Evolution RIP

[EarthScienceguy]

From Zumdahl Chemistry Sixth edition

Gibbs free energy equation in Chemistry indicates whether a chemical reaction will occur spontaneously or not. It is derived out of the second law of thermodynamics and takes the form.

dG = dH - TdS

dG = the change in Gibbs free energy
dH = the change in enthalpy the flow of energy reaction.
T = Temperature
dS = Change in entropy Sfinal state - Sinitial state

For evolution to occur the dS is always going to be negative because the
final state will always have a lower entropy then the initial state.

dH of a dipeptide from amino acids = 5-8 kcal/mole ,(Hutchens, Handbook
of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

dh for a macromolecule in a living system = 16.4 cal/gm (Morowitz,
Energy flow in Biology.


Zumdauhl Chemistry sixth edition

When dS is negative and dH is positive the Process is not spontaneous at
any temperature. The reverse process is spontaneous at all temperatures.

The implications are that evolution could not have happen now or in the past. genes could not have been added to the cytoplasm of the cell along with producing any gene's in the first.

Production of information or complexity by any chemical process using a polymer of amino acids is impossible according to the second law of thermodynamics. If any proteins were formed by chance they would immediately break apart.

Evolution Cannot Happen.

[Bust Nak]

I'm not sure how you reconcile 'intended' with 'hands-off' - how do you guide an unguided process?

The same way I can set up a marble chute, launch a marble with the intention that the marble ends in a particular bowl without further interference from me after the marble is launched.

- but in the sense that a DVD plays a movie in a 'hands-off' manner yes. I'm not sure that, as some ID proponents believe, new information had to be uploaded into DNA on the fly- we already know there is a lot of data decompression/extraction going on- in a sense the singularity was quite literally a self extracting archive of highly compressed information!

Right, so does that not follow than, that naturalistic evolution is a distinct possibility (improbable but not impossible,) even if you don't accept that it happened?

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 240 by DrNoGods]

We have no ability at the present time to make a laser at any wavelength powerful enough to illuminate the night sky of a planet around Alpha Centauri

[quote:6a6da697ae]10% light speed is considered feasible currently[/quote:6a6da697ae] [/quote]

Proxima Centauri, located roughly four light-years away, is the closest star to us and is orbited by several exoplanets. If we aimed our most powerful laser there, by the time the light reached it, it would appear brighter than the brightest star looks to us in a clear night sky. Ph.D. physicist Yeun Yiu

"
Lubin said that there has been dramatic improvement in directed-energy technology, especially by the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Propulsion that would have once required one prohibitively giant laser can now be generated by a much smaller source tied to many amplifiers in orbit around Earth, which could provide enough power to propel a meters-long sail pulling a little probe.
"
[]
The largest-scale laser system would employ 50 to 70 gigawatts of power to propel the craft forward, about as much as is used to launch current spacecraft to Earth orbit. That laser setup, which Lubin described in a proposal paper, could propel a tiny spacecraft with a 3.3-foot (1 meter) sail up to 26 percent the speed of light in 10 minutes.

Such a craft could reach Mars in 30 minutes, catch up with Voyager 1 — humanity's farthest spacecraft from Earth — in less than three days and hit the star system Alpha Centauri in 15 years."

Philip Lubin, Philip Lubin:professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara

^ I'm sure you could debate them on the math and feasibility, but again the larger point here is not what is currently built, but what is possible- if ET is given even say 100 more years of technological advancement than we've had- how about 10,000? We are mere decades after laser technology was first invented, we can't assume ET's tech. comes to a grinding halt after 50 or so years can we?

WE know that, but who else would without a visit first? And who\'s to say that some alien civilization would breathe O2 or have lungs and a blood system like ours? They may be more suitable to a hot, CO2 atmosphere like Venus, or a low pressure and cold CO2 atmosphere like Mars, or neither. Just because present life on earth favors the atmosphere and environment we have (naturally, since all this life evolved here in the first place ... go talk to the bacteria that were alive prior to the great oxygenation event and see how happy they would be in today\'s world) doesn\'t mean some random alien civilization would find our little piece of real estate attractive, or even livable.

Life, Jim, but not as we know it?

That's a great premise for writing sci-fi TV episodes, and in Jules Verne's time we could still enjoy speculating about all sorts of exotic alien life without flying in the face of scientific understanding.

