Do you believe in psychics, extraterrestrial life, time travel, other universes?

[Osmeric]

Correct, but this isn't like 2+2=4. (Also, a terrible analogy as that is essentially a definition, rather than a conclusion that you are arguing. Or rather we cannot be certain of anything until we hit some arbitrary amount for you.)

This is like saying "Based on we see, Person X is the likely criminal." And you go "But you haven't fully ruled out Person Y, therefore you don't know that."

But it isn't even that. You are proposing that the possibility that some mystery obstacle that we do not know could exist therefore you cannot claim life is likely. You don't seem to comprehend that just saying that isn't a refutation, it is perfectly fine if you personally are not convinced of the validity, but declaring there is no reason to accept it is nonsensical.

Taking your argument to the extreme discounts all human knowledge, for you there must be some cut off where evidence before perfect knowledge is obtain for us to be certain enough to make claims.

Disparaging an obstacle as "mysterious" is just you saying "I don't like this possibility, so I'm going to shit talk it and say it isn't legitimate". But the complexity argument says it's actually MORE reasonable than the "Shazam! A miracle happens and life has started!" alternative. We have to discover something fundamentally new to make OoL not be exponentially rare.

[Darththeo]

Disparaging an obstacle as "mysterious" is just you saying "I don't like this possibility, so I'm going to shit talk it and say it isn't legitimate". But the complexity argument says it's actually MORE reasonable than the "Shazam! A miracle happens and life has started!" alternative. We have to discover something fundamentally new to make OoL not be exponentially rare.

It is mysterious because the possible has no evidence of existence. What else would you call it?

And no we don't, because we have no evidence it is exponentially rare. You can posit it could be rare, but that's it.

You need more of a reason than "it's possible." We don't have to rule it out, if you are going to posit it you have to give more than a reason than "We just don't know yet." This is WHY you haven't "refuted" the claim life is certain. You can't just go "nuh uh."

[Osmeric]

It is mysterious because the possible has no evidence of existence. What else would you call it?

And no we don't, because we have no evidence it is exponentially rare. You can posit it could be rare, but that's it.

You need more of a reason than "it's possible." We don't have to rule it out, if you are going to posit it you have to give more than a reason than "We just don't know yet." This is WHY you haven't "refuted" the claim life is certain. You can't just go "nuh uh."

We have reason to imagine, at least as a default position, that OoL must be exponentially rare. That's because simple random processes produce complex molecules with a probability that declines exponentially with the complexity of the molecule. There has to be some other very strong effect to counteract this, and for origin of life we don't know what that is. That things would be a discovery so significant that it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of biology, and perhaps in science as a whole.

Presuming that this near-miraculous effect exists is adding another hypothesis to the mix, and Occam's Razor frowns on that when it's not needed. That's just a heuristic argument, of course, but it counters the dismissal of the possibility as somehow less legitimate than the presumption that the near-miraculous effect exists.

[Darththeo]

We have reason to imagine, at least as a default position, that OoL must be exponentially rare. That's because simple random processes produce complex molecules with a probability that declines exponentially with the complexity of the molecule. There has to be some other very strong effect to counteract this, and for origin of life we don't know what that is. That things would be a discovery so significant that it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of biology, and perhaps in science as a whole.

Presuming that this near-miraculous effect exists is adding another hypothesis to the mix, and Occam's Razor frowns on that when it's not needed.

You are assuming that the creation of the molecules is 100% random, chemistry is not random.
We have learned that large organic molecules are created via natural processes with far more ease than we assumed when we first did the test. And create more with better estimates on the Early Earth.
It isn't the chemistry that is a limiting factor. As Neil said, "the chemistry is too rich."

Again, this is you ignoring all the evidence we have to hold on that we haven't fully ruled something out (which is an impossibility to ever do for every possible explanation.) Again, you cannot rely on just "we don't know fully" as a reason, you need to provide something we can prove if you are going to posit there is something that either makes Earth unique or show that the odds could even be as small as required.

[Biomega]

We have reason to imagine, at least as a default position, that OoL must be exponentially rare. That's because simple random processes produce complex molecules with a probability that declines exponentially with the complexity of the molecule. There has to be some other very strong effect to counteract this, and for origin of life we don't know what that is.

We do, actually: time and numbers.

