We still have no idea how easy it is for life to form - and it could be extremely difficult
When I was a student in the 60s, almost all scientists believed that we were alone in the universe. The idea of looking for intelligent life outside of Earth was met with disdain and ridicule. At that time it was already better to declare a desire to look for fairies. The focus of skepticism was on the issue of the origin of life. Most scientists have assumed that life began by a lucky chemical coincidence, the probability of which is so low that it is unlikely to happen twice. "The origin of life seems to be almost a convention at the moment," is how the Nobel laureate, who participated in the discovery of the structure of DNA, described the situation. Francis Crick, "and for this to happen countless conditions had to be met." Also a Nobel laureate Jacques Mono agreed to that. in his book Coincidence and necessity, which was published in the 70s, Mono wrote: "Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent expanses of the universe, where he was created by chance."
Today the pendulum is decisively tipping to the other side. Many respected scientists claim that the universe is teeming with life, and that at least some of it is intelligent. The biologist, Nobel Prize laureate, Christian de Doub even went so far as to claim that life is "Cosmic necessity.” And yet, the science remains almost unchanged. The myth we have today about the path from inanimate matter to living matter is almost the same myth that surrounded Charles Darwin when he wrote: "Today's thinking about the origin of life is nothing more than nonsense, it is better to think about the origin of matter."
There is no doubt thatS, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has received a huge boost from the recent discoveries of hundreds of planets outside the solar system. Astronomers believe there may be billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. There is no doubt that there is no lack of real estate suitable for living in the areas. And yet, we do not know what the process is that turned a mixture of chemicals into a living cell, for all its incredible complexity. Until we know this, we cannot calculate the probability that life did emerge on these planets.
Carl Sagan once said that the formation of life can't be too difficult, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't have popped up on Earth so soon after we became hospitable to life. It is true that we can trace the first signs of life as early as 3.5 billion years ago. But we cannot draw any statistically valid conclusion from just one sample.
Another common argument is that because the universe is so vast, life must exist somewhere in it. But what is the meaning of this claim? If we limit our attention to the observable universe alone, there are probably 10 out of 23 planets in it. Yes, that's a big number. But this number is dwarfed by the odds against the random formation of a single simple organic molecule. If the path from chemistry to biology is long and complicated, it is very possible that less than one planet out of every trillion-trillion planets ever gave birth to life.
The statements that life exists in the universe are based on a hidden assumption that biology is not a random consequence of chemical reactions. The assumption is that some process of directed self-organization is involved here, which favors the living state over other states. Like a life principle operating in nature. But if this is indeed the case, then we have not found any evidence to confirm this.
And maybe we don't have to look that far. If life does form easily, as Carl Sagan has suggested, it should have started many times over on our planet. And if there were several origins of life on Earth, the microbial offspring of another origin might be found everywhere around us, creating a parallel biological environment. No one has seriously searched beneath any life unlike ours. It doesn't take more than the discovery of a single "alien" microscopic creature to settle the issue.
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In response to life - everything is possible!!!!!! Even what seems strange!!!!!!!! This is the attribute of infinity - that it will never end!!!! No matter how deep you look - everything will be equal to a degree that you will barely be able to scratch the surface - this is the meaning of infinity!!!!!!!
Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher who was put on the spot, pointed out that there are an infinity of stars - all this space that we perceive through the telescopes that exist and will exist in the future - just look at an area whose size in relation to other spaces is the size of a single atom, the spaces surely go on to infinity - an end and will never end and neither will the number of stars Exists in a way that actually doesn't exist - the end!!!!!! I have no doubt that it is absolutely certain, at least from my point of view!!!!!
I think the common people will agree with me when I say that there are certainly many more than 10^23 stars (the same intuitive number that likes to return everywhere..), maybe only from our small place is what we manage to see..
I also think that the simple logic of making a strong claim about the existence or non-existence of intelligent life is just another pretension clearly characteristic of our arrogant race..
Why do you think that all this madness, all this infinity, all this independent randomness that extends far beyond the imagination of any of us will be satisfied with one stupid and proud species?
Life
I would love to understand how the second law is related to life inventions...
