Do You BELIEVE there is life outside Earth?

[Toonu]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Yes to life, No to very common intelligent life in our galaxy. No to intelligent life in our galaxy capable of interstellar travel at speeds of a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Hi, this is not only you, but almost everyone who has said there is some life in universe also said it is not inteligent, I just ask why? Why it can't be inteligent when we look at lenght of time from big bang. Its little arrogant to think only one life can be inteligent.

[KSK]

A quick peek at the Oxford dictionaries site, gives me these definitions of 'believe'.

verb

• Accept that (something) is true, especially without proof.
• Accept the statement of (someone) as true
• Have religious faith.
• Feel sure that (someone) is capable of doing something.
•  Hold (something) as an opinion; think.

So I'm quite comfortable with using 'belief' as a shorthand for 'something I think is scientifically very probable but for which I don't have any direct evidence.'   I don't see why belief necessarily needs to be opposed to science in this context.

After that, @regex summed my opinion up very nicely in his first post on this thread.

 

 

Edited November 2, 2017 by KSK

[Green Baron]

Length of time doesn't count as an argument and life does not need intelligence. Monocellulars can exist for billions of years without much of a change.

Conditions need to be "right", for whatever that means. We do not know what lead to our big brains, it is not an obvious selective pressure because a much smaller brain would suffice (at least for me :-)). Otoh it needs a lot of energy, so we could as well say in times of need the pressure is against a big brain, just enough to come around.

And it not sexual selction as well, body features are by far more sexy than a big skull. It could well have been a side effect of some other adaptations in genome ...

5 minutes ago, KSK said:

 I don't see why belief necessarily needs to be opposed to science in this context.

 

That is just my radicalism :-)

Edited November 2, 2017 by Green Baron

[regex]

7 hours ago, Cassel said:

Or the first intelligent creatures in entire universe, because someone has to be first.

Yeah, that's what I was actually trying to get at, but my wording could have been better, like "earlier" rather than "younger".

[Kevin Kyle]

It would be pretty arrogant of us to believe we were the only ones. But that would be typical human thinking though.

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

This formula has one small disadvantage, which makes it absolutely useless.
Almost all its coefficients could be known only a posteriori. And when this will be done, then nobody will need the formula calculations.

Afaik, originally it even was not proposed as a formula, it was just an illustration of idea.

Edited November 2, 2017 by kerbiloid

[KerikBalm]

4 hours ago, Toonu said:

Hi, this is not only you, but almost everyone who has said there is some life in universe also said it is not inteligent, I just ask why? Why it can't be inteligent when we look at lenght of time from big bang. Its little arrogant to think only one life can be inteligent.

#1) There is a big difference between our galaxy, and the Universe.

#2) For a significant amount of time after the big bang, the "metalicity" was far too low to form planets in which life could exist. Entire generations of stars had to form heavier elements first (although for very big stars, their lifespan is quite low)

#3) In our 1 example of a life-bearing planet, we've got a ~4 billion year history of life, and only about half a billion years ago did creatures evolve even a primitive brain. By 300 million years ago, stem mammals were around... yet for the next ~295 million years or so, nothing very intelligent evolved... because evolution doesn't have a direction. Intelligence isn't a "goal" of evolution... clearly. It was basically accidental conditions at the right time that made evolution select for intelligence. I could go into great detail about the additional accidental conditions that lead to the evolution of humans even after the mammal "takeover" from that other accident of the impact ~65 million years ago.

#4) Life on Earth has a 4 billion year history... but... it really shouldn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox   Maybe our models are wrong, or maybe there was something funny and unusual going on with our star that has allowed Earth to be in the habitable zone for so long. We've only gone 0.5 billion years left before conditions on Earth become inhospitable for non-extremophile life. Earth will face the same fate as Venus, a runaway greenhouse, long before the red-giant phase of our sun. Based on what we know, it took 4 billion years to get to us... but with a star of our mass and our distance from the sun, we shouldn't have had 4 billion years. Smaller stars last longer, but then you get other problems - like light shifting to lower wavelengths, which don't penetrate atmospheres as well... at least atmospheres of our composition, which poses problems for photosynthesis and thus puts limits on life with high metabolic rates, and overall diversity and tiers to the "food chain"; or tidal locking (which depending on the variables, can cause the atmosphere to all freeze out on the dark side).

