Calculating the Odds of life

I agree that it hasn’t been demonstrated as a certainty; however whether it is a “likely” event is a rather normative consideration, wouldn’t you agree?

What does size have to do with it? Some self-replicating RNAs are only a few hundred base-pairs long. Additionally, what do we mean by “stable”? Stability is a function of environment as well as the specific structure of the molecule in question. One major cause of instability in the present environment is molecular oxygen. Since molecular oxygen is effectively a product of life (it is so reactive that unless it is constantly replenished in the environment it disappears all-but completely) when we are discussing the origin of life we are talking about an anoxic environment. That is important because anoxic environments favor reactions like the polymerization of nucleotide bases.

We’ve identified several environments in the early Earth where many molecules of biological relevance would have naturally formed and polymerized. We’ve also taken those materials and made self-replicating molecules from them. I don’t see how that doesn’t satisfy the conditions you’ve set here.

Since I disagree with the first part of this paragraph, the last sentence is still unclear.

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ALSO WRONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
You said you were flipping them once per millisecond since the beginning of the universe. The odds you calculated were based on doing it first try, though. You didn’t even take into consideration how much time you were given. You need to take a statistics class.

I had these mistakes glaring at me since I first peeked into this thread. Idk what took me so long to finally call him out. I guess I was just waiting for someone else to do it :S.

Origin of Life or Universe problem

A caused B shown as A → B.

then what caused ( A → B ) ? I am not saying what caused A because you get another kind of infinite regression as in An caused An-1 … A2 caused A1 caused A, etc. No I am asking what caused the general fact that A causes B or what made A cause B to exist…

C did.

then C → ( A → B ).

then what caused ( C → ( A → B ) ) ?

D did.

and so on forever.

So what is the final answer ? There is no answer, it goes on forever. But even if you get one last answer, X caused it all, does that really give you anything ? Isn’t X just another symbol - concept - idea ? Do you really think one concept - idea - answer X is “supernatural” is all “encompassing” ? I doubt it, but good luck…

A second problem regarding these kinds of problems is the very idea of cause: does A → B mean every time A appears then B appears ? Does it appear right immediately after A or after some time interval ? How many intermediate states are there between A and B ? Are there an infinite number of intermediate states ?

And what if it is probabilistic like in Quantum Mechanics ? B sometimes follows A, other times no ? or sometimes a wildcat comes after A ?

And then exactly what delimits A and B ?

maybe A extends up to B ? Maybe B is part of A ? maybe there is no cause and effect, but just B comes after A, as is a sequence of arbitrary items, symbols, delimitations (in space and/or time ? ). Etc. Etc.

Then if B just comes after A, isn’t that like house B is further down the road from house A ? Doesn’t necessarily mean A causes B, or maybe is it B causes A ?

So this gives me the idea that cause and effect and science in general breaks down past a certain point: if every time you get A, B sometimes appear, you got some kind of pattern, maybe not absolute, but some pattern. But you can never rely on it always. And when talking about the origin of Life or the Universe, delimiting, defining or even only imagining and conceiving items A and B doesn’t seem so easy. Good luck with that.

I think there are no odds. Just like the question that “Why” does the universe exist, both are inapplicable.

Science is based on “Intentionality of Use”: that is how the “new” result, discovery, cause and effect, relationship, new idea, study, model etc. is going to be used. It may be used to create another complex abstract model, some kind of physical experiment, some technological application, some new kind of observation, etc. But it is always our mind, within its constraints and limitations, within its own language and cause and effect models, mathematical and logical models, that decides how the results are used and channeled.

Now how would any kind of result in the exploration of the “Origin of Life” or “Origin of Universe” be used ? To create a new universe in a laboratory ? To create new life forms from molecules in a giant chemical laboratory that channels the reactions that led from simple carbon molecules to complete cells ? Maybe, or maybe it could be used in a Virtual Reality environment as a new imaginary world where modified - technological singularity brains interact accordingly.

But even more important, if you change the neural circuit of minds, brains, the way information, emotions, feelings, pain/pleasure circuits, memory , sense organs and sense information are associated - connected and combined, you get a new universe, you get new patterns and a new science with new laws of physics.

So you could simulate or create the information relationship (which is what really exists in the end, matter - reality or what is real and fake is irrelevant) that creates a model of the “Origin of the Universe”, or the “Origin of Life”. Or you can change the way our mind with new constraints, internal languages, cause and effect models, mathematical and logical models that use and channel information in new ways, decodes any information so as to create the exact new Origin of Life or Origin of the Universe Information Relationship…

It boils down to this:

  1. That very general configuration of atoms - molecules or even more abstractly just Matter - Energy can be repeated under the right conditions to produce a life form: even maybe in the center of stars in hot plasmas or 100s of km under the surface of planets. But these right conditions are unknown and very vague, and may always remain vague, in that the laws of physics may never let you get closer to a certain point in describing and knowing the general conditions.