I suggest to all scientists inflated with excess importance, to understand one basic thing. The second law of thermodynamics does not allow for another entity in the cosmos. Therefore for this reason, no two biological bodies of any size are identical to each other. The upper possible limit, and even that is doubtful, is some molecule the size of a virus that is able to divide only because it is in some kind of dense "soup" that creates a very small proximity between the molecules and that creates some kind of reaction between them that multiplies them. And after a change in the environment they break down. Therefore, all life on Earth is a random consequence of this law, and nothing else.
And maybe life always develops in exactly the same way and then the aliens are no different from us at all.
Maybe such aliens co-exist with us and are just exactly the same as us, so we don't think of them as "aliens" but as animals that evolved here.
Perhaps there is life on Earth that has evolved separately, only that there is no other possibility for development and therefore they are identical to those that evolved before.
It is known that most bacteria and microscopic creatures have not been classified at all yet and are unknown to science.
I once heard that in a sample of earthly soil there is not a large percentage of known and classified types of bacteria and the rest are unknown and unclassified, so maybe the aliens that are looking for the stars are some of these bacteria, and you should just look for them in the garden soil and not in space.
Asaf
One teaspoon of water has 10 to the 23 molecules 🙂
Asaf
There are 10 to the 23 molecules in a teaspoon of water...
And besides - who said the process was random?
I still think life on earth may have originated from outer space.
In one of the episodes of the new Cosmos series there is a reference to this in the panspermia theory, the entry in English Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
In Hebrew and for those who prefer a shorter entry
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A4%D7%A0%D7%A1%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%94
There is at least one creature on Earth that will definitely survive a trip in space, a water bear:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%93%D7%95%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%99_%D7%9E
%D7%99%D7%9D
"In an experiment conducted in October 2007, water teddies were sent into orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.[4] In the experiment, the water bears were exposed to a vacuum and to temperatures close to absolute zero. Also, some of them were exposed to direct sunlight, and some to background radiation. Most of the water bears that were not exposed to direct sunlight survived the journey, and surprisingly, a number of water bears that were exposed to unfiltered sunlight also survived. In this way, the water bears became the only animal known to science that can survive a journey in space without protection."
For those who prefer the entry in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
That is, water bears on the surface of an asteroid could land on the surface of the Earth and start life.
In the cosmos, the reference is also to a "lifeboat" in an ancient period of the Earth when it was bombarded with asteroids.
This is as part of a mass extinction event when water bears were thrown into outer space on the back of an asteroid that eventually returned to Earth to start life anew.
The whole thing of 10 to the power of 23 is incomprehensible. It is not that every star has only one possibility to arrange the molecules. Each star has 10 to the power of 23 molecules and a greater number of arrangement possibilities, therefore if we multiply by the number of stars the statistics are astronomical.
The first question that needs to be asked is whether we have even passed the threshold necessary to discover life on other planets orbiting other stars. Given that only in the last twenty years have we been able to discover any other planets around the other stars, and that with the current methods we apparently manage to lose about 90% of those planets (because the whip plane of these star systems is not directed towards us), and that we still cannot determine if there were (or still are) ) live on Mars or Europe, we probably have a long way to go technologically so that we can get similar determinations on alien planets many light years away.
You can also go ahead and ask what kind of life we can discover. Technological intelligent life (and what technology can we detect)? Intelligent life? Multicellular life? Simple?
The second issue concerns statistics, it's nice to talk about 10 to the power of 23 planets, but firstly, most of them are beyond our reach forever (due to the accelerated expansion of the universe), secondly, it turns out that most galaxies are completely barren (this includes the elliptical galaxies that were uprooted by the explosion of quasars billions of years ago and are still saturated with gas hot that prevents the development of new stars or new planets. This includes the center of our galaxy which is probably just as barren). All this before we included (or even discovered) some spectacular natural phenomena and calculated their murderous effect on nearby star systems and the statistics involved. So what are we left with? The edge of the Milky Way and M31 in Andromeda, and some dwarf galaxies around? A little less than 10 to the 23rd power.
In conclusion: we are still not able to determine that "there is no life". First we should reach the technological ability to determine if there is life, then we will activate it, then we will analyze the results, and maybe then we can reach this philosophical discussion.
Very true article.
The question is what is the minimum length of genetic code necessary for the replication process
Life started from the first replication, and it doesn't have to be on Earth.
It could be that the universe is polluted and life started billions of years ago in a galaxy that no longer exists