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minasole posted:is life only evolved and selected chemical reactions? there might be other kinds of life but since we're a bunch of evolved and selected chemical reactions we can't see or measure it
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Jan 12, 2016 07:57
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Life can be expressed as a set of self-perpetuating algorithms that exist because they've succesfully resisted the entrophic pressure of the universe. You, however cannot be expressed thus, but retarded.
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Jan 12, 2016 18:20
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SedanChair posted:there might be other kinds of life but since we're a bunch of evolved and selected chemical reactions we can't see or measure it Yet. Maybe ever, but we're pretty clever for ugly bags of mostly water
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Jan 12, 2016 18:35
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Negative OP, I am a meat popsicle.
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Jan 12, 2016 22:57
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LIfe is a box of chocolates OP
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Jan 13, 2016 07:07
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It's a method of carrying information coherently forward in time and space. We and all other Eukarya are adaptive organizations for the dissipation of energy. All energy is, in turn, information, that is then stored and later dissipated into smaller bits. This information levels off into a general flat line w/ regards to richness and structure given enough time, the most complex, and thus larger/more massive patterns (in the form of stars, planets, gas filaments and debris and other stellar-scale objects) are stored permanently in black holes first and then the simplest bits (constituent protons etc.) towards the end of time through the heat death of the universe. Gravity is either an operational framework for the connection of this information dissipation/storage or a byproduct of it. When a group of atoms is exposed to an external source of energy like the sun it will automatically over time restructure in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. So in specific circumstances matter inevitably becomes more complex to dissipate energy, and greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. Shine starlight on a rock for long enough and inevitably a plant self-organizes to dissipate the starlight. Give it a little longer and so do we.
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Jan 13, 2016 08:14
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Human-centered intelligence is not real objective intelligence. It only helps us survive and deal with surroundings. For instance, if water itself judges the global water cycle, then it will think that there is a lot of intelligence there, as so many fragmented procedures are (perceived by its eyes to be) perfectly knit together for one purpose. To maintain the water cycle.
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Jan 13, 2016 16:34
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minasole posted:Human-centered intelligence is not real objective intelligence. It only helps us survive and deal with surroundings.  Intelligence doesn't need to be human centric, but considering every sort of semi-stable state or system to be based in intelligence only looks like a good idea when stoned  . In your weird example, If water got pumped into orbit to remove it from the water cycle permanently, the remaining water would not in any way change its behaviour to prevent that.
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 19:37
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Yeah but describing life as just chemicals (not even naming them, lol) subject to natural selection, doesn't tell you anything about how to systematically and sustainably satisfy your head's reward system. I guess it is useful if you're trying to figure out whether you can cast a magic spell on someone, because if you didn't know that they operate from mechanical and chemical laws you might think that saying spooky words and burning some poo poo far away from them might create a reliable effect on their brain. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jan 13, 2016 |
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Jan 13, 2016 19:59
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Stinky_Pete posted:Yeah but describing life as just chemicals (not even naming them, lol) subject to natural selection, doesn't tell you anything about how to systematically and sustainably satisfy your head's reward system. A chemical reaction operates only when it can spread out energy. The secret to being happy is to help out this change in entropy. Have a large family, burn stuff, drive your car a lot etc. Basically the more energy you can burn through the better.
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Jan 13, 2016 20:08
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Stinky_Pete posted:Yeah but describing life as just chemicals (not even naming them, lol) subject to natural selection, doesn't tell you anything about how to systematically and sustainably satisfy your head's reward system. Yeah, you gotta say spooky words and burn some poo poo close by and hotbox those motherfuckers. 420 blaez it
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Jan 13, 2016 23:28
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Salt Fish posted:A chemical reaction operates only when it can spread out energy. The secret to being happy is to help out this change in entropy. Have a large family, burn stuff, drive your car a lot etc. Basically the more energy you can burn through the better.
