to think about. I hope they will launch a permanent orbiter and / or a lander to Europa soon. Although that comes with its own dangers of contamination.