Again today, we'd love to find just a fossilized microbe on Mars, but conditions have to be just right , especially for complex life.

The universe all came from, and is hence made of,- basically the same stuff-- and so we have a pretty broad swath of possible worlds right here in this solar system- coupled with what is looking like an extraordinarily rare case of stable orbits around a single stable star to give them all plenty time

But even on Earth there is a great variety of environments that complex life hasn't even been able to move into .. far less arise and thrive in in the first place- you can't just pick a handful of random conditions and watch life acquire sentience in it one way or another

And as you allude to with early life- it's not just a static equation, you need a coordinated symbiotic/dynamic evolution (in the sense of change over time) of life, atmosphere, ocean - all compounding each other as improbabilities

think it is way too early to even begin to answer that question, given the limited volume of the entire universe that we have been able to explore.

again unless you are given the opposite hypothetical, and then you already have the answer , and even give it as the reason you hope ET is found.

It's a very interesting question - are we alone or not? because either answer IS so profound, right?

If SETI had found the galaxy awash with intelligent life forms- I'd be happy to accept the implication- that apparently humanity is not the primary intended beneficiary of creation.

But I'm also happy to accept the opposite implications, those of what is actually observed reality so far- being alone. I can't honestly say I 'hope' this is the case- it is a little daunting- but the more we learn about biology and cosmology, that's where things are increasingly pointing are they not?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 242 by Guy Threepwood]

If we aimed our most powerful laser there, by the time the light reached it, it would appear brighter than the brightest star looks to us in a clear night sky. Ph.D. physicist Yeun Yiu

That is not even remotely true. The highest power continuous wave (CW) laser humans have ever built are systems like that used for LAWs (shipborne laser weapon), which is currently at about 30 KW with the potential to combine multiple beams to get up to 300 KW. There are fiber lasers that can reach 100 KW, and MW lasers are thought to be about a decade away (probably also via combining beams from multiple lasers, which reduces the beam quality):

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/u ... asers.html

But these are lasers that operate in the 0.5 to 10 micron range. The example I used earlier was a pulsed laser and I used a power level that is many orders of magnitude larger than anything we've built that operates continuous wave (CW), which you'd need for some intelligent creature with eyeballs on a planet far away to see it.

And any laser like this cannot get around the fact that the beam will diverge as it leaves the source. The longer the wavelength, the greater the divergence, and diffraction sets a lower limit for this. The diffraction-limited divergence is given by:

theta = 2.44 * (lambda / D)

where lambda is the laser wavelength and D is the emitting aperture. For a best case example, use the 532 nm Nd-YAG wavelength, then theta = 3.25 x 10^-7 rad. This cannot be achieved with a real laser, but plugging this full-angle divergence angle into D = a*tan(theta) with a = 25 trillion miles to Alpha Centauri gives D = 8.1 x 10^6 ~ 8 million miles (diameter of the beam at Alpha Centauri). So you'd have an 8 million mile diameter beam at Alpha Centauri (cross sectional area = 1.3 x 10^24 cm^2). Even if you had a 1 MW laser, the power density would be only 7.7 x 10^-19 W/cm^2 ... far too small to see at Alpha Centauri with an eyeball of any type. This is the diffraction limited version ... the real world case would be worse, and the wavelength likely longer as well. So Dr. Yiu apparently didn't run the numbers and ignored beam divergence.

which could provide enough power to propel a meters-long sail pulling a little probe.

Yes ... a very little probe. Nothing even remotely adequate to carry a human and supplies, but ...

The largest-scale laser system would employ 50 to 70 gigawatts of power to propel the craft forward, about as much as is used to launch current spacecraft to Earth orbit. That laser setup, which Lubin described in a proposal paper, could propel a tiny spacecraft with a 3.3-foot (1 meter) sail up to 26 percent the speed of light in 10 minutes.

More science fiction. First, we don't have 50-70 GW lasers on earth to provide the power for the tiny spacecraft and sail. Second, getting all that power (if it did exist) onto a 1m x 1m sail (described here:

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-scien ... -in-3-days

would be impossible once it got any significant distance from the source laser due to divergence of the beam (not even counting the atmospheric beam disturbance which would cause all kinds of problems ... Lubin requires ground-based lasers as obviously it isn't possible to create 50-70 GW laser light in a space-borne system). A comment from the above article:

"To be clear, the system isn't designed to send humans across interstellar distances - first of all, robots are far better equipped for that mission, and secondly, we'd be far too heavy. Instead, Lubin proposes wafer-thin spacecraft that can get close to the speed of light."

