Aliens, Exist or Dont

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Evolution has no top or highest achievements

Well, then Nature spent all 4 bln years for nothing.

das deednI

[KerikBalm]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Well, then Nature spent all 4 bln years for nothing.

das deednI

Indeed, it did. Evolution does not have a goal. Based on many of your statements, it seems you don't understand this.

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And until we find or somebody will construct, this is a guess. Carbon chemistry is very specific tree and almost all mentioned compound are near the very root.

its a guess that we don't know what other forms of life there could be? LOL. Um, no, that is a statement of fact.

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Twenty years ago a human genome sequencing was a multi-year international task, while cellphones were a near future sci-fi.

And your point is? - FYI, 20 years ago was 1997, cell phones were not sci-fi in 1997. The first cell phones were on the market in 1981.. 36 years ago... They were a reality 1.8x farther back in time than your claim of when they were sci-fi. You seem to have a problem with dating stuff.

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Isn't requred. Statistics methods are enough good. You don't need to calculate petrol moleculas to understand how your engine works. Excessive accuracy is an evil,

No, you can't used statistics to design an enzyme. If all you're going to do is calculate that burning petrol can release energy and and engine using it can work... then you can also calculate that theres an energy source for potential life on Titan. As per the RNA world hypothesis, which you seem to treat as established fact with some of your statements, we can assume that various ribozymes existed before protein enzymes took over their functions (with the catalytics core of ribosomes being a remnant). RNA chains are much simpler than amino acid chains (4 different subunits vs 20). Please design a template directed RNA polymerase Ribozyme, and then an ATP synthase. Design! don't use iterative directed evolution.

I'll be waiting, this task is much much much simpler than designing new life, so it seems appropriate since we're much much much simpler than your hypothetical aliens.

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Evolutionary they are contemporaries of insects. Intellectually not far away, too.

Mushrooms have. And several tens genders. Big heap of junk is still junk.

Ummm, evolutionarily, we are contemporaries of wolves, and HIV, and many Adenoviruses, and modern bacteria, etc.

"big heaps of junk" - you clearly don't know what you are talking about.

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From a biological perspective we have several more brain sections which allows us to change our environment rather than bodies.
That's why coelacanth has exotic name, while there are 7 bln humans.

From a biological perspective, our brain structure is pretty much the same as a cynodont from 250 million years ago. We don't have "several more brain sections". The proportions are just different, and we have grasping hands to make tools. These changes are so minor, that there's no reason a cynodont couldn't have evolved them 250 million years ago under the right selection conditions.

You clearly have a distorted view of evolution.

Edited March 28, 2017 by KerikBalm

[Green Baron]

8 hours ago, 0111narwhalz said:

I'm curious: What does it mean when you write something reversed like this?

*lol*

Nothing. That i am too annoyed by the editor to correct it over and over again. The forum editor has a bug. When i cite something, place the cursor inside the citation, press enter two times to start a comment then the cursor will stay at place while i type and the typing will flow from the cursor to the right. So it is reversed. Superluminal sotosay :-)))

The following lines then are correct, only the first shows that behaviour. I have realized that other users encounter this as well ...

Edit: see ? first line reversed ...

Edited March 28, 2017 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Evolution does not have a goal. Based on many of your statements, it seems you don't understand this.

Show me at least one place where I say something about a "goal".

10 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

its a guess that we don't know what other forms of life there could be?

It's a guess that really other forms of life could be.
Very strange to mention Titanic life as a sample as if it exists.

12 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Quote

Twenty years ago a human genome sequencing was a multi-year international task, while cellphones were a near future sci-fi.

And your point is?

And my point is that with computers the modelling of, between other, life processes will run much, much faster.
One doesn't really need to doubt in hi-civ computing abilities.

14 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

you can't used statistics to design an enzyme

Nature does it. It doesn't have a handbook, a computer, a theory, a database and specialists. It takes many samples and some of them work.
Specialist is better than Nature, he can reject obviously useless cases before the experiment.
Nobody calculates every atom of new medicine, they run field tests first on mice, then on people. Because you should spent millenia gathering and calculating. And that's exactly that what effects the enzymes.
Nobody need to design those enzymes from scratch, we already have a correctly running life example given us by the evolution. It is the starting point for further development.

23 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

ements, we can assume that various ribozymes existed before protein enzymes took over their functions (with the catalytics core of ribosomes being a remnant).

RNA is not given as is. Of course, originally it should appear from something more primitive.
And as you can see, IRL this primitive has resulted into *NA with necessity. 