Nobody is saying life happens all the time just like that - but even very very rare events have a tendency to come up when you're talking about MILLIONS of planets (in our galaxy alone) and BILLIONS of years of time. An event could be fantastically unlikely, but given so many places and so much time for it to happen, it's not a big leap to think it would have happened at least twice (again, just in our galaxy); we of course know it DID happen at least once.

If you're saying that even given these kinds of amplifiers it would STILL be rare enough to be unlikely to have occurred anywhere else, you'd either need to explain why Earth is special (i.e. that it has something other places don't); or why the event is so many orders of magnitude more uncommon for this much time and this many places not to compensate for the low probability.

We don't know, precisely, how life happened; but we know the basic materials involved (carbon chemistry, liquid water, stellar energy) and we know those are pretty common. With common ingredients, a massive number of potential sites, and billions of years of time - what is it that suggests it's more reasonable that life has NOT happened elsewhere rather than that it has?

[Varitok]

These aren't things you believe in or not. These are mostly theories with supporting and antithetical answers, this isn't something like God or Ghosts.

[Osmeric]

We do, actually: time and numbers.

This is a bad argument. If the time required to get a specific macromolecule increases exponentially with its complexity, then this quickly overwhelms the large size and duration of the observable universe. Even if every carbon atom in the universe is trying out a new molecule a billion times a second, the total number of tries there becomes small compared to the number of possible macromolecules of that size much smaller than the smallest known Darwinian Evolver (billions of atoms for the most pruned down microorganism), or of the essential machinery inside that cell.

Nobody is saying life happens all the time just like that - but even very very rare events have a tendency to come up when you're talking about MILLIONS of planets (in our galaxy alone) and BILLIONS of years of time. An event could be fantastically unlikely, but given so many places and so much time for it to happen, it's not a big leap to think it would have happened at least twice (again, just in our galaxy); we of course know it DID happen at least once.

The exponential unlikelihood of random assembly of very large complex systems utterly dominates this. View the problem quantitatively and you will see there's a huge problem.

I suspect a lot of the reluctance to come to grips with this quandry is from people who don't want to give Creationists even a sliver of an opening. But that's no way to do science. And it's a reminder of cosmologists who rejected the Big Bang because it was too much like Genesis. I have no patience with creationists, but science is science and cheating in what you think of as a good cause is still cheating.

If you're saying that even given these kinds of amplifiers it would STILL be rare enough to be unlikely to have occurred anywhere else, you'd either need to explain why Earth is special (i.e. that it has something other places don't); or why the event is so many orders of magnitude more uncommon for this much time and this many places not to compensate for the low probability.

If the sample space of places in which life could arise is sufficiently large, eventually it would happen somewhere. That space may be vastly larger than the size of the observable universe, and it might include things like all the myriad branches of the wave function of the universe, if the Many World interpretation of QM is true. You might try to argue that this means life is out there, on some other branches of that wave function, but other places like that are forever causally disconnected from us so we can never observe them (similarly for other possibilities like an infinite universe, or different universes bubbling out of Eternal Inflation).

We don't know, precisely, how life happened; but we know the basic materials involved (carbon chemistry, liquid water, stellar energy) and we know those are pretty common. With common ingredients, a massive number of potential sites, and billions of years of time - what is it that suggests it's more reasonable that life has NOT happened elsewhere rather than that it has?

No, that last step doesn't follow. Desperately repeating it doesn't make it any more valid.

[Dch48]

Haha, the irony...

Making up fantastical explanations for something you're simply not mentally equipped to explain rationally is not a sign of "open mindedness". You're obviously very ignorant about what "science" even means so it's no wonder that you're dismissive of it, and on top of that you have a propensity for using unreliable and often fraudulent sources as "evidence". You're of course free to believe whatever you like, but you haven't described anything that can't be easily explained as fairly common natural phenomena.

I am probably more "mentally equipped" than 99% of people here with a tested IQ of as high as 162. I know very well what science means and i also know enough not to blindly accept what it says. All too frequently it has to be revised and changed because of being totally wrong in what it said. Every time I hear about a new discovery (which most of the time is just a theory), my response is "Okay, Maybe".

