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I like how all science is based on the big bang theory.

It's like scientists saying,"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."

 Xenomancers wrote:

This isn't evidence.

By your standard of evidence a whole lot of science is made up, not just physics, a lot of other stuff (do you have any idea how many hypothesis are based solely in inference?).

At which point I fail to see why we shouldn't just keep making it up. It's worked pretty well thus far

That theory gave me autism...

Look at the bright side. You're now ready for a life of Shrimp Boating

 Khornholio wrote:
I like how all science is based on the big bang theory.

It's like scientists saying,"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."

We give god 2 free miracles, so asking for 1 isn't to much.

I prefer my theories bouncy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

 Khornholio wrote:
I like how all science is based on the big bang theory.

It's like scientists saying,"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."

Way more than that actually. It takes a total mathematical miracle for inert matter to form even the simplest amino acids, and then another miracle to form the right amino acids, and another to form proteins from those amino acids, and another to form the right proteins from those amino acids, and then another to get those proteins to form DNA and not just a useless pile of protein, and another for that DNA to have an even the simplest(yet still incredibly complex) cell form around it and start being a living single celled organism, etc...

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Khornholio wrote:
I like how all science is based on the big bang theory.

It's like scientists saying,"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."

Way more than that actually. It takes a total mathematical miracle for inert matter to form even the simplest amino acids, and then another miracle to form the right amino acids, and another to form proteins from those amino acids, and another to form the right proteins from those amino acids, and then another to get those proteins to form DNA and not just a useless pile of protein, and another for that DNA to have an even the simplest(yet still incredibly complex) cell form around it and start being a living single celled organism, etc...

Which is the basis for Rare Earth Theory.

This is why life is so inherently precious and we should strive to preserve its diversity.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Way more than that actually. It takes a total mathematical miracle for inert matter to form even the simplest amino acids, and then another miracle to form the right amino acids, and another to form proteins from those amino acids, and another to form the right proteins from those amino acids, and then another to get those proteins to form DNA and not just a useless pile of protein, and another for that DNA to have an even the simplest(yet still incredibly complex) cell form around it and start being a living single celled organism, etc...

No, it really doesn't take a "miracle" and it's one of the most commonly used fallacies when creationists try to dismiss the the idea abiogenesis.

Given what we know about non-randomness of chemistry and natural selection, and the conditions of the prebiotic Earth, it would have been much more unlikely for life not to have arisen.

Isn't it statistically pretty unlikely though? It doesn't require a miracle or sentient God for it to happen but it can be so rare as still to appear "miraculous".

The probability is so unlikely that it approaches zero.

The exact problem is that chemistry isn't random. You simply can't get amino acids to spontaneously arise from the chemical soup, the laws of thermodynamics don't allow for more complex systems to arise from simpler ones. You'd need an infinite amount of time for the math to even approach likely numbers, which we certainly don't have.

It certainly is so unlikely that you have to entertain the possibility of creation by a divine being.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The probability is so unlikely that it approaches zero.

Nope.

The exact problem is that chemistry isn't random. You simply can't get amino acids to spontaneously arise from the chemical soup, the laws of thermodynamics don't allow for more complex systems to arise from simpler ones. You'd need an infinite amount of time for the math to even approach likely numbers, which we certainly don't have.

Nope.

It certainly is so unlikely that you have to entertain the possibility of creation by a divine being.

Nope.

There is literally nothing you wrote that is true in any way, shape, or form.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The probability is so unlikely that it approaches zero.

The exact problem is that chemistry isn't random. You simply can't get amino acids to spontaneously arise from the chemical soup, the laws of thermodynamics don't allow for more complex systems to arise from simpler ones.

Imma stop you right there, because you're missing the qualifier; "...to arise from simpler ones, unless energy is entering the system from an external source." You know, like that big shiny ball of fire that hangs in the sky. I can never decide which is more annoying, creation/ID advocates grotesquely misusing/misapplying the laws of thermodynamics, or new-age woo-lords misusing the concept of quantum mechanics.

You'd need an infinite amount of time for the math to even approach likely numbers, which we certainly don't have.

It certainly is so unlikely that you have to entertain the possibility of creation by a divine being.

It really isn't, but even if it were, no, it's still not a good reason to entertain the possibility that an incredibly unlikely event which we don't currently fully understand was caused by an even more stupendously unlikely and completely unfalsifiable agent. There is no scientific question to which the answer is or could be "[a] God[s] did it", because that hypothesis can never be tested.

 Yodhrin wrote:
I can never decide which is more annoying, creation/ID advocates grotesquely misusing/misapplying the laws of thermodynamics, or new-age woo-lords misusing the concept of quantum mechanics.

For me, I'm going to have to go with the former, though they are both highly frustrating.

So complex life should be very common throughout the Universe rather than extremely rare?