#5) Given the rate of resource consumption of our civilization, it will probably be very short lived on the cosmic scale (lets say 10k years post industrial or less) unless we spread out into space. Even if there were a thousand civilizations that reached about our peak, if they were spread over the last billion years, and lasted 10 thousand years each, the probability is that we'd be the only ones at this point in time

#6) If some ET civilization did surpass our level of technology and expand beyond their home planet to evade extinction due to resource consumption...With fusion technology (not that far off), a civilization would be able to construct ships to travel in excess of 0.1c   - if a civilization starts a colonization wave that travels at even 0.01c, they'll be all over the galaxy in less than 10 million years (5 if they started near the center). Earth's been sitting here for 4.5 billion years... and if you think there were billions of years available before that (the universe being in excess of 13 billion years old), then its even more absurd that they're not already here, and that we don't see signs of them everywhere we look. In fact, given the speed at which the Galaxy can be colonized relative to the age of the Universe, or even just Earth, it seems that the first civilization to achieve interstellar travel is going to find the galaxy empty and theirs for the taking. The first interstellar civilization will be the only interstellar civilization (within a galaxy)

Maybe we're first... I don't think we'd even be here if someone else beat us to it... although we haven't become an interstellar species, and based on many events in the world today, we may be one of those civilizations from point #5 that only lasts for the order of ~10k years, and maybe we'll be long dead before the next industrial civilization pops up somewhere else in the galaxy, and asks "where is everybody"

[Green Baron]

@KerikBalm, well spoken imo.

Only i wouldn't sign #6 so easily.

Edit: To your question concerning #4: for example greenhouse gases were taken out of the atmosphere, volcanism and its gases receded, a lot of C and O got bound by organisms in sediments, otoh plate tectonics play a role in releasing a part of those elements so helping the earth out of cold phases e.g. when continents at the poles were covered with ice.

There were several circles, long and medium term at work to equalize the temperature.

Another planet should copy that ;-)

 

But if you could provide me with a link or a hint if there is new insight on the brain evolution i'd appreciate that :-)

Edited November 2, 2017 by Green Baron

[KerikBalm]

And that was just on the subject of life becoming intelligent and sticking around for any length of time, while also not spreading.

The mainstream view of this topic basically assumes that where life can exist, it will exist. The rapid appearance of life on Earth is cited as evidence of this... Creationists will insist that abiogenesis is impossible without some "intelligent designer" - obviously this isn't  true and not a subject that we should discuss... but it is worth considering that abiogenesis is actually quite improbable. I've listened to/read many lectures/papers on topics related to abiogenesis. Many of these focus on some particular environment as being the place that this or that was formed. Its becoming a consensus that there was no one environment where life formed, but a variety of different environemtns producing different compounds in different areas that could then diffuse. "Chemical evolution" and "metabolism first" are often spoken of. Some essential compounds may have been forming in hydrothermal vents. Some compounds would only form in cryogenic conditions. Some propose that the freezing of water lead to concentration of "impurities" as the water froze, increasing local concentration and essentially forming local protocells.

Others point out the role of our moon and the formation of tidal pools that would have concentrations increase as water evaporated, while also allowing for wider temperature shifts (a shallow pool can warm up much more than the deep ocean)

We of course can't ignore the RNA world hypothesis. Related to that is the observation that nucleic acids strongly absorb light in the UV spectrum, and UV light tends to cause cross linking or bond breakage in biomolecules. The particularly strong absorption of DNA/RNA to UV may not be a coincidence, but something that was essential when life was starting - here its important to note that atmospheric composition affects which wavelengths get through, and smaller stars will radiate less UV light and more IR light (IR and visible light being too weak to do much of interest for carbon based biochemistries)

When we replicate DNA in the lab, we use a technique that you've probable heard of... PCR, an essential component of that is thermal cycling to separate DNA strands (in our evolved cells, we've got helicase, but that probably wasn't around for proto-life). Its been suggested that Earth's Day/Night cycle provided the thermal cycling needed (perhaps combined with that already mentioned strong absorbance).

Then we know that 2 billion years ago there were natural fission reactors because the concentration of radioactive U235 was much higher (due to its ~0.7 billion year half life). 4 billion years ago it would have been ~7x higher than when confirmed fission reactors were operating. The observation of the immense energy output cause by this lead to some hypothesis that it also played a role in the formation of life (at least driving certain chemical reactions at higher rates, so that concentrations in the oceans were higher). My favorite name for a hypothesis ever is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Radioactive_beach_hypothesis

And... what if they are all partially right? what if it took a combination of high amounts of radioactive elements, a moon generating tidal pools, conditions where water could freeze and thaw, day/night cycles of an acceptable length of thermal cycling at some stage during the evolution of the first self replicating RNAs, geothermal vents, lightning ,etc etc... to get life?