We can accelerate things to 99.99% the speed of light with particle accelerators, but their mass is nearly nothing. So although photonic propulsion could, in theory, be scaled up arbitrarily, the amount of laser power required for anything but a "tiny" object is prohibitive. You'd have to follow the tiny sail with a gigantic space-borne laser generating GW of power, then figure out how to power that thing. So the suggestion that we could get any space craft big enough to carry even 1 human moving at 26% of the speed of light (or even 1% of the speed of light) is pure fiction at this point.

if ET is given even say 100 more years of technological advancement than we've had- how about 10,000? We are mere decades after laser technology was first invented, we can't assume ET's tech. comes to a grinding halt after 50 or so years can we?

This is just more speculation without any basis. We have no idea if some non-earth civilization that might potentially exist would follow the same track as humans have, or if they'd be a million years behind us or a million ahead, or any other details on how they might develop their technology or what that technology might be. So speculating that there is some Star Trek level of development by one of these civilizations is no different than speculating that they have a favorite god who gave them advanced technology.

But this all started with your "radio silence" comments. My whole point there is that we simply have not investigated anywhere near enough of the region of our own galaxy to expect that a system like SETI would have seen anything at all. If there were thousands of civilizations out there, just in our galaxy, with exactly our level of technological development, and they were more than a few dozen light years away, we'd have no idea they were there and vice versa. Divergence of radio signals would be far worse than the examples given earlier because of the long wavelengths (SETI looks at the 1-10 GHz range which is 0.25 to 2.5 cm wavelengths ... some 20,000 times longer than my 532 nm example so divergence would be that much larger), and we can't physically visit anything outside of our own solar system. And a system like SETI on another exoplanet would be blind to the tremendous about of near-IR light we generate (the entire fiber-optic communication system uses wavelengths in the 0.8 to 1.7 micron range), or the FM radio band signals (88 - 108 MHz on your FM dial). So I think the only thing we can say is that we haven't detected any intelligent communicators within a few dozen light years from earth, and that's it. Anything beyond that and we simply have no idea. Speculating the existence of advanced civilizations with Star Trek capabilities has no basis.

If SETI had found the galaxy awash with intelligent life forms- I'd be happy to accept the implication- that apparently humanity is not the primary intended beneficiary of creation.

Again, SETI has operated for so little time, and has so little ability to see any signals that weren't generated very close to earth, it tells us nearly nothing about whether some intelligent civilizations may be out there or not.

But I'm also happy to accept the opposite implications, those of what is actually observed reality so far- being alone. I can't honestly say I 'hope' this is the case- it is a little daunting- but the more we learn about biology and cosmology, that's where things are increasingly pointing are they not?

Same answer as above. We're only able to look within such a tiny distance from earth we can't say where things are pointing. SETI not seeing anything is what you'd expect given the sensitivity of the antenna arrays (ie. minimum power they can detect), and the fact that a source emitter more than a few light years away (probably less) would have to use an incredible level of directed power for SETI to have any chance of seeing it.

From this article:

https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/a-seti-signal

"Now note that we can work backwards from the strength of the received signal to calculate how powerful an alien transmitter anywhere near HD 164595 would have to be. There are two interesting cases:

(1) They decide to broadcast in all directions. Then the required power is 10^20 watts, or 100 billion billion watts. That’s hundreds of times more energy than all the sunlight falling on Earth, and would obviously require power sources far beyond any we have.

(2) They aim their transmission at us. This will reduce the power requirement, but even if they are using an antenna the size of the 1000-foot Arecibo instrument, they would still need to wield more than a trillion watts, which is comparable to the total energy consumption of all humankind.

Both scenarios require an effort far, far beyond what we ourselves could do, and it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to target our solar system with a strong signal. This star system is so far away they won’t have yet picked up any TV or radar that would tell them that we’re here."

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 243 by DrNoGods]

wow, thanks for the detailed response!

