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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
There either is a G-d or there isn’t and we’ll all find out eventually or we won’t.
My philosophy of life: the chances of something happening are either zero or 100%, depending on whether or not it happens.
Numerous resources can help, if you’re willing to learn. You’re the one who brought entropy into this. If you don’t get “closed system” then you aren’t on page one of entropy.
Briefly, I’ll just say that a closed system has a boundary, that anything outside the boundary is not in the system, and can not affect it in any way.
I would go with a science YouTuber of your choice. Avoid Wikipedia. Those guys are hostile jerks when they get their nerd on. The more academic you get with Wikipedia, the more the articles are written by university dilettantes to impress their friends.
This is true in retrospect only, is not useful for decision-making, and is not actually probability except in the post-factual trivial case. Technically, a point is a circle of radius zero, but solutions like that are not useful for purposes involving circles.
ADDED: It’s not a philosophy of life in the way that one uses such a philosophy to make decisions. It’s a (claimed) refusal to decide, to do, or to try anything. As such, I’m sure it’s not your philosophy of life. You’d be dead a week after taking such a vow, likely of dehydration, at any age.
Just the same, I like the tombstone. Technically, the odds of dying *due to a course of action* and *within a timeframe* might have been 1/10e6, but it would likely be a pretty short period.
It’s not quite that serious, but people seem to forget that even with something like “1 in a million” that means that, when you’re dealing with populations of hundreds of millions, or even billions, several people – perhaps quite a few people – ARE going to die. As some TV show (I think) said, “SOMEBODY makes up those statistics.”
And it’s also somewhat related to that other expression (George Carlin, maybe?), something like “one out four people is mentally ill. So think about your 3 closest friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you!”
And I am content with that. My post was simply to relate my own minor epiphany about the size of the great laboratory in which (I believe) nature played with chemicals.
The principle of entropy allows for localized and temporary concentrations of order. Life does not violate physics, any more than does the freezing of random water molecules into a regular crystalline lattice.
In the very (very, very, very) long run, it’s all dispersed into infinite expanding space, cold and inert. And entropy wins.
Probably.
I was going to say (as my dad is fond of doing): “I resemble that remark!”
Other Hank, I don’t know that it makes a difference. But you can see, can’t you, that if my working hypothesis is that the natural and undirected collision of certain organic compounds of non-biotic origin resulted in the first self-replicating chemical system which we would recognize as life, then having lots and lots of settings in which such compounds were knocked together by random currents would make that hypothesis more plausible?
I don’t have to know what the probability is to know that increasing the number of attempts makes any positive probability more likely to occur.
I don’t, of course, know that the probability is non-zero. However, no one knows that it’s zero, either. And a non-zero probability applied to a staggering number of opportunities remains, in my layman’s opinion, the least conceptually expensive explanation.
PS
I’ve been away, working on some projects and dealing with a family health issue and relocating Darling Daughter and generally not spending time on social media, Ricochet included. But I have spent some time on Twitter, since Elon Musk said he’d buy it (and I’m very much hoping he does), and I have to say…
…the folks here are still the smartest and most gracious bunch I ever encounter, anywhere. Frankly, makes me wonder why I spend time anywhere else.
Cheers,
H.
Is that still on? Last I heard, at least the rumors are that Musk is backing away from buying Twitter. It seems like his interest already caused some shake-ups there, and maybe he figures that was enough.
That’ a nice bit of irrational, emotion-driven condescension there, but it is not to be mistaken for clear argument. DNA is a digital information coding system and the implies the existence of an encoder. That fact is so clear to many in the field that they -and they include Francis Crick- routinely invoke directed panspermia (i.e. intelligent design with E.T. as the designer) to explain it.
As for unprovable or unfalsifiable claims: A materialist account of abiogenesis has been falsified. It not only does not happen, chemically it cannot. And unless the magical mutation faerie keeps intervening to keep error catastrophe at bay, neither can undirected processes give a believable account of the origin of species.
Bertie Russell used to argue that, since materials just had to be true, the values for various natural constants would prove to be very broad ranges, that life-permitting factors shaping the universe would prove to be broad. He took that as the ultimate refutation of the design argument. Russell’s argument has however also been falsified by discoveries mades in the years after his death. Russell- and everyone making his argument- was and is wrong and Fred Hoyle was right.
Bring on your falsification of “abiogenesis”, which sounds like a made-up DI term anyway. We just call it physics.
I refuse to accept heat death. The only reason I accept the possibility of dark matter is the hope it will provide sufficient mass for everything to stop running away from everything else and collapse back into an infinitely hot and dense jot that barfs out another cosmos.
What is the religious view of the end of the cosmos? It all goes poof when Jesus returns? That never seemed quite right; it seems incredibly wasteful, to say nothing of being anthropocentric. As if these impossibly beautiful distant constructions we can never behold were just props on a stage.
Good old Lileks. Standing athwart entropy, bleating “Ω > 1!”
Heat death doesn’t bother me. We’re talking trillions of trillions of years; the universe is young, practically in the prime of its life. And heat death — that’s trillions of years away, if it happens at all.
Long after we’re gone, after Earth is gone, after our sun is gone, there will be new generations of stars, surrounded by new planets made up of the stuff that’s currently boiling away inside the stars I see tonight when I stand outside.