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Jan 13, 2016 23:39
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Not to be sci-fi nerd but carbon based life is only what we know because it's what's here so it's all we know the details of. "Life" could be energy based. No clue how it could form but to think in a universe this size that life will be based on what's here is a bit egotistic, or that our definition of life is the only one. Even intelligence, we can barely agree on what sentience is, who knows what else is out there  Does remind me of a talk Tyson gave where he pointed out that chimps/apes share 99% of our DNA, if that 1% is the difference between a monkey and intelligence capable of what we've done, would another life form with 3% different DNA even register us as more than we view bacteria.
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Jan 14, 2016 02:06
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Toasticle posted:
I love me some Dr Tyson, but I find this argument very unconvincing. It would be clear to any intelligence that we do things with more purpose and that we have abstract thought. Now, creatures that are simply very different from us, like being incorporeal or differently-dimensioned might not be able to recognize us as fellow intelligences, or us them. I can't see this being true for things merely a few % different, but still basically biological as we understand it.
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Jan 14, 2016 02:45
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Yea, and the chemicals could probably have just as easily been antimatter equivalents and constitute a minority of the mass in the universe regardless. You're also mostly made of empty space that is popping virtual particles into and out of existence. It's cool though, go drink a beer or get laid or something. Enjoy it.
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Jan 14, 2016 03:03
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minasole posted:is life only evolved and selected chemical reactions? sure
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Jan 14, 2016 03:12
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We are our own gods OP.
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Jan 14, 2016 03:49
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Trent posted:I love me some Dr Tyson, but I find this argument very unconvincing. I badly quoted him, in the talk he was making jokes about how we view Koko(?) learning to sign and thought how they would view say Stephen Hawking and how what he knows are thing their children learn as toddlers. I think I just had Cthulhu in my mind as a 'race' of beings so far beyond us that we don't even register to them.
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Jan 14, 2016 06:17
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The only qualification for life is self replication. On Earth we have chemical based life. We can envision a future where humanity spawns mechanical/electronic life. I'm not sure what other kinds of life there could be. Weather based? Some type of medium dependent energy reaction? Any don't get too hung up on the chemical reaction thing. The point is self replication. Humans are nearly beyond being categorized as merely life imo. To elaborate, we're a medium for the interaction of information which is potentially way more important to cosmic evolution than biological reproduction. Moxie fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 14:27
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actually life is just this thing we made up because we decided some chemical reactions are magic and others not or whatever
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Jan 14, 2016 15:19
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Moxie posted:The only qualification for life is self replication. On Earth we have chemical based life. We can envision a future where humanity spawns mechanical/electronic life. I'm not sure what other kinds of life there could be. Weather based? Some type of medium dependent energy reaction? Is a 3D printer programmed to make more 3D printers alive?
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Jan 14, 2016 15:54
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blowfish posted:Is a 3D printer programmed to make more 3D printers alive? That's broadly a description of what a bacterium does, so apparently. I think it also needs to move around and find more materials for itself but yeah, kinda. E: HOMGARR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Biology So a modular 3d printer design, with an air conditioner attached, capable of breaking down things into more 3d printing fuel, which occasionally produces slight variations in what it prints which can be inherited, and which is glued onto a roomba, would biologically speaking, be alive. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 15:56
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Toasticle posted:Not to be sci-fi nerd but carbon based life is only what we know because it's what's here so it's all we know the details of. "Life" could be energy based. No clue how it could form but to think in a universe this size that life will be based on what's here is a bit egotistic, or that our definition of life is the only one. Even intelligence, we can barely agree on what sentience is, who knows what else is out there That's because 50% of our DNA is just the information needed for eukaryotic multicellular organisms to even have a basis. Once that's established in the code, the power in segments and codes that diversify those cells according to simple signals from their neighbors* is immense. We share 92% DNA with mice and other mammals, 98% with chimps. A lot of that is physiological, and goes with changes that accommodate our larger brains (e.g. we give birth earlier in gestation because our heads are bigger but pelvises smaller from standing upright), which is really the straightforward difference: we have more brain cells, and thus exponentially more synapse connections, and more room to form abstract concepts, memory, and language. Koko has enough to sign, but not enough to tell stories or express hypotheticals or counterfactuals. Anything that watches living things live in houses and produce light from non-burning objects and zoom around in metallic structures, can tell that those things can communicate and reason about the world. Any form of life that evolves to intelligence and culture, no matter the basis, will need to communicate with a sequence of symbols across time or space using light, sound, or electromagnetic waves. Any idea of life emerging in antimatter or dark matter is unfalsifiable and meaningless because we can have no interaction with it that would reveal enough information to suggest life. *It's really quite cool, stem cells diversify into a tree of specialized cells where each basic type can itself specialize into further subtypes. Read Life Unfolding to learn more. Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid also devotes a section to how DNA works mathematically and computationally.