But this all started with your "radio silence" comments. My whole point there is that we simply have not investigated anywhere near enough of the region of our own galaxy to expect that a system like SETI would have seen anything at all. If there were thousands of civilizations out there, just in our galaxy, with exactly our level of technological development,

^ but as interesting as all this is, focusing on your conclusion here- it is based on this odd premise of alien technology running into insurmountable barriers at exactly our level... and progressing no further? So have we ourselves reached a technological dead end?

our communication and transportation technology is in extreme infancy, we have watched it utterly revolutionized in just a lifetime or two. if we were debating the feasibility of a handheld GPS showing our position on a detailed photograph of the land around us from space.... 200 years ago... safe to say we'd be far further from any even hypothetical solution to the countless technological hurdles

But as it is, interstellar space travel and communication are at least hypothetically feasible- by merely scaling up technology we can already grasp.

I agree, as most do, that robotic probes would be the likely pioneers of any alien colony- had they ever got off the ground...

But the reality you hope for seems to walk a pretty fine line:

So that on one hand - intelligent life is commonplace enough to render humanity gratifyingly insignificant, but yet rare enough that they remain utterly concealed from detection..

which in turn requires that while intelligent life being common is a reasonable speculation, that they could have ever advanced far past our infant technology, even given 100's of millions of years.. is not reasonable??

Or that while habitable planets are likewise common enough to render Earth 'nothing special'... they must yet be rare enough to remain forever out of reach for aspiring colonists, no matter the time and technology at their disposal..

Once technology gets a hold, it continues to grow unless impeded- it has no inherent limitations that we are aware of. we can point to the fall of civilizations like the Roman Empire where technology regressed temporarily, but it ultimately regained it's footing elsewhere because civilizations also seed new independent ones.

This phenomena has a far greater effect in the case of interplanetary colonization, as the civilizations are each immune to any single 'global' catastrophe that might eliminate a single one-

which all plays into the Fermi Paradox- if ET exists, where are they?

Another option is that they are deliberately concealing themselves.. not impossible of course, but I am arguing that the observation so far is supported by the math- that there's simply nobody else out there

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 244 by Guy Threepwood]

which in turn requires that while intelligent life being common is a reasonable speculation, that they could have ever advanced far past our infant technology, even given 100's of millions of years.. is not reasonable??

The fundamental point I disagree with here is that idea that SETI has any real chance of detecting any ET communication even if they were out there, trying, so that a claim of "radio silence" is way too premature. I just found this article a few minutes ago that makes some of my same practical points:

http://www.bidstrup.com/seti.htm

If you stuck SETI out in space and asked what distance it would need to be at to NOT be able to detector any signals from earth if we aimed our strongest transmitter directly at it, it would not be very far in the grand scheme of things. And the pointing issue mentioned in the above article compounds things further still. The amount of time and space we have been able to investigate in the miniscule amount of time we've been able to generate and detect EM signals are both far too short to make a statement like "we haven't heard from anyone."

There certainly could be some tremendously advanced civilizations out there, but I don't think you can make comparisons to technological advancement on earth and draw any conclusions by trying to parallel those in some unknown, advanced civilization. Besides having no idea if the creatures would be human-like or (far more likely I think) something completely different, there is no way to know what technology development paths they might take. And these civilizations could have come and gone millions or billions of years ago, or not appear until millions or billions of years from now. And if they exist now, we could only potentially hear from them if they were very close to earth unless you go to pure speculation that there exists some tremendously advanced (compared to us) version which we have no way of knowing, and no basis to suspect that there is or that they would follow our same technological path.

I suspect there is life out there somewhere just from the probability of it, but on this planet it wasn't until a million or two years ago (just 0.044% of the planet's life) that any creatures evolved that could ponder these kinds of questions, and maybe even less time than that (depending on how intelligent Homo erectus, for example, was). The planet was full of life forms for up to 4 billion years before that, and if the universe was full of planet earths as it existed prior to 1-2 million years ago there would be no ability to generate or monitor EM signals at all, yet lots of life. It may be that humans just won a genetic lottery and evolved a complex and capable brain that is unique in the universe, but if we hadn't done this life would still be plentiful here (just no humans). There's no reason to believe that humans are special in the big picture of life in general. We just evolved a brain capable of higher levels of thought than anything else on this planet (so far) and that seems to convince a lot of people that our existence is somehow different from any other living thing, or has a special reason other than that we simply evolved a different brain.

