Hacker News Reader

Comment by bokan | Hacker News Reader

But the probability of life arising is an unknown. Intuitively I too feel it probably isn't that small, but it wouldn't be the first time intuition about the universe is wrong. How do you _know_ the odds of life arising aren't 1/10^30?

View on HN

We don’t know, but we can guess that it is lower than that, and have no reason to think it is that rare.

The elements of life have been found to arise spontaneously, see Bartel and Szostak for example.

The elements of life (by this I presume you mean various small biomolecules like amino acids) arising easily doesn't imply life arises easily.

We know the probability of life arising in the universe is >0 because we exist.

However, we don't know if life can arise spontaneously given the right conditions (abiogenesis) or if must it be "seeded" at some level by an existing life form (i.e. deity, asteroid containing bacteria, etc)?

I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.

> I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.

Hijacking someone else's comment to ask without judgement or agenda - How, if at all, would it alter your religious beliefs were life/intelligent life to be found on another planet?

I keep my religious beliefs and scientific beliefs mostly segregated, so they don't affect each other too strongly for the most part. The reason for this is that those 2 things are reinforced by different sources. My religious beliefs are reinforced by spiritual experiences (such as repeatedly being stumped by [challenging life/work problem], praying for help, and then getting distinct thoughts or impressions that miraculously unblock me... or sometimes I'm miraculously unblocked through the actions other people), my scientific beliefs are formed and are refined by reading scientific literature + critical thinking. If the 2 are in conflict (which is pretty rare), it's usually my religious beliefs that adapt to new scientific understanding. For example, if evolution seems to be in conflict with intelligent design, I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed (i.e. "this computer program can't have been intelligently designed, we've proven it was created by an LLM" --> "ok, then the LLM was intelligently designed").

One thing that would probably alter my religious beliefs significantly is if abiogenesis or synthetic life were proven possible (i.e. you can clearly show in a lab how to make life arise from non-life, or how to create artificial life). I don't find the current "primordial soup" or other abiogenesis arguments convincing enough to abandon religion, though I do re-visit the wiki every couple years to see what's new on that front.

> I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed

I don't understand why I don't hear anyone else take this position. To me it's obvious and it's hard to find any other way to reconcile them. (But I'm not religious.)

Well, actually there's two quite different things that could be asserted along that line and it's not clear which you meant: either that evolution is a mechanism by which the hand of God can meddle in random occurrences to pick outcomes, or that it's completely hands-off.

But I would state the second one differently: that the universe was set up to allow evolution and all the other systems of natures to create the world today. Evolution itself is ultimately a consequence of physics and statistics.

That’s not my view, but if seeded I’d expect to find it in many more places, why would our creators only seed one planet?

> I’d expect to find it in many more places

I'd expect the same, the problem is just the vast distances involved with space (meaning we are looking into the past) and the enormous quantities planets to check make it difficult to find other life out there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com