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Jan 14, 2016 18:18
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OwlFancier posted:HOMGARR It would have to make more roombas as well though
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Jan 14, 2016 18:19
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Toasticle posted:Not to be sci-fi nerd but carbon based life is only what we know because it's what's here so it's all we know the details of. "Life" could be energy based. No clue how it could form but to think in a universe this size that life will be based on what's here is a bit egotistic, or that our definition of life is the only one. Even intelligence, we can barely agree on what sentience is, who knows what else is out there It is extremely likely that any other life is going to be very similar to the life we see on Earth. Everything in the entire universe is made up of the same building blocks and exposed to similar pressures (heat, pressure, etc). If I had to guess, I would say that the basic forms of life (like bacteria, etc) are going to be extremely similar regardless of where it forms, with a higher degree of variation being possible as multi-cellular beings evolve in their respective environments. So it's entirely possible that you might end up with some organism that is as smart or smarter than humans and lives underwater, but very unlikely that there's some floating ball of energy organism. Regarding the "chimps are 99% the same" thing, it's important to keep in mind that all organisms share a large portion of their genetic code (because of the way evolution works), particularly if you're just looking at mammals or something. The protein-coding regions of the mouse genome are ~85% similar to a human (which is why we can sometimes effectively use mice as an experimental model for human disease). Human intelligence is likely more a matter of intelligence over a certain threshold being capable of things like complex communication and reasoning. The gap between a chimp's intelligence and a mouse's is larger than the gap between a human's and a chimp's, even though humans have had such a great impact on the planet. If we ever encountered a significantly more intelligent organism, it would probably be possible to communicate with them and would not be comparable to humans communicating with chimps. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 20:54
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Isn't there a hypothesis the the biggest difference between humans and other apes is our vocal cords? We have a wider range of vocalization which becomes a positive feedback loop of more sophisticated communication and cognition.
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Jan 14, 2016 20:58
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McDowell posted:Isn't there a hypothesis the the biggest difference between humans and other apes is our vocal cords? We have a wider range of vocalization which becomes a positive feedback loop of more sophisticated communication and cognition. There is no such hypothesis.
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Jan 14, 2016 21:37
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The giant jaws on apes require a sagittal crest to anchor them which puts a limit on skull capacity and brain size. I could see increased intelligence and fine motor control leading to less stress on the jaw and a ton of positive selection since a hosed up jaw is basically a death sentence for most animals.
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Jan 14, 2016 22:01
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Wouldn't the selection pressure then come from fire and its use as a kind of 'external digestion', which then lets jaws get smaller?
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Jan 15, 2016 00:01
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Potential BFF posted:The giant jaws on apes require a sagittal crest to anchor them which puts a limit on skull capacity and brain size. I could see increased intelligence and fine motor control leading to less stress on the jaw and a ton of positive selection since a hosed up jaw is basically a death sentence for most animals. It may be harder, but it's implausible to think evolution couldn't find a way towards large jaw and big brain. Though I can see reasons why the two of those things might not correlate (human evolution followed a path where tools replaced the need for biting capacity).