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 245 by DrNoGods]

f you stuck SETI out in space and asked what distance it would need to be at to NOT be able to detector any signals from earth if we aimed our strongest transmitter directly at it, it would not be very far in the grand scheme of things.

right- OUR strongest transmitter- after just a few decades and with probes barely reaching out of our solar system.. go back a little over 100 years and OUR strongest transmitter was detectable over about 2 miles... within a few years it could cross the Atlantic and save lives from the Titanic

With 1970's technology, Voyager 1 is still communicating from beyond our solar system in the interstellar medium- all this exponential range increase within a single possible lifetime- never mind the countless millions of years that ET could have had if common

There certainly could be some tremendously advanced civilizations out there, but I don't think you can make comparisons to technological advancement on earth and draw any conclusions by trying to parallel those in some unknown, advanced civilization. Besides having no idea if the creatures would be human-like or (far more likely I think) something completely different, there is no way to know what technology development paths they might take. And these civilizations could have come and gone millions or billions of years ago, or not appear until millions or billions of years from now. And if they exist now, we could only potentially hear from them if they were very close to earth unless you go to pure speculation that there exists some tremendously advanced (compared to us) version which we have no way of knowing, and no basis to suspect that there is or that they would follow our same technological path.

They would not have to take the same path, they would just need to get the technological ball rolling, we didn't invent radio waves, we just discovered such convenient lines of communication already exist. If you are speculating that only we had the intelligence, curiosity, tenacity to take advantage of this- I agree- that's my point, we are unique, special.

I suspect there is life out there somewhere just from the probability of it, but on this planet it wasn't until a million or two years ago (just 0.044% of the planet's life) that any creatures evolved that could ponder these kinds of questions, and maybe even less time than that (depending on how intelligent Homo erectus, for example, was). The planet was full of life forms for up to 4 billion years before that, and if the universe was full of planet earths as it existed prior to 1-2 million years ago there would be no ability to generate or monitor EM signals at all, yet lots of life.

Star Wars begins: 'a long time ago in a galaxy far far away'... because there is no particular reason (all else being favorable) that civilizations could not have sprung up 100s of millions of years ago. what if the Dinosaur extinction occurred just one million years earlier? Certainly from a materialist standpoint- there is no reason to expect a civilization HAS to wait until the universe is exactly this age to arise! To a large extent, solar systems are on their own timelines depending on when their stars were formed right?, on a longer scale they are blinking on and off like Christmas lights. Civilizations would(if common) have faced the looming death of their systems and had plenty time to evacuate- even if they didn't already have means and motive out of sheer curiosity like ours.

It may be that humans just won a genetic lottery .

Well there you go, there are just so many losing tickets, so many other possible conditions and paths that would NOT lead to beings pondering these questions... that we are at least beginning to appreciate the statistical rarity of that lottery ticket.

As I have said all along, it's not that chance is impossible, it's that the odds are so low, (and getting ever lower the more me learn), the bar is getting lower and lower for OTHER possible explanations to jump over. Just like the gambler playing 3 royal flushes in a row. of course chance is possible, it's just not the best explanation unless we can utterly rule out cheating to an impossible degree.

Or HELP being written in rocks on the deserted island beach, no sign of anyone ever being around, it certainly could have been the random action of the waves, but do you conclude that to be the more probable explanation?

why not?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 246 by Guy Threepwood]

With 1970's technology, Voyager 1 is still communicating from beyond our solar system in the interstellar medium- all this exponential range increase within a single possible lifetime- never mind the countless millions of years that ET could have had if common

I used the Voyager example in post 235 ... but that spacecraft is only 0.00228 light years away and from a directed antenna we are receiving only 10^-22 W of power from a 22.4 W transmitter ... a 23 order of magnitude loss in signal strength over what is a relatively tiny distance of 0.00228 light years. I don't think you are appreciating the huge distances we are talking about, and the effect of signal loss over those distances, when it comes to claims of "radio silence."

I also mentioned the fact that over the "countless millions of years", civilizations could have come and gone long before we had the ability to detect their EM signals (ie. these signals would have passed earth long ago). And new civilizations may be in the future. We've been looking over too small of a time interval, and over too small of a spatial region, to claim "radio silence."

If you are speculating that only we had the intelligence, curiosity, tenacity to take advantage of this- I agree- that's my point, we are unique, special.

We are the only ones that we know about, and our ability to see or hear or contact potential other civilizations that may be around now in just our own galaxy is far too limited to know if we are truly the only advanced civilization around. We just don't have the ability to investigate that question.

