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A Small Thought About Some Big Numbers
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t find the thought of life originating and evolving on Earth through purely naturalistic processes incredible. Five hundred million years — the approximate time we think it took life to get a figurative toehold on our cooling orb — is a long time: multiply that by the number of ponds and puddles and deep ocean vents and, well, there are a lot of places where naturally occurring lipids might self-organize, as lipids do, into little test tubes in which organic molecules can dance.
I find it entirely plausible that that’s what happened.
But I realized today that I’ve been looking at the numbers wrong. Yes, a half a billion years on Earth is a lot of time for chemicals to slosh around, but nonetheless that’s really a drop in the bucket — no, a drop in the ocean.
No, far less than a drop in the ocean.
There’s no reason to think only of the opportunities for life to appear on Earth. More sensible is to think of the opportunities for life to appear anywhere, because, wherever it appeared, that’s the place from which we’ll end up marveling at its improbability.
About a billion lightyears from Earth is a cluster of galaxies named Able 2029. One of the galaxies in that cluster goes by the poetic name IC 1101. It’s the biggest galaxy of which we’re aware, containing on the order of one hundred trillion stars.
That’s 100,000,000,000,000 stars.
In comparison, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a mere quarter of a trillion stars.
There are well over two hundred billion galaxies. Ours is unexceptional — other than being the only one, as far as we know, that contains life.
We now think that most stars probably have planets. Recently, scientists decided that the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” the range of orbits about a star in which the temperature might be “just right” for water to exist as a liquid, is probably much broader than we originally thought. (This has to do with atmospheric dynamics of planets considerably larger than Earth.)
The universe is pretty young (at least it seems that way to me), less than 15 billion years old: life on Earth has been around for more than 20% of the age of the universe. But our sun isn’t a first-generation star: there have been at least two or three generations of stars before ours, perhaps more. So that’s a lot more stars than “merely” the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars we can see on a clear night. (I kid, of course, but that’s a rough approximation of how many we think are out there.) So double that number to account for those stars that have come and gone before us.
That’s an awful lot of stars with an awful lot of planets. Multiply that by half a billion years, to give life a chance to start. Think of all those ponds and puddles and deep ocean vents.
Given all that, while I find it wonderful and beautiful and deeply moving that life exists at all, I don’t find it surprising.
Published in Science & Technology
Ehhh, not quite true. Everything cellular uses DNA — so at most, the vent life is a different branch of the same old tree. It looks like RNA might have been a precursor to DNA before being co-opted to serve as DNA’s gopher, but so far we’ve never found cellular life without DNA.
You are misusing the word “design”. The structure and function of DNA is just a fact. When you use the word design, of course you feel the need to say “therefore, designer.”
I could well ask you to flip a coin a thousand times, and to do that each day for a year. We could then observe the remarkable tendency, and then marvel at how you keep the results so closely balanced. Yet you, the only person who touched the coin, did not design the result.
I’ll grant you the hammer, though.
Are you claiming that since all life at least on this world, so far, has DNA – including trees, etc – that necessitates a designer? Seems like a stretch.
Yet it’s still a more reasonable avenue of thought and experiment alike than positing literally supernatural, unproveable (unfalsifiable) beings with powers so far beyond magic that Merlin looks like magma.
Those who carry unfalsifiable axioms into arguments cannot be reasoned with regarding conclusions *drawn from those axioms*. Still, it’s nice talking to you all.
Yes, but you’re climbing the wrong ladder. The hammer ladder doesn’t go to biology.
Not at all. Just correcting a claim. So far, we’ve only seen it happen once.
Well, having been to only one planet so far, is a bit of a drawback.
I am not an expert in any of these fields, so I quickly run into the problem of my own ignorance pretty quickly. Here’s my last shot at it–DNA is but one example. Cellular function is another. The human body is a third. The more we learn about how they work, the way the systems interact, etc., the more we see staggering complexity. In no other space would we look and the complexity and go–“huh, looks like that’s neat combination of random events through time and space that got us to that point.” We understand the laws of entropy too well to say such things. Instead, we usually conclude that the appearance of design suggest that there was a designer. Yet when it comes to the origins of the universe and life on this planet, the smart people insist that the complexity is merely the appearance of design and not an actual design. I’m not smart enough to prove them wrong, but I can’t help but to think they’re missing something pretty important.
Plus one other quick item–where did the stuff for the Big Bang come from? Aliens? Spontaneous generation from . . . dunno what?
True–but biology is infinitely more complex than a hammer. It’s an analogy to help guide our reasoning.
Except the hammer comes from both biology – the wood handle – and minerology.
Sure.
But I’m not willing to conclude, from that, that it is not possible. And, again, I don’t find it particularly implausible that a mindbogglingly large number of attempts in natures inchoate laboratory might have stumbled upon it.
That’s an awful lot of monkeys on an awful lot of typewriters working at something a lot less wordy than Shakespeare.
Again, I respect people of faith, and I think faith is a beautiful thing. But, for my particular plodding mind, faith-based arguments don’t satisfy.