The 2 events I related can absolutely not be explained away even though attempts have been made. The attempts at explaining how I knew every word the people were going to say are ludicrous. There was no after the fact remembrance involved. I said to myself, "Okay, now he is going to say this" and Bam, word for word. Then "Now she will say this". Again , bam, word for word. This continued for 4 or 5 minutes and honestly had me in a state of amazement. I have made nothing up and never claimed open mindedness. Open mindedness is the willingness to accept possibilities that have not been proven. Something I see very little of in this thread. Things that have actually happened in your life do not fall under that heading. They are concrete knowledge. I could go out in the woods and have an encounter with Bigfoot (if it exists) and when I came back and told about it, how many would believe me? Not many. But I would know for an absolute fact that it happened. The same thing applies here.

Closed mindedness clothed in flowery pseudo-intellectualism is still what it is.

[Darththeo]

This is a bad argument. If the time required to get a specific macromolecule increases exponentially with its complexity, then this quickly overwhelms the large size and duration of the observable universe. Even if every carbon atom in the universe is trying out a new molecule a billion times a second, the total number of tries there becomes small compared to the number of possible macromolecules of that size much smaller than the smallest known Darwinian Evolver (billions of atoms for the most pruned down microorganism), or of the essential machinery inside that cell.



The exponential unlikelihood of random assembly of very large complex systems utterly dominates this. View the problem quantitatively and you will see there's a huge problem.

I suspect a lot of the reluctance to come to grips with this quandry is from people who don't want to give Creationists even a sliver of an opening. But that's no way to do science. And it's a reminder of cosmologists who rejected the Big Bang because it was too much like Genesis. I have no patience with creationists, but science is science and cheating in what you think of as a good cause is still cheating.



If the sample space of places in which life could arise is sufficiently large, eventually it would happen somewhere. That space may be vastly larger than the size of the observable universe, and it might include things like all the myriad branches of the wave function of the universe, if the Many World interpretation of QM is true. You might try to argue that this means life is out there, on some other branches of that wave function, but other places like that are forever causally disconnected from us so we can never observe them (similarly for other possibilities like an infinite universe, or different universes bubbling out of Eternal Inflation).



No, that last step doesn't follow. Desperately repeating it doesn't make it any more valid.

This has two assumptions:
1) Chemistry is random ... it isn't.
2) That life requires large chemicals. Which we have no reason to assume outside Earth Life is made of large chemicals. Life is merely self reproducing chemicals.

[Dch48]

Moving on, I have said that I am open to the possibility that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is possible. I am also open to the idea that we are alone. An interesting thought is that if you take the approach of pure evolution, the odds against the same things that supposedly happened here happening somewhere else are pretty astronomical. However, from the Creationist point of view, its entirely possible that what was done here by Divine intervention could easily have been done elsewhere by the same force.

[Osmeric]

This has two assumptions:
1) Chemistry is random ... it isn't.

Actually, it can be. Heat organic chemicals and you tend to get random glop with no specific structure. This is what you get out of prebiotic chemstry experiements -- a soup where the concentration of the chemicals decreases exponentially with their complexity.

2) That life requires large chemicals. Which we have no reason to assume outside Earth Life is made of large chemicals. Life is merely self producing chemicals.

All the life we know of has large chemical systems to get the error rate low enough in reproduction for evolution to occur. You can hypothesize that there are simpler systems with sufficiently high reproductive fidelity, but at this point it would just be a hypothesis.

[Darththeo]

Actually, it can be. Heat organic chemicals and you tend to get random glop with no specific structure. This is what you get out of prebiotic chemstry experiements -- a soup where the concentration of the chemicals decreases exponentially with their complexity.




All the life we know of has large chemical systems to get the error rate low enough in reproduction for evolution to occur. You can hypothesize that there are simpler systems with sufficiently high reproductive fidelity, but at this point it would just be a hypothesis.

1) You do know that we have made peptides in experiments that mimic the early earth right? Also, what you are describing is not even random. No specific structure does not mean random.
2) You don't need evolution for life. Life can evolve, but we have no reason to assume life must evolve or even must be able to evolve. Stop bringing up evolution it does not belong in this discussion. It doesn't belong.

[Shadowferal]

Just a random thought, a hypothesis floating about; Theia is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early Solar System that, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the resulting ejected debris gathering to form the Moon.