My guess is that Europa and Enceledus have environments where Earth microbes could proliferate. My guess is that they are also both probably sterile (and if not, the life is related to ours, and didn't originate there)

Mars was clearly habitable once. We've sent multiple craft to what was once a lake/seafloor. While its very easy to accept that there could be fossils of life, and we've just missed them, its a little disappointing that we haven't stumbled across massive macroscopic fossil biofilms or stromatolite clumps.

What if the evidence keeps showing Mars was always sterile despite clearly having a history of conditions on the surface that were quite similar to early Earth?

We may also be underestimating just how hard abiogenesis is, simply because maybe all the right conditions happened to come together at the same time and place on Earth.

Or maybe abiogenesis happens readily under a variety of different conditions... we simply don't know. So for the moment, I'll concede that life, of any form, may be relatively common in the galaxy... but it may be less common than people think.

 

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

#3) In our 1 example of a life-bearing planet, we've got a ~4 billion year history of life, and only about half a billion years ago did creatures evolve even a primitive brain. By 300 million years ago, stem mammals were around... yet for the next ~295 million years or so, nothing very intelligent evolved... because evolution doesn't have a direction. Intelligence isn't a "goal" of evolution... clearly. It was basically accidental conditions at the right time that made evolution select for intelligence. I could go into great detail about the additional accidental conditions that lead to the evolution of humans even after the mammal "takeover" from that other accident of the impact ~65 million years ago.

We can obviously see that the life evolution on Earth constantly follows the complexity increasing way.
Of course, it does this like a crawling drunkard, but step by step approaching to the home.

It's not just a random process, it's a stochastic process with accumulation of thermodynamical information .
Negative loopbacks appear and stay, keeping the system more and more complex and stable.

The random dice rolling is a creationists' "argument", it can explain nothing, just forces a false opinion that "such complicated systems could not appear unintentionally because it's like a dice rolling".
 Control systems theory rules.
On most planets original chemical and physical conditions can't get from chaos to order.
On some others - chemical systems can self-organize into primitive encapsulated self-reproducing systems like bacteria.
Also there are rare planets like Earth with very specific conditions (liquid water, active geology, big moon causing tidal waves in the ocean, intermediate equator tilt, etc) where unicellular systems get often kicks and, constantly accelerating, evolve into more and more complex systems, until there appears something like us.

At last, the sapient species has appeared (so-called "humans"), which has vastly eliminated the "natural" biosphere, replacing it with themselves and with high-organized "agricultural" one.
Next stop - biocybernetics.

Edited November 2, 2017 by kerbiloid

[PB666]

Lets perform a thought experiment.

Species Blech lives on Planet Zyxwvut in the Star system Ponmlk.

That star system is in the Way-too-milky galaxy in the Inverse Universe (the universe that went in the negative time direction of our own) which they call the Universe and they call our Universe the Inverse Universe.

OK, Blechs are very intelligent and they have studied their star system and are now discovering planets including their own.

In this Universe Blechs were the very first life-form to develop sentiency within their own visible Universe and all of the universe that can measure X billion or less years back to the time of Big-Bang (which they call Gnab-gib)

Based on their observations, many people in the Blech system believe they are not the only sentient species in their Universe, and also that there many varieties in their own galaxy, they have even sent messages on golden records attached to slow moving satellites poking their way out of their star system (fractionally more significant than space dust and less significant than the billions of larger size protocomets that float in an out of their stars sphere of influence).

Despite any evidence thereof.

What shall we say of Blech's beliefs.
1. They are making a judgement that they are unlikely the first because . . . . . . . .
2. They are making a frequency argument based on counting a single planet with known sentients under the assumption that 1 cannot be true.
3. They are disregarding that their planets biological descendants cannot possibly be the only sentient life to develop before the heat-death of the universe.

This is by definition a circular argument regarding the belief of the Blechs.

