How might life migrate through the universe?
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Really any system capable of creating themrodynamic disequilibrium and a chemical gradient could be an option. An example of this might be the freeze and thaw cycle of large planetoids. Swing close to the planet, warm up enough, move away, cool enough. Just a basic cycle (I believe the surface images of Pluto support the existence of such cycles). If volatile ices can have just enough warth to create bonds, there are many many many more of these types of objects than well places 'goldilocks' planets. Give it enough time and one will knock out of orbit and smash into a planet that does have adequate conditions for the development of life. Just a bunch of precursor chemistry to life, but plenty of it.
I've tried to look into deep space volatile ice chemistry but haven't exactly found great resources. But it strikes me that if a simple extraplanetary mechanism for pre-life chemistry accumulation exists, well, then life is probably pretty much everywhere.
The interstellar medium, pretty primordial, seems to be filled with phospholipids: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2101314118
We have found peptides on asteroids and in meteorites.
Not quite the same thing. Actual abundant phosphorus compounds would be quite surprising. Probably the end of the phosphorus-problem resolution of the fermi paradox, for one thing. But medium-small organic molecules aren't that big a surprise anymore.
Sincerely, Thank you!
And, if instead we narrow it such that "the first life would think this for the first 100 years of its awareness that there might be more life out there"...
Then it also becomes true for the 11th through the 100,000th life born, because the first 100 years is also the almost certainly a low level of technology and of just not having spent enough time looking.
Thus, the fact that we say "it looks empty" does not do us any good in determining whether we are #1 or #100,000, or even higher still.
It sucks that we will be extinct soon, and didn't get to figure out which number (roughly) we are.
At present, we are transforming Earth to our short term needs, but against our long term needs. The timescales don't match, because expanding to space should take several centuries, but we are risking wrecking the planet after only two centuries of industrial civilization, roughly. So it's wise to be afraid of extinction.
Reverting to low-tech after civilizational collapse... that one seems far too plausible to me.
And we've used up loads of the easily-accessed coal and oil. industrial revolution 2.0 may not actually be feasible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...
While what is happenings is extremely bad for our perception of what life is like, life itself has been through much worse.
I’m not particularly eager to see humanity extinguished or the world reset into another age. But if it happens, life won’t be gone from the universe even if there’s only life here on earth.
Nature might, who knows? And maybe we are just “programmed” to feel our own importance, and thats perhaps necessary but not sufficient to save us.
And then what? We do not have a third planet like that nearby. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Jupiter and Saturn are gas with no solid surface. Uranus and Neptune are ice. The next solar system is way too far.
I suspect that if we ever get the ability to travel to the next solar system, it will probably be easier to just stay in space, and only use the planets to mine the resources. Even for that, asteroids may be more convenient.
So, from this perspective, Earth is, and will remain, unique.
Realistically, terraforming mars for sustained independent settlements is likely not within our technological horizon before we wipe ourselves off this planet.
I don’t think we will end human civilization either though. The fact we could inhabit the moon and eventually mars at all means we could adapt to a inhospitable earth pretty easily. Maybe there will be much fewer of us and we wouldn’t like that life, but our future descendants would know nothing different and would be adapted to that civilization. But in the time spans of geology life will be resilient to whatever we do.
Hmm, not so fast. I don't think we've proved that at all.
We can "inhabit" those in the same way that I can "inhabit" the bottom of a pool.
In fact, as a numbers game: we've been on the moon during all the Apollo missions for ~3.5 days. Modern humanoids are about 200,000 years old. Or in other words, we've inhabited the moon for 5e-8 % of humanities' existence.
The record for holding one's breath is ~25 minutes by a guy called Budimir Šobat. Say their lifespan is 85 years. That's about 5e-7 % of their life. Or in other words, they've "inhabited" the bottom of the pool for 10x longer than humanity as a species has "inhabited" the moon.
I wouldn't feel comfortable saying his record proves we can inhabit the bottom of a pool, and I think the same has to be applied to the moon.
We have to consider self-sufficiency as a condition of whether or not we're really considered as native inhabitants of a place, or just a temporary extension of the mother planet.
In that regard, we honestly can't even really prove equilibrium with our home planet's resources, let alone an inhospitable one like mars or the moon.
I'm sure we could sustain a colony of 50 people on mars for the rest of their natural lives. Pack them enough air and snacks, and I'm sure it's doable today. However, I'm much more skeptical that we could do that without constant resupply for an indefinite period. Yeah, we might be able to conceivably generate electricity, purify water, oxygen, grow food, etc on-site, but what happens when those solar panels start to fail at 50 years, or the mechanical interlocks on the airlocks start to become excessively leaky, or the HVAC systems fail? None of that equipment can be regenerated on mars.
I've given this some thought before. I like the idea of mushrooms being all around the cosmos due to their adaptability and the resistance of spores.