For example, any argument that balks at an undesigned beginning and so invokes a designer must, of necessity, invoke a designer with an undesigned beginning, or with no beginning at all. I can barely accept the idea that very simple things might spring from apparent nothing following very simple rules — rules we don’t yet understand — having to do with the nature of forces and matter and waves and probabilities. Such ideas have been demonstrated to have predictive power; the math is pretty compelling; there’s a built-up-from-the-bottom quality to it that offers a plausible path from the simplest to the most sublime.
Metaphysical arguments, for me, simply push that off into a domain for which we have no math, no observations, no hope for measurement or control — no objective knowledge or answers. I’m willing to go there, but only when I’m convinced that we’ve exhausted a rational approach to understanding the natural world. I don’t think we’re even close to that.
Yup, and the successful stuff gets to be that way by beating back all the less-successful stuff, so good luck finding non-DNA life. We don’t even see Neanderthals about anymore! The key advantage that our PNA/RNA/DNA sequence of precursors had was that there was nothing better around. It may be the kind of thing that can really only happen once in a given (potential) biosphere, because once it does, it eats anything else that may crop up later. Nipped in the bud!
For an example of apparent design without the sticky life questions, look at stars. They have structure, function, and depend upon the most bizarre physical processes. They eat nuclear fusion and piss daylight. The odds of atoms simply arranging themselves into such arrangements “BILLIONS” of times over, and then festooning the works with planets, comets, protective magnetospheres and the like are highly suspect.
Yet looking them as the result of combined processes over time, we can follow the logic (if not all of the physics) directly. That is, others can follow the physics, but not I. I would argue that a star is on the ladder to understanding biology, life and evolution. I’ll caveat up front — stars do not reproduce selectively, so this is not an illustration of natural selection. But it is physics and time. Loooots of time.
I don’t doubt you’re saying something related, but TBH, I don’t see how it refutes anything I wrote. For example, our ability to learn about stars is really limited by their distance from us and/or they’re kind of too hot to get really close to (like the sun). Thus, we do the best we can with what we know. But to me the same principle applies. No doubt the more I would learn about stars, the more in awe I would be of the working of the star in particular and the universe in general. In other words, you see more evidence for progressive evolution, and I see more evidence of a beautiful design.
This is a nice expression of what I think is perhaps not the best way to think about “random” as it pertains to the evolution of life. It makes it sound as if the progression is one of randomness piled on randomness, without any selection or direction. But that’s not how complexity is built. Complexity is a response to selective pressure. Each individual change is likely random, but which changes are preserved and which are discarded is not random — not in the sense of being arbitrary.
Evolution is, I think, largely a guided random process: the changes are random at the level of genetics, but the results are then tested, the poorly adapted weeded out, and the survivors — which may or may not be more complex, but are quite likely better adapted to survive — left to procreate and continue changing.
By the way, I belatedly added the link I promised back in my #15. Link to that right here.
True, but a tree is not mere biology either. It involves a complex interaction of organic and inorganic material to be sustained. The bark is not living in the same sense that the leaves are, which are both different from the flow of water in the trunk. The root are equipped to process minerals, the leaves are equipped to process (the right) atmospheric gases. Amazing stuff.
Right–but how do we incorporate entropy into this argument? The argument, as I understand it, is that for billions of years we went from disorder to order, but for recorded time, we now have a law from order to disorder. At what stage of evolution did the second law of thermodynamics kick in? Because the amount of “added order” needed to go from ooze to the functioning mammal body is staggering to consider.
You are leaving out the “closed system” part. A ruby crystal sitting on a shelf unmolested will never pump out brilliant laser-light, every photon synchronized and going somewhere with a purpose. But start pulsing that thing with various forms of energy, and suddenly you’re carving your name on the moon. The ruby sitting there alone is more like a closed system, whereas wrapping xenon flashbulbs around it (or whatever) definitely makes the ruby itself an open system. It is capable of receiving inputs and outputs, so with sufficient input, there is organized output.
“Gravity always does positive work.” The accumulation, formation, collapse, and ignition of the sun took an incredible amount of work (which was done by gravity), which has been spewing dividends for four-odd billion years. solar radiation provides heat, light, and other frequencies for the re-arrangement of various atoms. Earth as a closed system would be like Pluto, but more so.
You’ve surpassed my ability to follow this argument. I simply don’t see how the “closed system” part of this addresses the entropy question. Are you able to re-state your argument to help me out? Thanks.
But unless you’re suggesting that trees just ZAP! came into existence with those differentiated processes already in place, what difference does it really make?
Seems to me the main point is that an overall, generalized, “universal” process of entropy, does not exclude small “pockets” of increased organization.
If nothing else, trees growing, and having babies, proves that.
You let the lipids organize and then what happens? Massive lipid unrest, that’s what. And when lipids go on strike, proteins are unhappy. When proteins are unhappy triglycerides demand more. Next thing you know the supply chain on Vitamins A, D, E and K are backed up for months. And all because of agitators like you.
You’ve not been to one of my in-laws’ family reunions…
Not to mention the NLRB gets involved and we’re all screwed!
I’m reasonably familiar with the Drake equation. I insist on not claiming a value for it if we don’t have any approximation of the value of the coefficients.
As soon as you start claiming that science says things that it hasn’t actually proven yet, you’re no longer doing science.
Also, the ancients understood the question of “first cause”. Still a valid question today.
Does that matter? How do you know that a factor of a sextillion even makes a difference?