This thought experiment shows the perils of trying to lead science with faulty assumptions. So next the Blech's start exploring the galaxy (they differ from humans in they enjoy long periods of frozen stasis). They go from planet to planet looking for life. As careful as they try to be in their exploration,  they cannot help but deposit life on planets that are by magnitudes more favored for evolutionary development than the per-existing life. Blech's do not believe contamination is a serious issue because "other sentients must have existed and already visited the planet and the indigenous species already evolved after that exposure".

Of course Blech-kind themselves are evolving, but now not on one world but many worlds, and in their wake many evolving sentient organisms went extinct and were replaced by species with Blech-like biochemistry (48 amino acids, 6 Nucleotides encoding their DNA . . . . . ). On the otherside of the galaxy species Y starts doing the same thing, but now they encounter planets, oddly, in which the organisms have similar xeno-biochemisty. Their conclusion based on their observation is that a omniscient god-like creature seeded the planets with life after these planets formed. So instead of looking for a bumbling, careless and foolish race we have a second race scouring the universe looking for 'god'.

-or-

http://hitchhikersguidequotes.tumblr.com/post/17038225839/in-the-beginning-the-universe-was-created-this

The answer is there are exactly 42 sentient species in the Universe and the Vogon's carelessly wiped one out.

[KerikBalm]

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

We can obviously see that the life evolution on Earth constantly follows the complexity increasing way.

No, it doesn't. It just as often reduces complexity when complexity can be reduced. 

Essentially we are seeing a Gaussian curve of complexity with a strong shift to the left. As biodiversity grows, the tail on the right of the Gaussian curve has more members. The median doesn't need to increase at all to have the appearance of more complex forms, just the total number of forms. Lets not forget that it seems that most life on Earth has <10 million base pairs of DNA. Sure, some have billions, some tens or even hundreds of billions (plants and lungfish). Then we've got mycoplasma, viruses, etc... Complexity only increases when its advantageous to do so, and often, its not.

 

Quote

It's not just a random process, it's a stochastic process with accumulation of thermodynamical information .
Negative loopbacks appear and stay, keeping the system more and more complex and stable.

Well, it depends on how you define the "process" the selection is non-random, the mutations are random. Even so, the selection has no "goal" other than to increase fitness.

Negative feedback loops can lead to more or less complexity.

and what is themordunamical information>

 

Quote

The random dice rolling is a creationists' "argument", it can explain nothing, just forces a false opinion that "such complicated systems could not appear unintentionally because it's like a dice rolling".

I should have never brought them up... I do not support creationist arguments. I'm simply saying that in countering their idiocy, we may have oversold how easy abiogenesis is. Clearly, it requires certain conditions. An absolute vacuum is not going to lead to abiogenesis. The conditions on the surface of Venus are not going to lead to abiogenesis either. We know there must be some constraints on the process, and it is a mistake to assume that the constraints on that process are the same as the constraints on where highly evolved life can survive.

For the most part, on Earth, we find that water+ some energy source = a habitat suitable for life. I want to caution against extending that to other worlds and assuming that a place that has a habitat suitable for life = a place where conditions were right for abiogenesis to happen.

 

Quote

 Control systems theory rules.
On most planets original chemical and physical conditions can't get from chaos to order.
On some others - chemical systems can self-organize into primitive encapsulated self-reproducing systems like bacteria.
Also there are rare planets like Earth with very specific conditions (liquid water, active geology, big moon causing tidal waves in the ocean, intermediate equator tilt, etc) where unicellular systems get often kicks and, constantly accelerating, evolve into more and more complex systems, until there appears something like us.

At last, the sapient species has appeared (so-called "humans"), which has vastly eliminated the "natural" biosphere, replacing it with themselves and with high-organized "agricultural" one.
Next stop - biocybernetics.

 

[Green Baron]

13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

We can obviously see that the life evolution on Earth constantly follows the complexity increasing way.
Of course, it does this like a crawling drunkard, but step by step approaching to the home.

Actually organisms often try to "rationalize" complexity away, simplifying traits. Example bones in the skulls of amphibians are combined to form a new bone, which can be derived from sutures that can be seen in young specimen or a development over a long row of speciation. Or the hoof of horses, reduced to one single finger and stiffened by ligaments.

Cetaceans simplified a lot of their land living ancestor's features away (extremities, intestines), others grew more complex (number of fingers).

It depends where the pressure is pushing to ...

53 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

We of course can't ignore the RNA world hypothesis.

My understanding is that this is by now the most accepted version of early life. Also, i have no problem with abiogenesis. Given the right circumstances and energy it seems to me almost a "must" that the chemistry starts to find a stable state in self replication. As you said, linking and bondage in nucleic acids occurs under absorption of energy.