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Jan 15, 2016 00:27
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Ytlaya posted:It is extremely likely that any other life is going to be very similar to the life we see on Earth. Everything in the entire universe is made up of the same building blocks and exposed to similar pressures (heat, pressure, etc). I in no way have the background to discuss this well, my only problem is statements like "Everything in the entire universe...." We've seen first hand Earth and the moon, Mars (Venus?) and a comet/asteroids through probes and the rest by by various forms of telescopes, of which we've seen a fraction of a fraction of what's out there and even then just at frequencies we decided are the important ones to observe. What we know about the rest of the universe is an educated guess. There's still plenty of very weird poo poo out there we don't really have a grasp of, we've been watching KIC 8462852 for a decade and are still not quite sure what is going on there. (Google it, I in no way could correctly explain it). The majority of what we've theorized and tested about reality is mostly in the last century, with the last couple decades being the most productive. Hell we only just figured out why things have mass, or at least proved Higgs's theory. Dark matter and energy are still in the "Pretty sure they are a thing but we know almost nothing about them". How recent did we discover life in areas we would have previously considered completely inhospitable in the super heated areas around deep underwater vents or bacteria that can survive in the vacuum and radiation heavy environment of outer space or in arctic ice? Even Gravity is still in the theory stage. I could be wrong but haven't we still not figured out how there are essentially two realms of physics, classical and quantum, the former breaks down completely at high enough energy levels. Most people don't even know we're down to three forces, Gravity, strong and now the weak and electromagnetic is electroweak. Until the Higgs Bosons broke that theory (Highly into barely understanding what the gently caress I'm even talking about territory now, Higgs breaking electroweak symmetry I barely grasp) Point being our knowledge of reality could be almost complete or we're just starting to understand the basics and I feel pretty confident it's the latter, I have serious doubts that in the last 30 or 40 years we finally understand most of it. Basing what life would be like on what little we have figured out in the last half a century just seems a bit premature. We define it based on what immeasurable fraction of conditions we know of and my egotistical comment was referring to that. These are the conditions that we see what we define as life so those must be the conditions life can form in. Until we find things like those worms and crabs living around deep sea sulfer vents in temperatures/pressures and chemically toxic environments that would obliterate any other form of life. The chimp intelligence thing was just something I remembered Dyson talking about and considering it's not his field I think it was more "What if" talking than an actual theory, just though it was interesting navel gazing talk. And why the gently caress does Apple insist that gravity should be capitalized? Edit: According to astronomers we've observed only about 2% of the universe, and most of that only via radio telescope arrays, which as I said even then only observing the frequencies we've decided are the important ones. The other 98% could all be just the same but saying "Everythung in the entire universe" when we've only seen the barest portion of EM emissions of 1/50th of it I don't think supports that we know what the other 98% is. Even the small portion we've observed is filled with things that don't make any sense, we've found a super massive black hole that according to what we think we know about them should not have had enough time to be that size. There's a massive 'cold' spot 3 billion light years away that's 1.8 billion light years across and has 20% less matter than the rest of the observable universe. It's ''missing' 10,000 galaxies and they still can't explain how this exists http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11550868/Giant-mysterious-empty-hole-found-in-universe.html So no, even in the areas we can see it's not the same conditions everywhere. Toasticle fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 03:08
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One thing to keep in mind is the need of the moon for tides - the resulting swamps and other tidal ecosystems might not occur on another planet with water and land in the 'goldilocks' zone If we did find microbes on mars what if they use the same codons as earth life? If they don't that means they are alien that has its own questions. But if they are the same- was it cross contamination? Did humans do it or did meteroites bring life from Mars to Earth? Could that have caused an ancient mass extinctions? The surviving earth organisms might have integrated the foreign DNA in the evolution of the immune system.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:24
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rudatron posted:Wouldn't the selection pressure then come from fire and its use as a kind of 'external digestion', which then lets jaws get smaller? I don't see why not, an understanding of fire and the ability to reliably create it is a huge boon to survival. asdf32 posted:It may be harder, but it's implausible to think evolution couldn't find a way towards large jaw and big brain. Well evolution doesn't have any agency but it's possible. That said, I'm pretty sure there is a direct correlation between diminished sagittal crests and brain size. Gorillas and chimpanzees are a good modern example.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:26
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Potential BFF posted:You're also mostly made of empty space that is popping virtual particles into and out of existence. ooo virtual particles care to explain?