It’s beautiful and amazing that we had a part in it at all. And, frankly, that we were in on the ground floor, when the universe was just a few billion years old, still pretty small, still cozy and full of nearby galaxies not yet rushed by expanding space over the edge and into dark oblivion.
Someday, if natures does its improbable magic trick again and some other race looks out in space …
… they’ll look out into a blackness broken by at most a few points of light, into a universe devoid of the glittering, pulsing, exploding wonders we take for granted.
We are lucky.
What I was trying to say is that I did not follow your argument–how the closed system worked to refute my argument. kedavis provided a comment making the connection that was helpful.
As I noted, this is largely out of my field of expertise. But my inability to understand your point is not sufficient evidence that you’re correct. It does, however, suggest I learn when to shut up and listen.
My problem with the idea that life arose from chemicals stewing around for vast quantities of time, occasionally getting zapped with lightning or some such trigger, is that as soon as the first living cell is produced, it has to reproduce itself in order for life to go on. And that means some kind of programming, which requires a programmer. Without the program “be fruitful and multiply”, there is no reason to expect a living cell to reproduce itself. There is no purely chemical reason why life and reproduction should be preferred over no life or no reproduction.
Although I tend to agree with you, I think that’s where the argument for eons and eons of time comes into play. Perhaps non-reproducing cells were created multiple times over those eons, and one of those times it happened to work.
But I should probably let those more qualified make the case.
I was only refuting your refutaton, leaving my position un-refuted by that particular refutation (entropy). I wouldn’t claim that I have therefore proven my position in whole. I can’t prove it in whole. I just have heard the same ill-formed “refutations” for decades now, and I don;t like it when it happens to good-natured people like you and others on this thread.
Far from shutting up, I’m glad you spoke up (can’t have a conversation alone), and I hope to have helped you find a tasty morsel to chew on for a while.
Without addressing the rest of your comment (perhaps later), I see this rhetorical pattern a lot. Yet gravity does not require a gravitor, aging does not require an age-master, and fusion in the sun does not require a Director of Fusion.
We see things that we do not understand (epigenetics is my current, albeit dormant fascination, as I’m out of my depth), we apply labels from seeming analogs that we at least kind of understand, and then we extend the analogy too far. When observations fail to live up to our analogies, we preserve our preconceptions and discard the observations.
Part of the human condition.
Stephen Meyer leaned heavily on that DNA-is-structured-information-hence-there-must-be-an-author argument. The obvious question is “why? Why must there be an author?”
Meyer’s defense is, in my opinion, circular and fallacious. The question remains unanswered.
Reproduction, even at a very basic level, is a complex process with a purpose – the continuance of life. The purpose presumes that it is better to reproduce, to have life continue, than to not continue. None of that makes any sense in a purely materialistic world created solely by chance, and the passage of time doesn’t lessen that – there is no reason for life to be “better” than non-life, and frankly even the concept of “better” can’t be explained in a world created solely by chance. Eons and eons of time doesn’t answer that.
There was an experiment a while back, and forgive my not remembering the details, but the experimenters created a computer environment that would simulate life in a survival-of-the-fittest environment with mutations. They found that the simulated life developed various unexpected forms of complexity from a little mutation here and there over time.
Edited to add:
This may be it from 1997.
This is another write up.
Respectfully, Jean, here’s how I’d respond as a materialist, given my lack of faith in anything metaphysical:
There is no material sense in which life is “better” than non-life, any more than there’s a material sense in which the orderly structure of a snow flake is “better” than the disordered jumble of water molecules from which it formed.
There are simply some patterns which replicate. Those that replicate most effectively in a particular environment do so more often, consume more resources in the process, and come to dominate their ecological niches.
That isn’t “purpose,” merely effect.
No “purpose” required. If some things reproduce and others do not, then after some time, there will be more of those which reproduce than there were before.
EDIT: Yeah, what Henry said.
Why? The default position appears to be that it is better to reproduce to continue life into the future, but why? In nature, sometimes great sacrifices and complexities are involved with reproduction. Why, if there isn’t some default setting that posits that it is better to be alive? In a world built solely by chance and material forces, I see no reason why any organism would strive to reproduce. It is meaningless. It is neither better or worse for organisms to prioritize the future life of offspring over no future life.
Maybe organisms reproduce “against their will” then, but in a way it makes no difference: we would only see the organisms that DID reproduce; all the others are gone.
I think people seek a metaphysical explanation for exactly the reason you stated, Jean: We want to know why. We want a purpose, a reason.
That urge doesn’t mean that there is a purpose, merely that we feel the urge to find one. The desire to explain things is human and natural — I suspect it has enormous survival value. It’s what brought us to faith, and what brought us to science, the wish to understand the world around us.
That desire to make sense of things is what causes us to ask why bad things happen to good people. Where’s the justice in it, the purpose? Why did that tower fall?
Organisms strive to reproduce because those that happened to be inclined that way, for reasons of chemistry and biology, reproduced more than organisms that just weren’t all that interested in having offspring. And so that trait, that urge to reproduce, was amplified in those offspring that were born… and we reach the point we are at today, where essentially every living thing that has any kind of volition is obsessed with reproduction to the exclusion of everything except basic survival itself (and, sometimes, even more obsessed with reproduction than with survival).