Data of the early ocean and atmosphere is missing. So that question will probably not be solvable in the near future.

53 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

My guess is that Europa and Enceledus have environments where Earth microbes could proliferate. My guess is that they are also both probably sterile (and if not, the life is related to ours, and didn't originate there)

That's why Nasa tried to avoid contamination, to be able to answer that question somewhen in the future.

 

I had hoped for new inside on the brain thing :-) One day ...

 

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

@KerikBalm, well spoken imo.

Only i wouldn't sign #6 so easily.

Edit: To your question concerning #4: for example greenhouse gases were taken out of the atmosphere, volcanism and its gases receded, a lot of C and O got bound by organisms in sediments, otoh plate tectonics play a role in releasing a part of those elements so helping the earth out of cold phases e.g. when continents at the poles were covered with ice.

There were several circles, long and medium term at work to equalize the temperature.

Another planet should copy that ;-)

 

But if you could provide me with a link or a hint if there is new insight on the brain evolution i'd appreciate that :-)

To your edit: That is what was assumed to be the easy solution, but the data doesn't seem to support it.

Quote

Based on an "analysis of nitrogen and argon isotopes in fluid inclusions trapped in 3.0- to 3.5-billion-year-old hydrothermal quartz" a 2013 paper concludes that "dinitrogen did not play a significant role in the thermal budget of the ancient Earth and that the Archean partial pressure of CO2 was probably lower than 0.7 bar".[10] Burgess, one of the authors states "The amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere was too low to enhance the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide sufficiently to warm the planet. However, our results did give a higher than expected pressure reading for carbon dioxide – at odds with the estimates based on fossil soils 

...

the research by S.M. Som, based on the analysis of raindrop impressions and air bubbles trapped in ancient lavas, have further indicated a low atmospheric pressure below 1.1 bar and probably as low as 0.23 bar during an epoch 2.7 bn years from present.

As for the evolution of the brain... I'm just going with the cambrian explosion. Arthropods had brains (not very complicated ones, but they had brains). Sponges don't. Jellyfish don't. Only members of bilateria have brains. Granted that there is evidence of precabrian bilaterians, it also seems that brains independently evolved in deuterostomes and proterostomes (note not all deuterostomes have brains, I'm only sure that the chordates do). So this constrains the time at which they could have appeared

[KerikBalm]

30 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

My understanding is that this is by now the most accepted version of early life.

Well, it depends, when talking about the start of life, the division between life and non-life gets fuzzy. Its a pretty good bet that there was self replicating RNA before the first cell. The questions is to what extra RNA was still king by this time it started wrapping itself in a lipid bilayer. Were proteins already taking over some functions? did DNA come before or after the cell? This is still unknown. It is pretty well accepted that RNA was doing a lot more stuff of a biological nature in the past, and it was doing this before DNA was around.

 

Quote

Also, i have no problem with abiogenesis. Given the right circumstances and energy it seems to me almost a "must" that the chemistry starts to find a stable state in self replication.

I have no "problem" with it. Of course it happens given the "right circumstances". The question is what are those circumstances, and how common are they in locations that you've only selected for the presence of "liquid water".

 

Quote

As you said, linking and bondage in nucleic acids occurs under absorption of energy.

It can, but too much can also break it, or link it together in ways that makes it unusable (thymidine dimers, cross linking to proteins, etc). When making DNA constructs, we use a dye that associated with DNA under UV light (well, now they have dyes that work with violet/blue light in the visible spectrum rather than UV), when cutting out a band of DNA, one would be careful to minimized the time of exposure to UV, because it does cause mutations. Too much energy can cause things to break apart, not enough energy, and the chemical reactions you need won't occur. There has to be a balance. For a given temperature and UV intensity, only certain combinations of start size and atmosphere will work. A red dwarf may warm a planet enough for liquid water, but with the energy shifted into lower wavelengths, the amount of UV is going to be less than what earth experienced. While low UV levels would generally be good for life now, it may be bad for the process of abiogenesis. Imagine if you needed a certain UV flux to get abiogenesis to occur, and that you simply won't get the right overlap of temperature and UV flux from red dwarves. If that were true, then the most common type of star in the galaxy/universe would presumably have no life bearing planets (but the tidal locking thing may also lead to the same conclusion, and even if not, the low visible light intensity would mean that the biosphere would not have as many trophic levels and not be as rich in biodiversity as ours).