I'm genuinely asking.

I know Carl Sagan thought life would be pretty common but there was a recent documentary with Brian Cox and he was more inclined to go down the Rare Earth Theory route.

I don't pretend to understand these things, it just appears (as somebody with a passing interest) that there's legitimate basis for both.

I hope that complex life is common. I really do.

 Medium of Death wrote:
So complex life should be very common throughout the Universe rather than extremely rare?

Define "complex" and "common". And don't forget that the universe is a really huge place, so even if life is pretty rare there are probably still countless planets with life on them.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
It certainly is so unlikely that you have to entertain the possibility of creation by a divine being.

Even ignoring the difficulty of life forming "god did it" isn't an answer. Unless you're just looking for a comfortable way to "prove" your existing religious beliefs and satisfy yourself that an "answer" exists you inevitably have to ask where god came from. And a god capable of starting life on our planet (and doing it in such a way that it left no observable evidence) coming into existence is certainly at least as difficult as the original problem, so now you've just replaced one problem with an even harder one.

 Medium of Death wrote:
Isn't it statistically pretty unlikely though?

The simplest theorized self-replicating peptide is only 32 amino acids long and given what we know about the state of the prebiotic Earth, chemistry, and natural selection, the probability of it forming randomly, in sequential trials, is approximately 1 in 10⁴⁰. That sounds like a lot trials needed for a self-replication peptide to form, and it is. However, you have to remember that, given the vast volume of the prebiotic oceans, billions and billions of trials were occurring simultaneously across the Earth, as the amino acid-rich oceans were continuously churned by the tidal forces of the moon and the harsh weather conditions of the Earth (which is why the "violation of the laws of thermodynamic" fallacy fails, the Earth is not a thermodynamically closed system).

Even if the oceans had a very dilute concentration of amino acids (which it most likely didn't), 10³¹ self-replicating peptides would form in under a year, let alone millions of years. Life arose on Earth at pretty much the first chance it had, nearly 4 billion years ago (the earliest physical traces of life are around 3.7 billion years old and the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old).

The Miller–Urey experiment and other experiments have overwhelming shown that the conditions on the early Earth favor the formation of amino acids. Fun fact: after Stanley Miller died in 2007, persevered vials of the results of their original experiment were reexamined and they found 25 amino acids had formed in the original experiment. All life as we know requires only 20 different amino acids. Other experiments have, including one that replicated volcanic conditions, have produced even more amino acids and other organic compounds. Also, phospholipids spontaneously form lipid bilayers, the basic structure of a cell membrane. These are things that we have directly observed.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:
So complex life should be very common throughout the Universe rather than extremely rare?

Define "complex" and "common". And don't forget that the universe is a really huge place, so even if life is pretty rare there are probably still countless planets with life on them.

On this subject, there may very well be "life" (depending on how you chose to define it) within our own solar system. Apparently clouds of plasma can display most of the characteristics that biologists use to define living organisms. I apologize for the unscientific tone of the article I inked, but it seems to be the most accessible piece of writing describing this phenomena.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/weird-life.htm

On topic: Yes, electromagnetic field strength is higher than gravity. However, the other fundamental forces, especially electricity (AFAIK, I'm not terribly familiar with the strong and weak nuclear forces) always come with a zero-sum - for every positive pole, there is a negative one, and so the electric field will cancel out if measured in aggregate over a large enough area/volume.

Gravity always adds up. Hence why on the macroscopic cosmological scale gravity far outstrips any of the other fundamental forces, even if it may locally be overpowered by them anywhere.

@ Grey Templar: Speaking as a chemist, you could not be more wrong. The whole point of chemical reactions is that they are based on molecules and atoms bouncing into each other completely randomly.

In fact, particularly in organic chemistry, there are reactions where the desired collision or electron jump only happens X percentage of the time due to there being other stable positions and reacting positions within the same compound. Due to the stupendously large number of collisions though, the desired result can and does happen X amount of the time, even in small reaction tanks over very short periods of time.
Small compared to the entirety of Earth's oceans, lakes and rivers, and short compared to the billions of years the reaction vat known as Earth had to form life (at which point evolution takes over from chemistry's random collisions). So yeah, not so astronomically small a chance after all.

@ Khornholio: You got that backwards .

Edit: sniped by Scooty. Good show old bean!

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:
Isn't it statistically pretty unlikely though?

The simplest theorized self-replicating peptide is only 32 amino acids long and given what we know about the state of the prebiotic Earth, chemistry, and natural selection, the probability of it forming randomly, in sequential trials, is approximately 1 in 10⁴⁰. That sounds like a lot trials needed for a self-replication peptide to form, and it is. However, you have to remember that, given the vast volume of the prebiotic oceans, billions and billions of trials were occurring simultaneously across the Earth, as the amino acid-rich oceans were continuously churned by the tidal forces of the moon and the harsh weather conditions of the Earth (which is why the "violation of the laws of thermodynamic" fallacy fails, the Earth is not a thermodynamically closed system).