25 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I'll be waiting, this task is much much much simpler than designing new life

Why somebody should design new life from scratch? It's pointless. You already have the template, use it with profit for further development.

27 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

evolutionarily, we are contemporaries of wolves, and HIV, and many Adenoviruses, and modern bacteria, etc

Some of them have nice and tasty neocortex, others not. 
Any macroorganism performs many orders of magnitude more complex circulation of matter, with many negative loopbacks, keeping stable conditions inside, living 70 years instead of 20 minutes.
Virus even can't exist without another lifeform.
Of course, you can treat bacteria as equals, but unlikely you'd remember them by names.

Either the modern bacteria haven't changed much compared to the primordial ones, and then you can't say that the evolution has done nothing.
Or the modern bacteria differ a lot from the primordial ones, and then you can see that it's impossible and pointless to try gathering all possible bacteria from all known planets. 

35 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

"big heaps of junk" - you clearly don't know what you are talking about.

The mushroom *NA afaik, can be many times heavier than human's one, most of the mushroom protein is its *NA.
Mushrooms have tens of genders which is much more complex system than primitive human's X+Y.

But they stay just big clots of mildew fibers, from time to time making edible (or not) bulbs, and yes, we can treat this as a piece of junk, compared to clever us and lovely kittens

38 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

From a biological perspective, our brain structure is pretty much the same as a cynodont from 250 million years ago.

42 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

We don't have "several more brain sections".

(II have nothing against cute primordial fuzzies (always wanted to have look at one, not as a skeleton).
Yes, yes, absolutely the same. Neocortex, gyri, all that stuff - who needs it.

Spoiler

 

47 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

These changes are so minor, that there's no reason a cynodont couldn't have evolved them 250 million years ago under the right selection conditions.

As I don't have cynodont at hands, tried to discuss this with a creodont grand-daughter - my cat.
Alas, she has no idea how to play KSP and even can't speak.

34 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

*lol*

(He uses symmetric words when wants to hide: is it direct or reversed. How insidiously!)

 

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Well, then Nature spent all 4 bln years for nothing.

das deednI

@KerikBalm is right, evolution is a natural process that has no direction or goal. You accused him of creationist thoughts but apparently you fell for them yourself ... In contrary to thinking that there is a direction one should apply the mechanisms that we know about in biological evolution. The big picture is quite clear, but (many) details remain to solve, in particular the beginnings. There have been proveedings in the last years, Kerim Balm the RNA before DNA thing which is known as the RNA-world hypothesis, by now the most accepted hypothesis for the beginning.

We do not know the exact conditions on earth at that time, shortly after solidification of the crust, chemism of the ocean, atmosphere, crust, etc. because there are no traces left, but have an overall picture. To condense it to the thoughts that many have these days about et-life: it might well be that, given that the elements needed are not really rare, if the conditions are right (temperature, available energy, low radiation, etc. pp.) that the evolutionary process will start quite automatically because it's just chemistry (subdivision of physics ;-)). Which lead relatively fast (a few hundred million years) to microbial life.

Maybe that helps you letting go of the idea of a direction, it's just physics :-)

[KerikBalm]

Forget it GreenBaron, its not worth arguing with this guy, there's so much gibberish and logical fallacies in there that the whole exercise is pointless.

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

evolution is a natural process that has no direction or goal

Because it's just a statistical process, pure mathematics.
But unlikely you can seriously say that complexity of the living beings stays the same compared to the primordial ocean.
(Yes, I know that degeneration is a form of evolution, too. And of course, 500 or how much mln years later there again will stay only bacteria, until the Sun burns them.)
I talk here about obvious current state, a local result, not about phylosophical aims of evoultion.

8 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

it's just physics :-)

It isn't physics, it's mathematics.

7 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Forget it GreenBaron, its not worth arguing with this guy, there's so much gibberish and logical fallacies in there that the whole exercise is pointless.

You see! Your evolutionary progress is much higher than mine, though we are the same biological species, and you talk about those cynodonts!

[KerikBalm]

26 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

As I don't have cynodont at hands, tried to discuss this with a creodont grand-daughter - my cat.

FYI, creodonts were the sister taxa to carnivorans, your cat is not a creodont. We are members of cynodontia, however.

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, KerikBalm said:

FYI, creodonts were the sister taxa to carnivorans, your cat is not a creodont.

Ok, she's grand-nephew. She just always mentioned creodonts as "granny".

[Urses]

43 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

/evolution is a natural process that has no direction or goal./ snip

Like i understand it, Evolution have a goal and a Direktion.

