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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
It’s only the appearance of craziness. Given enough time and enough comments you will no doubt see a beautiful tapestry of logical coherence.
Then again, maybe not…
Oh. Maybe I’ve misunderstood Henry’s argument then. 😉
Dang. I missed your joke. That was pretty clever…
Yet life is here. So without life arising from non-living precursors, either it was created by [something] along the way, or it was created by [something] recently at the same time as everything else. I could be missing something. Your thoughts?
Thank you for the thoughtful responses as well. Pardon me if I initially lump apparent similar argument into similar categories of objection. Hard to tell until you dig, and USUALLY it’s a re-run.
We need not go so far as Poincare time.
Henry, your numbers would suggest that man has a humble place in the universe. It is good to be reminded of that from time to time.
Have anything that has ever blown up put itself back together in an orderly and systematic way?
Are apes evolving into people yet or are they still apes? Maybe one had a fluke gene, kept going and here we are….. I’d say now evolution is reversing when it comes to man…….
That’s not the way it works. First, biologically, people are apes. Second, it is unlikely they would have the mutations to go down that path. The current great apes are each the products of millions of years of evolution in their historical environments, just as we are the products of the environments our ancestors lived in. We did not evolve from chimps. We evolved from something that preceded chimps. It would be like saying that your cousin will become you. Not happening.
That’s not the way it works, either. Evolution is not a direction on a timeline. Evolution is the product of thousands and thousands of mutations that are acted upon by the environment. If the mutation better suits a given environment or a niche within the environment, the carriers of that mutation will be more likely to survive and breed. Over time, if a mutation conveys advantages, it gets passed on until most or all of the population has it, not because it’s contagious, but because only those with the mutation survive and breed to pass their genes on.
There is no reverse switch. It’s always forward in a new direction, depending on the current environment. If the environment changes, other mutations might be selected for.
Chimpanzee more likely, and both of us have evolved from a common progenitor, which was a whole lot more like a chimp than a man. Those which stayed in the jungle got more like modern chimps, which we may suspect are even better adapted for that situation.
Man, like chimp, continues getting better at some things and worse at others.
Geographically isolated populations drift without regard to what’s going on in other populations. Fast-forwarding, the humans who stayed in Africa became optimized for that environment, as did (respectively) those who wound up in other areas, such as Europe and Asia, and then later, an Asia split to the new world.
Races are what in any other organism we would call subspecies, and they came about in the same way.
Thanks for asking!
I am agnostic regarding the existence of God, Stina. I’ve seen nothing that makes me think it’s probable, but nor have I seen anything that makes me think it’s impossible. I think the question is outside the realm of the natural sciences.
While I think people of faith who try to use science to support their metaphysical claims are making a mistake, I think people who try to use science to debunk faith are worse, because the latter should know the limits of science and refrain from making claims science can’t make.
JC, you too. And, frankly, I’m about ready to disengage from it as well. I don’t want to come off as disparaging of religion, as I think religion is virtually essential to our good character both as a nation and as individuals. (I think that’s particularly true of Judeo-Christian faith.) I’m just of a particularly rational bent, and find cosmology, evolution, etc., fascinating.
Take care. And thanks for participating.
Arahant’s comments remind me of something the late Stephen Jay Gould used to emphasize in his books about evolution. He liked to remind the reader that evolution is not a progression, in the sense of things getting better, more sophisticated, more advanced. Evolution is merely a continual trimming and fitting of a species into a particular environment. If that meant a species becoming simpler and less complicated — less “advanced” — then that’s where evolution would likely lead.
A near universal trope of science fiction is that, in the far future, people have huge brains and scrawny bodies — or, alternately, they’re golden Adonis figures of uniform perfection. Genetic engineering and biological augmentation might get us to that, but there’s little reason to think that evolution will.
The cockroach is as “evolved” as we are — and perhaps more so, if our measure of “evolved” is how well suited an organism is to its ecological niche.
Not me, I paid for hubris seating.
4.5 million years of my ancestors didn’t claw their way to the top of the food chain so that I could eat bugs.
We may not agree on all these details, but I’m with you on the bugs thing. The modern steer and hog are cultivated to provide us with near heavenly culinary delights.
Indeed! All wrapped up in the Bacon Cheeseburger!
I’m sorry @henryracette, but I just don’t see that way.
Let’s start at the beginning. Getting amino and nucleic acids is not an easy process. These are fairly complicated molecules that are not terribly stable. You can make them fairly easily with the proper conditions and selected starting materials, but then you have to separate the final molecules from side products – good luck having that in nature. Watch any of NileRed‘s chemical synthesis videos to see just how much purification is involved.
