zing
Platinum Member
It is an interesting read. Personally I lean toward the anthill theory. I don't consider it to be depressing though, to think that we are not advanced enough to be aware of the others around us and outside of our sphere of realization. It is kind of a "Keeping up with the Jones' " type of thing. Who cares if there are others that are too advanced for us to understand, as long as we are happy inside of our anthill. If they come along someday and bulldoze our anthill for a highway, well worrying today won't change that future event.
WRT the idea that the filter is the difficulty of life being created, there is an interesting article about some recent information about the probability of that happening. Basically it discusses the prevalent thinking that the accidental mixture of random elements and the spontaneous transformation into an organized living organism, is too far fetched to be realistic. His premise is that the organization of the random elements is not actually required to happen by chance, instead it is happening all the time due to natural processes, and so the chances of this organized cluster of elements creating life becomes much less far fetched and possibly almost inevitable to happen regularly in the vast reaches of the universe as long as the conditions are the same.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
It is a very interesting read. Basically summary (as I understood it) is...
- The law of thermodynamics says that all energy tends toward entropy. This would appear to contradict the idea that matter could become organised and become life without some help, at least to the point of it being incredibly far fetched.
- The misperception in this argument is that while entropy is the destination, that does not mean that "disorder" is the best way to get to entropy. A simple example is that drops of water losing enegy can form complex structures like snowflakes as they lose energy. There is no living organization required for that process, just laws of physics, yet it happens over and over again. Another example is sand dunes or ripples that form as moving sand loses energy and is deposited. In fact, the most efficient way to lose energy is often for matter to form a consistent structure that allows the energy to leave faster.
- He moved on to study the organization of organic chemicals in a heatsink (like the ocean) that would be constantly trying to cool down and lose energy. What he found is that the organic chemicals are most efficient at losing energy when they are organized, and the organized state is suprisingly similar to RNA, one of the building blocks of life.
- The premise is that in an environment where you have a large heatsink (I.E. a large body of water) that is constantly being recharged (like by energy from the sun) there will consistently be a situation where organic molecules (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc) are naturally arranged into an RNA like structure just due to the continual natural loss of energy by those molecules.
- Once it is clear that the molecules are constantly organizing themselves in that way due to natural processes, then it is not so far fetched that they could form RNA based life.
- It also suggests that since the presence of planets orbiting stars is quite common when we consider all of the universe, it is not hard to picture that conditions (water being warmed by a star) would be common enough not only for life to regularly be created elsewhee, but also for that life to be RNA based, similar to ours.
Perhaps that is the fliter? Perhaps life requires RNA but RNA based life prevents the expansion of alien life forms, since there may be physical laws that prevent the accelleration of organic molecule based matter beyond the speed of light. Until we can detach our life from our organic matter, we may be stuck just due to the distance involved. It is a fascinating and thought provoking read.