Complexity

Sozialisation and Diversity

Entropie

Don't you think?

E: Spezialisation Not Sozialisation (autokorrekt)

Edited March 28, 2017 by Urses

[Green Baron]

20 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Because it's just a statistical process, pure mathematics.

Nope. Only the variation part could be interpreted as "statistical", though it obeys chemistry and thus physics. I don't let you out of this one :-)

But biological evolution is much more comprehensive than mere variation of a code during replication, it encompasses all the processes that form niches for organisms, like plate tectonics, sedimentation, forming of sinks and wells in the spheres (cryo-, bio-, atmo-, litho-, blabla), water stands on global or local scales, the list is long and worth exploring ;-) Also organisms themselves can form sinks, corals for CO2 for example.

A lot of feedback- and control circuits are at work, from wilson cycle over conveyor bands to evaporation of epeiric seas in the large scales to co-evolution between for example animals and plants (horses and grass) or symbiosis' between organisms.

It's physics, and very complicated.

[Green Baron]

21 minutes ago, Urses said:

Like i understand it, Evolution have a goal and a Direktion.

Complexity

Sozialisation and Diversity

Entropie

Don't you think?

E: Spezialisation Not Sozialisation (autokorrekt)

Hallo Nachbar (hi neighbour) ;-)

Specialisation and diversity are an outcome, not direction. Also they are somewhat exclusive. Specialization leads to narrow "nicheing", change the niche and the highly specialized organism dies if it can't adapt fast enough. Sabretooth is an example for a highly specialized way of hunting. It worked as long as prey in form of huge animals was abundant in the cold steppe. Climate change and competition sorted that out.

Diversity depends on the number of available niches and "carrying capacity" of the environment. Narrow that and diversity will diminish. We call that extinction (which is part of evolution !) or even mass extinction if the narrowing takes place on a large scale. Or even a global scale like humanity does to the environment right now.

No direction or goal is present, it is just the outcome of the mechanisms that drive evolution.

dit: this is going OT. I kindly ask to search the forum, specially the fermi-thread, because all that was discussed here before. Also there are good essays about evolution on the internet, from universities or natural history sites/museums. I don't want to type it all over again :-)

 

Edited March 28, 2017 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

45 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Nope. Only the variation part could be interpreted as "statistical", though it obeys chemistry and thus physics. I don't let you out of this one :-)

Nope.

Chemistry and physics are just actuators. Process is pure mathematics.
You can run evolution of abstract objects where chemistry and physcs will be just what CPU consists of.

For example, somebody here believes that it's possible to gather all species from all planets and to get analythical solution.
Wild Nature solves all problems with the method of Monte-Carlo.

Evolution is pure statistical process running with any kind of objects regardless of their physical nature. A kind of numerical methods crossed with the Control Theory (or the Theory of Automatic Regulation as another term).

Edited March 28, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Nope.

Chemistry and physics are just actuators. Process is pure mathematics.
You can run evolution of abstract objects where chemistry and physcs will be just what CPU consists of.

For example, somebody here believes that it's possible to gather all species from all planets and to get analythical solution.
Wild Nature solves all problems with the method of Monte-Carlo.

Evolution is pure statistical process running with any kind of objects regardless of their physical nature. A kind of numerical methods crossed with the Control Theory (or the Theory of Automatic Regulation as another term).

It's the other way round, nature does not behave like our simplistic models, our simplistic models try to describe processes in nature. Also the fantasies of science fiction authors (Rama comes to my mind when reading about gathering species from planets) are nice for entertainment but not reality. Really, you must understand at least part of the processes in order to judge how much our modeling can describe and where it's limits are. What you put forward here as control theory is originally meant to describe industrial processes that run in very restricted and limited environments, where constraints of processes, materials and so on are known and can be computed (have been before contsruction).

Also, i kindly ask to doublecheck the place of mathematics in the tree of natural sciences. You put mathematics at the wrong end for describing natural processes. It is a tool, an abstraction like a language for physics (even philosophy uses it) to model nature, but nature is not mathematics.

*sigh*

:-)

 

Edited March 28, 2017 by Green Baron

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

That's a good one to live by...