Then you have chirality. We somehow ended up with system based on amino acids with a specific “handedness” It is really, really hard to resolve different chiral compounds, as they only differ in their reactions with other chiral compounds
Now you have to properly link the units together. This is not trivial – synthesizing these building blocks into something functional requires a lot of human intervention. Typically you will need coupling agents and protecting groups. Nucleic acids are even worse, with numerous bonding sites on the sugar and the base. Bear in mind, we still don’t have anything approaching life yet in this process.
So what is the most basic form of life imaginable? What you need is self-replication and energy collection. Energy collection or metabolism turns chemical or other energy into useful work in overcoming the entropy cost of self-replication. This is still not trivial at all, and we are still talking something so simple it makes a virus look like a human. This is a level of unlikely akin to predicting every play in the Super Bowl.
Now, once you have something that is living, you have a long row to hoe on the way to intelligent life. Natural selection’s biggest weakness is that there is no planning or even determinism. Every mutation is evaluated immediately, and either provides an advantage, disadvantage, or neither. Fitness is only determined by whether an organism survives to reproduce and how much it reproduces. This means a massive improvement can be rendered null by bad luck. A bacterium evolves a resistance mutation to penicillin. It is treated with a quinolone or macrolide, and its mutation dies out. In fact, since many drug resistance mutations are detrimental when the drug is absent, most bacteria will not be resistant in a non-antibiotic treated population. The normal, wild-type form predominates, with a small number of mutants. That’s why multi-drug therapy is so effective.
I only see two explanations for this: some as-yet undiscovered force that promotes life to form or a designer. The designer could be any highly intelligent entity. It is entirely possible the designer is the result of a time loop or is a being of evil who created life to see us suffer. It has no more religious content than the Big Bang.
So what’s one step that, assuming that any required precursor components are available, simply can’t occur without some kind of direction or intervention?
I don’t know if they can seriously claim “can’t” but that it’s highly HIGHLY unlikely, which is where the trillions and billions might come back in…
And even if this is the only place in the entirely universe with intelligent life, it still only had to happen ONCE.
That’s pretty much my point.
When we start throwing out one after another complex molecule or molecular process, it’s easy to feel buried under improbabilities — to the point where “impossible” seems the only answer.
But if anyone is going to tell me that it is impossible that the sequence arose through undirected natural processes, I want to know which step in the sequence was a leap too far: which smallest increment could not have occurred, even if given a significant fraction of all the time and space in the universe?
If we can’t convincingly name that step, I think all we’re really doing is saying “wow, it just seems so unlikely that it must be impossible.” When the numbers are as large as they are, gut feelings about plausibility shouldn’t be elevated to the status of demonstrated fact.
By the numbers, every order of a card deck after a shuffle should be unique until well after the heat death of the universe.
There is at least one verified instance of four perfect bridge hands being dealt. That is, each of the four parties at the table received a hand containing a perfect suit. The odds against that happening are fantastical, much as your 52!.
But it turns out that if you start with a new deck in sorted order, and you do two perfect riffle shuffles that exactly interleave the card, and then deal, you’ll deal four perfect hands. Someone really good with cards can do two perfect riffle shuffles with a bit of practice.
None of this has anything to do with my post, but it’s interesting.
The point is that big numbers do not preclude things from happening.
Maybe that depends on how fast they can shuffle and deal. :-)
Late-night ruminations from the bottom of a glass of bourbon. Let’s give those numbers some thought.
52!, the number of orderings of a deck of cards, is about 8 x 10^62.
Let’s say ya gotta be on a habitable planet to shuffle. The number of habitable planets in the visible universe, charitably saying there’re four habitable planets per star, is (perhaps) on the order of 4 x 10^24.
So 62 – 24 is 38. That means that we have to do about 10^38 shuffles per planet. How long before the heat death of the universe? No one knows, but the shuffling has to end a long, long time before that, let’s say in a million trillion years (which is probably generous: there won’t be much star formation going on by then). A million trillion has 18 zeros.
So we need to do 38 – 18 = 20… 10^20 shuffles per year per planet for the next million trillion years.
Figure ten billion people on each planet shuffling non-stop. That’s 10^10 busy shufflers. They have to shuffle 20-10… 10^10 times each year. A year (let’s use Earth years) has about 31.5 million seconds in it, so that means each of those people has to shuffle about 300 times per second to get the job done.
Shoot. Even Star Trek’s Data doesn’t shuffle that fast.
PS And the “four planets” assumption was ignored and irrelevant. I blame the bourbon.