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Jan 15, 2016 03:36
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Reason posted:ooo virtual particles care to explain? I'm not a physicist but essentially the majority of the mass in a proton at any given moment consists of subatomic particles generated from fluctuations in the strong nuclear force holding the quarks together. These particles are popping in and out of existence and constitute most of the mass of matter. These fields exist in a vacuum as well, space that is empty in the traditional sense is actively generating all sorts of particles from nothing. I'm basically cribbing what I remember from a bunch of Lawrence Krauss talks.
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Jan 15, 2016 04:26
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Incidentally, it was one of those talks that tipped me over from agnosticism into atheism. Something can't come from nothing! Well, actually...
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Jan 15, 2016 06:40
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Reason posted:ooo virtual particles care to explain? 0 = -1 + 1 Or in other words, if you have nothing, you still have something. Particle and antiparticle pairs are constantly popping out of the void in every single dot of reality and immediately annihilating each other and disappearing back into the void. And we can detect it too! Or rather, we can detect the pressure caused by virtual particles. I'm not entirely sure I've understood it correctly at all, but I think the mediating particles in many universal forces like weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetic fields are in fact virtual photons.
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Jan 15, 2016 07:20
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life is a dissipative system OPSeasonal Candles posted:It's a method of carrying information coherently forward in time and space. We and all other Eukarya are adaptive organizations for the dissipation of energy. All energy is, in turn, information, that is then stored and later dissipated into smaller bits. This information levels off into a general flat line w/ regards to richness and structure given enough time, the most complex, and thus larger/more massive patterns (in the form of stars, planets, gas filaments and debris and other stellar-scale objects) are stored permanently in black holes first and then the simplest bits (constituent protons etc.) towards the end of time through the heat death of the universe. Gravity is either an operational framework for the connection of this information dissipation/storage or a byproduct of it. a good post
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Jan 15, 2016 09:47
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Reason posted:ooo virtual particles care to explain? It's a fascinating subject, even in the empty vacuum of interstellar space is a constant creation and destruction of particles and antiparticles forming from nothing then annihilating each other. It's been nicknamed "quantum foam" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam or vacuum energy or zero point energy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy I think its explained by the Casimir effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect. Hawking theorized it causes black holes to 'evaporate', when these particles form at the event horizon and one is pulled in while the other escapes, it's called Hawking radiation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation and in theory cause black holes to actually evaporate away. When they fired up the supercollider and people were babbling about creating black holes and them swallowing us, the black holes that would form would be so small they instantly evaporate away, a sun sized one would take 10^100 years to evaporate. Toasticle fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 19:19
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Toasticle posted:I in no way have the background to discuss this well, my only problem is statements like "Everything in the entire universe...." We've seen first hand Earth and the moon, Mars (Venus?) and a comet/asteroids through probes and the rest by by various forms of telescopes, of which we've seen a fraction of a fraction of what's out there and even then just at frequencies we decided are the important ones to observe. What we know about the rest of the universe is an educated guess. There's still plenty of very weird poo poo out there we don't really have a grasp of, we've been watching KIC 8462852 for a decade and are still not quite sure what is going on there. (Google it, I in no way could correctly explain it). All matter is still composed of atoms (and atoms composed of the same subatomic particles), and we know how various atoms have been formed since the Big Bang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#/media/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg If you observed only 2% of the Earth, you could indeed infer the fundamental building blocks of the other 98% based upon that. Everything would still be made of the exact same stuff at the subatomic level. We already know about all the elements that can occur naturally and be stable. Like, it isn't possible for there to be some mysterious life form made out of a 0th element because the very concept of a 0th element makes no sense. Sure, there might be some magical form of life that is built from some completely unknown building block, but that is literally the same as an argument for God or any other magical thing. The fact that we don't understand much about stuff like dark matter does not in any way mean that there might be some bizarre dark matter life or something.
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Jan 15, 2016 21:22
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