  2. When the conditions to create a life form are met, the exact form may be impossible to predict because the chance configurations, quantum fluctuations specify such a unique sequence of events and such a unique chain of causes and events as to not be possible to repeat it again even in an infinite universe that cycles through its infinite configurations: the exact number representing the sequence of events is always larger than the number of configurations the universe can cycle through: One infinite number (the sequence of chemical reactions) is larger in some odd way than another infinite number (the configurations of all atoms or all of the possible configurations of Mass - Energy ). A kind of race condition is set forward with the exact sequence of reactions being to large of a set compared to the set of all possible configurations of Mass - Energy.

Well, anyways, the math is not very precise, someone else could do better, but you get the idea…

I think that there may be no predetermined sequence, no real determinism operating even though we have precise laws of physics: the exact events are like completely new, not even the laws of physics could have predicted them so to say, not even god could have known, in this sense there is no “external reality”: when a person says, “it could have gone differently, it could have evolved in another way”, there is no IT. It is like a micro big bang every picosecond, it is like a new set of laws of physics pop into existence just that one time to create just that one event, and a sequence of events create the path from atoms to cells.

In that case, it will never be known, because there is no IT.

Matter thinks it knows itself, thinks that it can predict itself, but it really can’t, sometimes it can make some good predictions that often work, other times, it won’t.

Is it mind over matter ? we predict and make things happen, or is it that we think things happen the way we wanted ? We always fool ourselves in the end. God plays dice, but dice is also playing god.

The uncertainty principle suggest exactly that: we can predict something up to a certain precision, but not past a certain point: humans die before they reach 200 years old, but the precise age of death of a specific person is unknown, unless you say that before 200 years is good enough: if you assign that as infinite precision then you always win, you control all reality: in fact you can assign anything anyway and take advantage of the fact that matter thinks it knows itself but it doesn’t, but you do know all of matter and reality because you assigned it that way.

You win, the laws of physics lose…

And you win even when you lose, because you assigned it that way.

I think that this is how the Origin of Life and the Origin of the Universe occurred.

Would you be happy with ‘highly probable’? Sounds technical enough for me. Of course, it is still a fading out definition. I suppose different people would be satisfied with different quantitative values. Has anybody quantified the probability so far?

Size matters in that the probability of one of a random combination is much higher if the size is small than if the size is large. Stability is certainly a function of the environment. I never talked about stability in the present environment. If we can guess intermediate molecules, guess and demonstrate the environment was stable in and if the progression of such enviroments is what we would expect from the laws of physics, we would have a credible case for abiogenesis. As for presence of molecular oxygen in today’s environment, I am not aware of that being a constraint in our ability to simulate environments that were drastically different from what exists today. Can you direct me to information that presents this to be the limitation in our ability to simulate pe-life environments in the laboratory?

I am not aware of any experiment where a self-replicating molecule was formed without deciding a-priori what its structure was going to be, something that is a must for abiogenesis. That anyone can arrange pebbles on a beach into a long sentence in English, does not prove that such a pattern could emerge by physical forces. I would be glad to know of any such successful experiment.

Maybe the most that we can achieve is that we may know some general conditions where molecules polymerize, we can see some evolution or some portions, we can see some reactions and some primitive organisms evolve slightly, but past that we won’t see: it is like history, we know groups of people conflict, change organization, change power structures and interactions constantly (as man is the infinitely programmable machine, people and groups of people can be programmed (and program themselves) to act and interact in any of an infinite number of different ways), but we can never predict the exact sequence of events, like WW1 in Europe and then hitler in 1939, and WWII, etc. That exact sequence is just pure chance, and so is the exact structure of the simplest cell, let alone the exact structure of an ape or human…

The most important results in Science deal with what we cannot know, what our limits are, in what box we live in, where the edges of the box are: so we can’t travel faster than light, we can’t measure position and velocity to infinite precision at the same time (Uncertainty principle) and probably we can’t predict a precise given sequence of events exactly because there is no predetermined sequence, the sequence just happens, just occurs with no deeper reason or cause.

A bit like saying 4 guys playing 2 guitars, bass and drum will create music: but that those four guys will exactly create the 10 Beatles albums is totally unpredictable because things like that just happen with no deeper cause. Determinism is defeated.

But maybe I am wrong, and in virtual reality environment you can simulate the possibility to predict exact sequences no matter how far fetched…

Nor do we need to. Evolutionary theory, for those who have taken the time to read and understand it, is quite compelling. It addresses the almost unimaginable diversity found starting from very simple life forms and a set of “laws” that can be said to operate whenever there are finite resources and entities capable of replicating indefinitely.

However, what is not so compelling is the evidence for abiogenesis. At the moment, it is a faith position.

What are the variables you would use to calculate such a probability? There are too many variables and we are (at present) too ignorant to begin a proper calculation of them.

We can create anoxic environments in laboratories, it happens all the time. The Miller–Urey and Jose Oro experiments are pretty classic examples of trying to recreate the reducing environment of the early Earth atmosphere and plenty of compounds involved in present life are formed there. While there is some controversy surrounding the specifics of these experiments, other variations accounting for those controversies still produce materials that would be sufficient for early “life” in significant quantities.