... because there is no particular reason (all else being favorable) that civilizations could not have sprung up 100s of millions of years ago

Yes ... I've mentioned this in several earlier posts. We exist in a tiny window of time here on earth, and have very limited ability to "see" beyond a small range around our planet in terms of the size of a galaxy. Many civilizations could have some and gone long before our ability to see their signals, or they may arise at some point in the future. Again, we've only have the ability to investigate a tiny volume around earth, and for a very short period of time.

Well there you go, there are just so many losing tickets, so many other possible conditions and paths that would NOT lead to beings pondering these questions... that we are at least beginning to appreciate the statistical rarity of that lottery ticket.

Sure ... I'm not arguing that the probability of an advanced civilization like ours is low, but my whole point in this discussion is that we can explore (via signals we send our, or those we receive) only a tiny volume around our planet, and over such a short period of time, that we cannot say anything about the prospects of other civilizations existing just in our own galaxy, much less the billions of others. You can speculate that there must be some Star Trek level of technology our there and so they would have visited our tiny little world, or tried to contact it for some reason, but we have no way to assess that assumption.

Or HELP being written in rocks on the deserted island beach, no sign of anyone ever being around, it certainly could have been the random action of the waves, but do you conclude that to be the more probable explanation?

why not?

I not sure I see how this analogy relates to the subject. Are you referring to the evolution of intelligence in humans and why our brains are more capable than other animals? Or are you referring to the existence of life itself on this planet, in general, independent of the intelligence level of the life form? If we do find life on another planet, then obviously that would show that earth is not special in that regard and I think this is the primary result people are after with efforts to identify extraterrrestrial life. Whether a level of "intelligence" similar to that of humans, or more advanced, exists is a completely different question and I'd think far less important. We know that human intelligence via brain structure developed progressively in the Homo line and did not appear suddenly in one species (Homo sapiens). This seems to exclude some god being "creating" humans as fully formed creatures with a modern human brain, and different from other animals as special pets of the god.

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 246 by Guy Threepwood]

Yes ... I've mentioned this in several earlier posts. We exist in a tiny window of time here on earth, and have very limited ability to "see" beyond a small range around our planet in terms of the size of a galaxy. Many civilizations could have some and gone long before our ability to see their signals, or they may arise at some point in the future. Again, we've only have the ability to investigate a tiny volume around earth, and for a very short period of time.

I don't think we are too far apart on the difficulty of detecting alien civilizations IF they are few enough and all remain isolated in time and place. But that's a big assumption, needed to explain the complete lack of evidence. I'd also agree with you if everyone was on the same timeline and civilizations and technology were all in their infancy like ours. But as it is, we'd have to assume that however many civilizations you feel are necessary to render humanity insignificant, not a single one was ever able to continue on the path we have begun and colonize the galaxy, which one single successful civilization could have done over and over again many times by now.

It's a little like sampling some water in an alien ocean, finding no life of any kind- but insisting it's probably out there because it's so vast, and this tiny sample is not enough to draw any conclusion on

On Earth you can find millions of viruses in a drop of water, so you'd need to come up with some mechanisms that definitely prevented what would otherwise be inevitable proliferation. We can speculate of course 'they blow themselves up first' or 'they are everywhere but want to remain undetected' are popular

Or... they just don't exist, and I'd say that is the option that is becoming increasingly more probable the more we appreciate how special earth and humanity are.

I not sure I see how this analogy relates to the subject.

It's the very subject that led to this discussion if you remember; it was about how we can use the existence of specified information/ the significance of a result, versus the improbability of it's chance creation, to identify probable intelligent agency.

Whether HELP on the beach, 3 royal flushes in a row, or a symphony being broadcast from somewhere in Andromeda, there is an objective measure for intelligence involved here- no matter how profound the implications are- or whether or not they happen to be in accordance with any particular world view.



As a materialist, you openly concede that you 'hope we find' this specified information-based objective and conclusive evidence for ET- thus demonstrating humanity to be gratifyingly insignificant in accordance with your world view, right?

I don't believe ET exists, and it does not fit with my current world view. But, we agreed earlier- that if SETI found enough specified information, (more than that single sequence) at some point I'd concede you are right, there is only so much I can write off as a blip, - the product of some spontaneous mechanism, it very quickly strains credulity to see strings of specified info emerging from any unintelligent cause

So what about the other side of the argument, the one that would run counter to your hope:

How much more specified information needs to be found in DNA, biology, physics, chemistry, and all space/time matter/energy.. to strain that credulity of spontaneous mechanisms for you?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 248 by Guy Threepwood]

I don't think we are too far apart on the difficulty of detecting alien civilizations IF they are few enough and all remain isolated in time and place. But that's a big assumption, needed to explain the complete lack of evidence.