According to one version of the hypothesis, Theia was an Earth trojan about the size of Mars, with a diameter of about 6,102 km (3,792 miles). Additional evidence published in 2019 suggests that Theia might have formed in the outer Solar System rather than the inner Solar System, and that much of Earth's water originated on Theia.

--------
Just a little something I found interesting especially regarding Earth's water. (It's just a theory, but interesting nonetheless. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)

[Biomega]

This is a bad argument. If the time required to get a specific macromolecule increases exponentially with its complexity, then this quickly overwhelms the large size and duration of the observable universe.

This is a flawed premise. You're essentially leapfrogging a whole array of steps, going from random simple chemicals straight to macromolecules. That's not how it works. You start small, with simple organic compounds, that then progressively become more complex - but that doesn't happen randomly. You get increased complexity BECAUSE you have less complex building blocks - this is a contingency chain, not a series of random events. What's subject to (mostly) random chance are only the first steps, after that you follow from previous contingencies which is (largely) a non-random process.

This is effectively the same logic as creationists arguing you can't just go from fish to human by chance - it's a misrepresentation of progressive systems that build on one another, and while some random elements are definitely part of the chain it's VASTLY different from purely random processes.

And for the first few organic compounds, there isn't actually THAT much variety of possible combinations. Certainly nothing that would dwarf the constantly ongoing chemical processes on millions of planets over billions of years. Same with the contingent steps after that.

This, by the way, is also why there's a good number of scientists who think that it's not at all unreasonable that alien life would be fairly similar in structure to life as we know it - because life on Earth didn't just evolve by being subject to random fluctuations, but in response to statistical filters determined by the environment. Similar environments tend to produce similar structures; there's plenty of examples of that kind of convergent evolution.

[Shadowferal]

This, by the way, is also why there's a good number of scientists who think that it's not at all unreasonable that alien life would be fairly similar in structure to life as we know it - because life on Earth didn't just evolve by being subject to random fluctuations, but in response to statistical filters determined by the environment.

One of which may be this; Morphogenetic field an idea still being tossed about.

[Adamas102]

I am probably more "mentally equipped" than 99% of people here with a tested IQ of as high as 162. I know very well what science means and i also know enough not to blindly accept what it says. All too frequently it has to be revised and changed because of being totally wrong in what it said. Every time I hear about a new discovery (which most of the time is just a theory), my response is "Okay, Maybe".

HAhahahaha! Trust me, guys. My IQ is SO high. I don’t listen to what SCIENCE says. It’s just THEORIES, not fact like my future dreams!

This has been a laugh from start to finish, I gotta give you that at least.

[Surfd]

I didn't make that claim. Reading for comprehension is hard?

Literally you:

The evidence we have is consistent with life being rare.

Want to try that again?

The "evidence" can not possibly be consistent with that suggestion when the "evidence" consists of a sample size so utterly minuscule as to be completely meaningless.

[Hollycakes]

That's about as moronic as making the following observation:
- I found ants in my yard.
- I did not find ants in my neighbors yard.

And attempting to argue that therefore, ants must be exceedingly rare on planet earth.

This is too funny and the only analogy needed.
Could have stopped here lol.

[Ielenia]

I'm sure you guys will come up with something to try and refute this. There is just no reasoning with completely closed minds.

But we do have an open mind. The difference is that we know to use a filter to keep up bad ideas from entering and taking up space that could be used by bad ideas.

Someone with an open mind considers the ideas that they come across, and accepts or dismisses said ideas depending on their actual validity, i.e., the evidence for it. Having an open mind does not mean giving ideas the same weight and validity. Flat Earth and round Earth ideas do not have the same merit. Young Earth and old Earth ideas do not have the same merit.

There is a reason the saying "be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls off" is a thing.

It's funny, but those who accuse others of being "close-minded", are, much more often than not, the ones actually being close-minded.

[Biomega]

It's funny, but those who accuse others of being "close-minded", are, much more often than not, the ones actually being close-minded.

That is definitely one of my favorite paradoxes.

"Why are you so close-minded? All I'm saying is that I follow a dogmatic religious position that isn't subject to evidence and doesn't permit critique, and here you go with your science la-di-da."

"I believe in psychics, and I don't need to prove they're real, they just are because I know so and I'm not interested in your science or reason. You should be more open-minded!"