As for a legitimate opinion, it is likely, probably certain that there is unintelligent life, and some form of complex life as well. As for a sentient life form, how do you even define "sentient"? My opinion is that it is difficult to differentiate complex life from sentient life. Tool use and industry are some hints, but most likely if intelligent life exists or will exist, it will never have the means to contact us, and vice versa, will just be too far away, and if it ever does come to Earth will consider humans too stupid to communicate with.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Green Baron said:

It's the other way round, nature does not behave like our simplistic models, our simplistic models try to describe processes in nature. Also the fantasies of science fiction authors (Rama comes to my mind when reading about gathering species from planets) are nice for entertainment but not reality. Really, you must understand at least part of the processes in order to judge how much our modeling can describe and where it's limits are. What you put forward here as control theory is originally meant to describe industrial processes that run in very restricted and limited environments, where constraints of processes, materials and so on are known and can be computed (have been before contsruction).

Also, i kindly ask to doublecheck the place of mathematics in the tree of natural sciences. You put mathematics at the wrong end for describing natural processes. It is a tool, an abstraction like a language for physics (even philosophy uses it) to model nature, but nature is not mathematics.

You just don't distinguish physical implementation and mathematical model, trying to declare that virtual currency is impossible because banknotes have twenty degrees of physical protection. So, where should we place hidden colored fibers if there is no sheet of paper.

19 minutes ago, LetsGoToMars! said:

As for a sentient life form, how do you even define "sentient"?

Not sentient being using tools repeats the same actions in hope to get desired result even if they are obviously require another way to be used.

[Vanamonde]

So, do you guys believes exist or not? 

[SuperFastJellyfish]

According to the big bang theory, everything exploded from a singularity.  Looking at the oldest known existence of light, the cosmic microwave background(~400,000 years after the big bang), you can see how uniform the universe was back then.  From this you can extrapolate that everything coalesced from the same general material across the universe.  To think that we are the only corner of the universe to develop the self-reproducing chemistry called life seems completely impossible to me.  That said, we won't know scientifically until we find evidence beyond what we have on Earth.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

 

So, do you guys believes exist or not? 

 

Aliens do exist by definition.

We are aliens for another civilization, and we exist.

The only question: does that another civilization exist to know about us, aliens.

[Green Baron]

5 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

So, do you guys believes exist or not? 

I am not that much into believing.

[magnemoe]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Not sentient being using tools repeats the same actions in hope to get desired result even if they are obviously require another way to be used.

Border here is a bit floating if you look at early humanoids and can easy bee with aliens too where you can have sentient beings who don't use tools. 
However this is pretty irrelevant as they will either be so technological advanced we can detect them from light year away or we will have to land to find them. 
An low chance we will see structures with an satellite in orbit around the planet but this is not much harder than landing. 

[kerbiloid]

20 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

early humanoids

Not sentient, unless we are going to wait for a million years to listen something clever from them.
More sentient than a dog, but no. Especially for hi-civ which is even more advanced than we.

24 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

too where you can have sentient beings who don't use tools

Then they use their biological tools and anyway organize chaotic nature into structures.

If they are pure philosophers dwelling in paradise, without tools, buildings, gadens, etc — then yes, this would be a problem.
But without visible signs of their intelligence we'll never get to know about that problem.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Not sentient, unless we are going to wait for a million years to listen something clever from them.
More sentient than a dog, but no. Especially for hi-civ which is even more advanced than we.

Said at some point, like hom erectus, habilis very unknown. 
We never had to define this before. 

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Then they use their biological tools and anyway organize chaotic nature into structures.

If they are pure philosophers dwelling in paradise, without tools, buildings, gadens, etc — then yes, this would be a problem.
But without visible signs of their intelligence we'll never get to know about that problem.

Thinking more of an smart predator, probably sea creature, think an smart dolphin. 
We would notice if they was noticeable smarter than typical animals. part of the reason dolphins has been researched a lot, no dolphins are not sentinel. 

[0111narwhalz]

Quote

Here is what we know about sentience. Sand is sentient. The desert is sentient. The sky is not sentient. Plants are intermittently sentient. Dogs are the most sentient. We are not sentient. The planet as a whole is sentient. The parts that make up that whole are not sentient. Holes are sentient. We are not sentient. Gift cards are sentient until they expire. States in which it is illegal for gift cards to expire have created immortal sentience. Money is not sentient. The concept of private property is sentient. Sand is sentient. The desert is sentient. We are not sentient.

This has been the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner.

[Guest]

I completely agree with you. With so many planets, there has got to be life somewere. And, considering how young earth is compared to other planets, aliens would have millions of years to colonize the galaxy before even cavemen appeared! the possibilitys are endless. What if alien life is everywere, but they realized that all we are a big complex machines and have shrunk themselves to microbes to reduce there footprint on there planet?