 

Quote

Data of the early ocean and atmosphere is missing. So that question will probably not be solvable in the near future.

Its missing, but not entirely absent... what data we do have doesn't seem to resolve the paradox

Quote

I had hoped for new inside on the brain thing :-) One day ...

Brains, like eyes, independently evolved in multiple branches... however, like eyes, they seem to have first evolved in multiple lineages around the time of the cambrian explosion. There were nerves and simple nervous systems before brains (like in the cnidaria). So, like eyes, the building blocks of the organ were shared across multiple branches of the tree. Evolution strongly selected for such an organ (just like eyes) once active predation of mobile animals really kicked off.

 

You might like this paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19559615

Edited November 2, 2017 by KerikBalm

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

No, it doesn't. It just as often reduces complexity when complexity can be reduced. 

It does for a specific species, not for the terrestrial life in whole. The leader changes, but the race keeps running farther and farther.
Probably, the only counterexample - Ediacaran catastrophe, when the first wave of multicellulars probably has totally died out.

Unless you bring an example of a time period when  reptiles were replaced by jellyfishes or insects were replaced by worms.
Not just in one specific lake, but on the Earth totally.

DNA/RNA is not an example here, because this is much lower level. Sub-life level.
Say, protons, neutrons and electrons the DNA is made of, have not evolved at all. Should we say because of this, that an evolution has never happened?

9 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

and what is themordunamical information

A physical value similar to entropy, but its delta has opposite sign.
While the entropy is a measure of chaos, the information is a measure of order.

delta-Entropy = - delta-Information

Entropy ~ log(W), where W - statistical weight, i.e. number of possible states of a (thermodynamical) system.

Say, you have a coin. It can lay with heads or tails up. 2 cases with equal probability.
You throw the coin and get an exact answer. You have gotten log₂2 = 1 bit of information.
(If you prefer,, you can use a natural logarithm and get the answer in nits, or ternary logarithm - and get it in trits, doesn't matter).
If you roll a die, it gives you log₂6 = 2.5849625 bits of information.So, every time when a probability turns into a certainty for you, you get some information - a logarithm of inversed original probability.

(The system doesn't "remember" the information, but the information is how much the system differs from chaos, numerically.)

When a system gets less chaotic, this means that it has accumulated a thermodynamical information.
It's state and behaviour gets more predictable, its inner processes gets more predictable and stable.
Negative loobpacks form and make the system behavior stable.
Life is exactly this. A chaotic mess of chemical compounds turned into stable structures with predictable behavior, based on negative loopbacks (ecology, so on).

The more numerous and complex structures appear - the more material they possess and rule, like a whirlpool.

When an unpredictable mess turns into the crops and meat, then into a sandwich, then into you, and this repeats for decades, the system in whole is not chaotic, but predictable, and the information is the value which defines how much do you, sandwich, crop and cow differ from a random molecular mess.

In turn, when you do your work (as I can understand, you are a biochemist or so), you observe random events, record them as (measured) facts, find out the patterns.
When you have finished a study, the humanity picture of Universe becomes a little more  predictable, some information has been accumulated by the terrestrial life.

A Namibian peasant takes some clay, makes bricks and builds a hut. Original mess of clay has been structurized into bricks and now forms a structure with predictable behavior - the hut.
The picture of Universe becomes a little more  predictable, some information has been accumulated by the terrestrial life.

As we can see, the life evolution on the Earth goes from random mess to primitive local cycles of material (early unicellulars), then into more and more global and complex systems.
(Except the poor Ediacarans, when the complexity falled, accumulated information got lost, entropy raised.)

Edited November 3, 2017 by kerbiloid

[KerikBalm]

Wow, are you playing fast and loose with assumptions/terminology/logic or what?

#1) 

Quote

It does for a specific species, not for the terrestrial life in whole. The leader changes, but the race keeps running farther and farther.
Probably, the only counterexample - Ediacaran catastrophe, when the first wave of multicellulars probably has totally died out.

Unless you bring an example of a time period when  reptiles were replaced by jellyfishes or insects were replaced by worms.
Not just in one specific lake, but on the Earth totally.