Even if the oceans had a very dilute concentration of amino acids (which it most likely didn't), 10³¹ self-replicating peptides would form in under a year, let alone millions of years. Life arose on Earth at pretty much the first chance it had, nearly 4 billion years ago (the earliest physical traces of life are around 3.7 billion years old and the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old).

The Miller–Urey experiment and other experiments have overwhelming shown that the conditions on the early Earth favor the formation of amino acids. Fun fact: after Stanley Miller died in 2007, persevered vials of the results of their original experiment were reexamined and they found 25 amino acids had formed in the original experiment. All life as we know requires only 20 different amino acids. Other experiments have, including one that replicated volcanic conditions, have produced even more amino acids and other organic compounds. Also, phospholipids spontaneously form lipid bilayers, the basic structure of a cell membrane. These are things that we have directly observed.

Thanks for that.

I must say, I expected this thread would really depress me, but it's actually cheering me up a fair bit

One thing about the Rare Earth Theory is the step up from the Prokaryote to the Eukaryote and apparently that's the pretty rare part. (?)

I wish I could explain it better or find the Brian Cox clip but that's the "complex" life part I was talking about.

So you might likely find bacterial life around the Universe but it might be much more rare for multicellular life.

Something about one cell being absorbed by the other but being retained within so that when it divided the cell inside also divided.

This is me attempting to remember the documentary explanation.

I'm not doing this justice I know. Hopefully somebody knows what I'm getting at!

 Grey Templar wrote:
The probability is so unlikely that it approaches zero.

The exact problem is that chemistry isn't random. You simply can't get amino acids to spontaneously arise from the chemical soup, the laws of thermodynamics don't allow for more complex systems to arise from simpler ones. You'd need an infinite amount of time for the math to even approach likely numbers, which we certainly don't have.

It certainly is so unlikely that you have to entertain the possibility of creation by a divine being.

In a static universe model. The time needed for such reactions is essentially infinite. The popular theory in science is that life did not originate on earth but organic material was transfer from an alien world to ours. There are large structures in the cosmos that given the measurable velocities of the surrounding bodies should have required 100's of billions of years to form. Interestingly enough - that's more than 5 times longer than the BB theory postulates the age of the universe.


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 LordofHats wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

This isn't evidence.

By your standard of evidence a whole lot of science is made up, not just physics, a lot of other stuff (do you have any idea how many hypothesis are based solely in inference?).

At which point I fail to see why we shouldn't just keep making it up. It's worked pretty well thus far

That theory gave me autism...

Look at the bright side. You're now ready for a life of Shrimp Boating

I didn't say that dark matter isn't a fair hypothesis in a vacuum. To infer that something might exist by an unexpected reaction is fair - but it's far from proof. It's also all they got...outside of gravity lensing (which is a property of gravity (a force we don't understand in entirety). However, when you look at the dark matter hypothesis when compared to the BB theory it becomes exceedingly more unlikely. The entire theory was created without dark matter in it's equations. The didn't rewrite it...just changed a few parameters and insist that dark matter is non baryonic and therefore does react with baryonic matter outside of the force of gravity. How convenient. It's invisible, doesn't react with matter, and its everywhere at all times, even inside you (sounds more like a god than a particle.)

 Xenomancers wrote:
In a static universe model. The time needed for such reactions is essentially infinite. The popular theory in science is that life did not originate on earth but organic material was transfer from an alien world to ours. There are large structures in the cosmos that given the measurable velocities of the surrounding bodies should have required 100's of billions of years to form. Interestingly enough - that's more than 5 times longer than the BB theory postulates the age of the universe.

Panspermia is not a "popular" theory... It isn't even really a theory, it's an hypothesis (that will certainly interesting) isn't seriously regarded outside of a few big names pretty much saying, "Yeah, I guess it's possible."

 Xenomancers wrote:
I didn't say that dark matter isn't a fair hypothesis in a vacuum. To infer that something might exist by an unexpected reaction is fair - but it's far from proof. It's also all they got...outside of gravity lensing (which is a property of gravity (a force we don't understand in entirety). However, when you look at the dark matter hypothesis when compared to the BB theory it becomes exceedingly more unlikely. The entire theory was created without dark matter in it's equations. The didn't rewrite it...just changed a few parameters and insist that dark matter is non baryonic and therefore does react with baryonic matter outside of the force of gravity. How convenient. It's invisible, doesn't react with matter, and its everywhere at all times, even inside you (sounds more like a god than a particle.)

Just stop, dude.

I'm not even going to refute anything you wrote, other than say that dark matter is pretty integral to Big Bang model.