Also, the universe might actually belong to viruses.
What’s exciting is the market is potentially very large, and hitherto uncontacted
His early "how about comets" work got laughed out of town. I think the laughter might be more hollow now, but there was a long winter for Hoyle in the Astronomy community, he was a little to "out there" for some people. I don't know for sure but I'm thinking he may have been very irritating to work with as well, not a lot of love around the FRS table.
Can you say a little more about this? I know that life itself preserves the increase of entropy
Fred worked on that.
Are there any catalysts that are much faster diffusing than being reinvented locally?
Maybe there is a paper about that already or we dont know enough to derive something useful from such constraints.
The concept of carbon life as a universal and migratory phenomenon is certainly appealing. The question is whether the few pieces of the puzzle we have already sketch anything concrete about the many missing pieces.
That's a lot of ifs, but it would be an interesting way of exploring interstellar space in a much shorter time span.
At that time in the early universe, there were no carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen atoms, and no planets with water. Life could only get started several million years after the first supernovas made heavy atoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#The...
his article starts out saying early supernovas (very, very early) would be required and the stars would need to be enormous. He cites various estimates of the early universe to support this.
This is a movement from disorder towards perfect order, perfect stillness.
Actually I'm saying that life is like inanimate matter, but is just another step on a continuum towards greater structure.
The first "life" couldn't even affect a thing next to it. Now humans are changing Earth and the near solar system. In the future our reach will be galaxy wide and beyond. Increasing order from disorder.
What is so specific about "biological" (which is a fairly meaningless term) that can't be replicated if we do the same thing with silicon or other substrates?
I think you are hand waving the whole thing and thinking consciousness = brains.
Sure, our brains produce consciousness, but WHY? Structure? Density of information? Complexity? Brain waves?
Nobody knows.
I believe it is entirely possible that we could eventually create AI that is conscious, or at least, would be able to convince it is. Whether this is achievable is different from whether it is possible, but I do think that if we continue down the current line with LLMs and other models, we'll eventually end up with a system that can articulate its consciousness to the point where the Supreme Court will have to make a decision about AI rights.
Consciousness does not necessarily mean you are non-deterministic in your consciousness operating.
Everything may be deterministic, but too complex for us to figure out at this point.
What if having a meaning is wrong too?
What if meaning is simply always a subjective thing and thus NOT OBJECTIVE.
Thus what is, is. And that's it. Anything else is just subjectivity applied.
It does seem inevitable, but it also seems that way from our current point of knowledge. Nothing says the story ends with our current understanding.
If you just look around a little bit, you discover that the whole universe is alive
There isn’t a single dead thing
From that observation you can realize that life is already everywhere
And just like energy, life is never created or destroyed, only transformed
This is as profound as saying everything is dead matter. It’s poetic, but largely useless for gaining deeper understanding.
We all “know” that our lives are completely dependent on, and intertwined with, our environment
Yet, we mostly go about our days being oblivious to it, oblivious to our impact on the environment and its effect on us
Why do you need to be dismissive instead of curious? Is there no value in exploring ideas? Or does someone just needs to be right?
How is the corpse of a loved one not a dead thing
It might not have the consciousness of your loved one, but the whole process from “death” to complete decomposition, is part of life and done by living things (animals, bacteria, plants, funghi, other microorganisms)
Would you say your arm is alive? Is your foot alive? Your nails? And if they are not, then are you alive?
You can’t just put together a bunch of dead things and call it life. Just like splitting loving things won’t make them dead (even if it ends our perception of that thing’s consciousness)
Everything is completely intertwined with its environment
Isn’t that like saying nothing is ‘cold’ because coldness doesn’t really exist, its just a lack of heat?
When I say “this toaster is not alive” you know exactly what I mean. When I say “this corpse is dead” you know exactly what I mean. Why play word games about it?
Exploring these limits and definitions have had tremendous impact in at least the medical field
It also has an impact on the way we see, understand and treat the world around us
Questioning our basic assumptions and perspective is what leads to scientific insight and progress
Would you prefer we never wonder about the definition or meaning of any words? Or only certain words?
However, at the end of the day, it’s just an agreement
There is no basic universal physical law that defines life
If we allow ourselves to re-think the definition, or just do without
We can create alternative models, think differently and discover new ideas
And you said quite a few very interesting things
Why do you say the undetermined unity contain nothing of interest?
Having a conscious experience of undetermined unity, can be a life changing event (as for example, reported by astronauts when going to space)
Experience, and for that matter consciousness, doesn’t need thought
But we kind of live in the intersection of both
If you understand German this video may help, else there are subtitles https://youtu.be/mh_KE4VwPDk?si=-zCwWSAIFdQi8nKe
Taking that definition, we can still approach it experientially without thought
What sometimes is called “minimal consciousness experience” in cognitive sciences