Terrestrial life as a whole is not more complex than it was ~200 million years ago -. which is about half the history of life on land. You aren't even defining complexity, but you assert it is always increasing as a whole. What would you say makes life as a whole today more complex than it was during the triassic? Is it humans? our bodies are no more complex than other mammals, or birds that have been around for 100 million years. Until several thousands of years ago, our society wasn't any more complex than other animals. That doesn't show a progression towards complexity, but rather jump when natural selection selects for jumps.

As for your thermodynamic information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory#Criticism

 

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There exists criticisms of the link between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy.

The most common criticism is that information entropy cannot be related to thermodynamic entropy because there is no concept of temperature, energy, or the second law, in the discipline of information entropy. ...  Boltzmann's equation is presumed to provide a link between thermodynamic entropy S and information entropy H = −Σi pi ln pi = ln(W) where p_i=1/W are the equal probabilities of a given microstate. This interpretation has been criticized also. While some say that the equation is merely a unit conversion equation between thermodynamic and information entropy, this is not completely correct.^[19] A unit conversion equation will, e.g., change inches to centimeters, and yield two measurements in different units of the same physical quantity (length). Since thermodynamic and information entropy are dimensionally unequal (energy/unit temperature vs. units of information) ...  he question then remains whether ln(W) is an information-theoretic quantity. If it is measured in bits, one can say that, given the macrostate, it represents the number of yes/no questions one must ask to determine the microstate, clearly an information-theoretic concept. Objectors point out that such a process is purely conceptual, and has nothing to do with the measurement of entropy. Then again, the whole of statistical mechanics is purely conceptual, serving only to provide an explanation of the "pure" science of thermodynamics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory#Is_information_quantized.3F

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In 1995, Tim Palmer signalled two unwritten assumptions about Shannon's definition of information that may make it inapplicable as such to quantum mechanics:
The supposition that there is such a thing as an observable state (for instance the upper face of a dice or a coin) before the observation begins
The fact that knowing this state does not depend on the order in which observations are made (commutativity)
Anton Zeilinger's and Caslav Brukner's article[20] synthesized and developed these remarks. The so-called Zeilinger's principle suggests that the quantization observed in QM could be bound to information quantization (one cannot observe less than one bit, and what is not observed is by definition "random"). Nevertheless, these claims remain quite controversial.

anyway, ignoring the controversial nature of the topic, you assert that "We can obviously see that the life evolution on Earth constantly follows the complexity increasing way. ...  it's a stochastic process with accumulation of thermodynamical information."

Yet we've got no way to measure that "accumulation", and I strongly dispute that we see any constant drive towards more complex life forms.

Suppose that the complexity of a life form falls on a gaussian curve.

If we have 10 species on that curve or 1000 species on that curve, we'll find more complex life forms when there are more species, without the mean or median complexity on the curve shifting at all. Likewise, we'd also find less complex life forms in the case of 1000 species vs 10 species. What we see is increased diversity of species, not a drive for species to become more complex.

We sometimes see temporary drives towards more complex forms, but only when natural selection favors it. Its not some fundamental property of the universe driving all species towards more complexity.

[Green Baron]

I know about the basic brain and ganglion nodes, my question was more about our (hominids) much bigger-than-necessary brain, if there is something new, mayhaps from genetics, you seem to have an ear on it :-)

Sorry for not being clear.

Edited November 3, 2017 by Green Baron

[DrLicor]

I do think there's life somewhere. But as Arthur C. Clarke said:

'Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.'

[magnemoe]

On 1.11.2017 at 11:47 PM, Terwin said:

I am not too sure about the 'smarter to deal with other humans' at least not at first.  I saw a something recently saying that the evidence suggests humans may not have killed other humans much until the late paleolithic, and that is very recent in an evolutionary scale...

If you are an endurance hunter(as humans are theorized to be with our sparse fur, bipedal motion, sweating, etc), then every step towards intelligence that lets you out-smart your prey a little better, also saves calories from the hunt gives a competitive advantage(more calories available for procreation, even though more calories are also being spent on the bigger brain that lets you out-smart your prey better by planning further ahead for example).

Chasing an animal off a bluff that breaks it's legs is a lot less calorie intensive than chasing it until it can no longer stand, and it takes a fair bit of planning to dig a ditch before hand when there are no bluffs near-by.

Not smarter as in fighting, more like social interaction and flirting. 
As its an selection criteria it don't even need to be an real benefit, think peacock tails.
Endurance hunting is not very common wolfs do it, think some other canines like hyena. being smarter is nice but not an major benefit util you can discuss strategy. 