But I don't need that assumption specifically ... I just need the distance between them to be large and we know that this is the case already. The communication distances are simply too far, both for us to send signals out for detection and for another civilization to send signals that we could detect, based on technologies that we have here on earth today. There could well be civilizations all over the galaxy right now and we're all simply blind to each other because of the limited ranges that we can transmit and detect signals. The galaxy is just too big, and potentially habitable planets are too far apart, for us to actually gather enough evidence to claim that there is a "complete lack of evidence."

On the other hand, you need to postulate the existence of a highly advanced civilization ... far beyond anything we've been able to accomplish on earth ... and that seems to be to be a much bigger assumption to make. Then you have to assume they would make the effort to colonize the galaxy, and be able to get to the entirety of it. Not unreasonable, but you can say there is a lack of evidence for such a civilization because such a Star Trek group might have randomly targeted earth for some reason and we'd know about it (why they'd target this speck of dust is a question). And, of course, there could be thousands or millions of planets in our galaxy teaming with life that isn't intelligent enough to build spacecraft or communication systems (eg. like earth for the first 99.99999783% of its existence). That is far more likely I expect.

Or... they just don't exist, and I'd say that is the option that is becoming increasingly more probable the more we appreciate how special earth and humanity are.

I still argue that it is far too early to say. You require a Star Trek or higher level of advancement for your argument to make sense, and possibly multiple versions of that. If there were thousands of earths full of humans in just our galaxy, with exactly our level of technology, separations more than a few hundred light years at the very maximum and we'd all be invisible to each other.

As a materialist, you openly concede that you 'hope we find' this specified information-based objective and conclusive evidence for ET- thus demonstrating humanity to be gratifyingly insignificant in accordance with your world view, right?

Not exactly ... I hope we find life on other worlds but it doesn't have to be human-like or "intelligent." That would just be a bonus. If we find life of any kind on another planet, even if it is microbial, that proves that life itself isn't something specially reserved for earth and kills the whole idea that this is some special planet that a god decided was the only one he/she/it would create life. This seems to be important for the religious crowd, with the added requirement by some of them to believe that humans are something special ... different from any other animal ... simply because we evolved a more complex and capable brain. So finding intelligent life (or rather, sentient life ... there are plenty of animals that have intelligence at some level) would kill the "humans are special" idea as well.

How much more specified information needs to be found in DNA, biology, physics, chemistry, and all space/time matter/energy.. to strain that credulity of spontaneous mechanisms for you?

I'm convinced that all life on this planet evolved from much simpler, single-celled replicators whose exact details we don't know yet. So for this question I would look only at the transition between collections of molecules assembled into a nonliving "thing", and ask what the probability is of that transitioning into the first, simplest organism that could be defined as "life." Another poster here often uses the analogy of a couch suddenly starting to talk. And others jump straight to the complexity of a modern multicellular organism and ask how a bunch of nonliving molecules could spontaneously assemble such a thing. But that is the wrong way to look at it. You have to look at the transition to the first ever, simplest life form and ask how that came about, and we don't know the answer to that yet. But just because we don't know that answer, I don't believe assigning it to some superior being as a "creation" is the answer (god of the gaps). I hope I'm still around when science does answer this question ... I think that would be far more interesting than whether or not there are intelligent civilizations out there somewhere.

[JoeyKnothead]

[Replying to post 5 by ATN]

That is not the problem. The problem is creating new genes for an upward organizational movement of a species.

Creating new genes requires an increase in the complexity of the arrangement of the amino acids. The Gibbs free energy equation indicates that increase in complexity cannot happen spontaneously. And even it did it would move back to the original state spontaneously. Therefore making evolution impossible.

And this is exactly what we see in nature.

What we see in nature is that some critters, over time, become them different than what they was awhile ago. Equashuns and math be danged, elephants ain't near them hairy as they used to be.

"Complexity" is both a subjective, and relative term. How come it is women are so danged complex, but us men are so simple? I'd argue that there's a whole bunch of women that're just pretty as heck, but that doesn't mention how so many of 'em're smarter'n they are pretty.

Subjective terms are a poor way to fetch the truth.