Actually, most of the self-replicating RNA demons were not designed a priori but rather through a selective process starting with Q beta. Randomly messing around with Q beta to see what happens is hardly an a priori approach, it is an experimental one where selection is at play.

I basically echo one of Xunzian’s points - It is difficult to determine the probability of life occurring in the universe without knowing for sure what really can be defined as life and what kinds of life are out there already in the universe. It’s a pretty wild extrapolation from the perspective of the entire universe to say that our life is the only type there can be, given that we’re currently locked on one planet out of quadrillions without any larger perspective on what the universe outside of us really contains.

Of course, when has that stopped philosophers from asking questions before? But let’s define life first at least. Current thinking is that all life requires water, but in the end that too is limited to what we know on Earth. This then leads us to something akin to old-school metaphysics - a worthy exercise but it is nonetheless important to recognize it at the outset. Our body of Natural Science is far too limited to be of much use in narrowing this question down.

This sentiment is completely correct. It was in the news recently: a kind of bacteria completely unlike any other lifeform previously discovered. Apparently, it uses different building blocks than every other known life form. It uses Arsenic.

thatsfamous.com/6832-nasa-sc … alifornia/

Until we can demonstrate the path and quantify the probability, abiogenesis will remain a faith position.

Well, having the components and demonstrating the path are entirely different things. Demonstrating that amino acids could form in an abiotic environment is a step closer to proving abiogenesis, but doesn’t constitute proof by itself.

If this is an experiment where self-replicating RNA molecules were formed starting from molecules that have been demonstrated to have been capable of forming in an abiotic environment, please link me to it. I am not aware of Q beta replicase being formed in abiotic environments.

So it would be the probability of life as we know it, which is good enough for scientific research, if not for philosophical curiosity.

The broadest definition would be: self-replicating pieces of information that are capable of organising the matter around to sustain the information and self-replication process.

That is only one we know. Until we find other forms of life that fit the definition, it will have to do.

Well, not everyone seems to think the study’s conclusions are reliable. NASA’s arsenic microbe science slammed

even if the results of the study i linked are incorrect, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that life can arise under drastically different conditions than Earth’s.

Of course, not!

Nothing is precluded as a possibility. Green-headed beings with antenna are certainly a possibility that cannot ever be precluded, just as the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient creator can never be. But I doubt they should ever enter a serious discussion on that count alone.

Hello Ganapati:

The point is that we don’t have a sufficient domain of knowledge on life to even know if our probability estimates of life, whether as we know it or as we don’t know it. Calculating the probability of whether a quarter will land heads or tails starts with the knowledge of the set of alternatives for the facing of the coin, the domain of possibilities. Life as we know it on Earth may be not exist anywhere else, but any planet that sustains life has a different form. The principle of life may be a generation of self-motive bodies using the chemicals available on the planet provided certain solar characteristics exist. In such a definition, life made of silicon that floats through a gas giant and which drinks liquid methane instead of water would not be life as we know it, and the standard or definition of life would be so out of touch with our probability characterizations that they would be useless. Heck, life may originate from persistent sound waves on a planet - how would our probability calculations or your definition account for that? These are speculations on other types of life to be sure, but our very narrow frame of reference in a universe with quadrillions of planets makes any calcuations on our part equally speculative or purely in the realm of metaphysics, not natural science.

As to your argument that our knowledge of life’s current forms will “have to do”, I would ask “have to do for what?” What good will they serve as a scientific foundation when we do not have sufficient observations and data to draw a conclusion under the Scientific Method?

The answer is to forget grounding such discussions in science and instead put it where it belongs - as a metaphysical inquiry. That’s not such a bad thing.

There is one form of life we know exists and infinite forms that we don’t know if they exist. We can define life as we know it to be the only possibility in the domain of possibilities and then proceed to calculate the probability of it. It may still be very difficult to compute it, but it will not be meaningless. If we have evidence about other forms that we are forced to concede are life, we will have to recalculate our probabilities, the domain of possibilities having changed.

When I said “it will have to do”, I meant for a scientific enquiry. Science proceeds precisely based on available evidence that can be extrapolated. If we do not find a phenomena in our observations and by inference on earth or anywhere else, we don’t go under the assumption it exists i.e, we proceed as if it did not exist.

Nothing is barred from speculation, but in order to make scientific sense, it needs to be more than speculation, it needs some supporting evidence. That is why if there exists evidence for life distinct from what we know it to be, it has to be considered. If not, it is pure speculation.

By that token anything can be taken out of the discipline of science, not just life. How do we know the laws of physics were the same before we discovered them? Perhaps they were all different with the consequences being exactly the same as we observed?

This can be discussed at a scientific level as well as a metaphysical level. Since the thread is in the natural sciences forum and used scientific terms, I chose a scientific approach to my responses rather than a metaphysical one.