And yes you will get to an intelligence level there you have serious benefits. 
 

[magnemoe]

22 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

This formula has one small disadvantage, which makes it absolutely useless.
Almost all its coefficients could be known only a posteriori. And when this will be done, then nobody will need the formula calculations.

Afaik, originally it even was not proposed as a formula, it was just an illustration of idea.

However its nice how more of the early values start to get filled out as in planet stuff, next is planets with life, you might even be able to detect more advanced life as in forests with gravitational lenses or giant telescope arrays. 
For intelligent life we will either detect an old advanced civilization or stone age tribes. 
My guess is on the last as in my first contact image 

Edited November 3, 2017 by magnemoe

[Diche Bach]

Simple life (as in "not-complex life forms"):  almost assuredly exists outside Earth and possibly even within the Sol system.

Indeed, it is probably "abundant" from a cosmic standpoint; meaning for the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one septillion else "quadrillion" depending on which country you are in) solar systems estimated to exist in the known universe (that is 1 x 10^23 for you scientific notation lovers out there).

It seems safe to assume that the chances of life emerging at some point during the last 15 billion years in the old Universe at large is at least no "worse" than a one in a septillion chance (1 in quadrillion if that is your thing) based on the fact there (a) is life on Earth, and (b) there are probably (maybe) around a septillion solar systems in the universe.

However, when we stop and consider all the ROCKS (and not just all the star systems), chances go down. Just for the rocks in the Sol system, we can say that the rate is--at this point apparently--at least no higher than 1 in a million (-ish), though with the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt that might ratio might plummet substantially(?).

We might assume comparable numbers of celestial objects to Sol system (~10 planets,  ~1,000,000 minor planets and other sundry rocks:  That works out to be 

Total "rocks" that might support "life"	1,000,010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
one percent of the above number	10,000,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I don't think there are words for such numbers? Ah hold on . . . WRONG! Names of large numbers

That is a LOT of rocks.

I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of all those celestial objects had icings of blue-green algae-like actively cooperating membrane-bound replicase molecules that could meet all the standards for defining "life." clinging to the sunny spots on their surfaces . . .

Such simple life, even if abundant is however, likely only of academic interest at the outset, though of potentially vast interest to biological sciences in the long run (and enormous importance to humanity).

"Complex Life:"  (meaning probably eukaryote-like degrees of cell complexity). I think is far more speculative question. The emergence of this complexity of life on Earth seems to have taken a very long time to occur (something like 2 billion years after the formation of the planet, which is at this point still nearly half of the total age of the Earth) and been facilitated by a series of cosmic historical accidents which may be quite rare even in the entirety of the vast Milky Way.

Life that will be of interest or value to humans within the next 10,000 years? unlikely but well worth all efforts to discover. By this I mean: small puddles of goo living in caves on Mars, or perhaps even more complex squiggles (MAYBE! even eukaryote-like squigglies!) living in the oceans under the surface ice on one of the outer planet moons.

Again, like I said, any life discovered within the next 100 to 10,000 years is likely to be of initially only academic interest. But once a few years of thorough analysis have taken place, the revelations about evolution and biology which such life might afford could well revolution biology, medicine, psychology, and many other fields.

1. Life: absolutely!

2. Complex life: possibly but Earth might in fact be THE ONLY site in the entire vast cosmos

3. Garden Planet Ecological Scale "Life:" extremely speculative. Rare Earth Hypothesis suggests that garden planets like Earth might be exceedingly rare. Even if there are a dozen of them in the ~100 to 300 billion solar systems in the Milky Way, the vast distances mean that they will remain perfectly irrelevant (by being completely "out of reach") for humanity for hundreds or thousands of years, and possibly forever.

Rather than being depressed that our childhood fantasies of exotic and fascinating extra-terrestrials are likely no less imaginative than any other world religion, let us savor the enormous fortuity of our existence, and that of our species and all Earthlings. In all the cosmos, it may well be that Earth is the ONLY true Garden of Life, and rather than being depressed by that speculation I suggest we need to be joyous. I believe if this ethos can be spread to even half of humanity, it might well progressively make us a more civilized and human species.

Edited November 3, 2017 by Diche Bach
humor

[PB666]

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It does for a specific species, not for the terrestrial life in whole. The leader changes, but the race keeps running farther and farther.
Probably, the only counterexample - Ediacaran catastrophe, when the first wave of multicellulars probably has totally died out.

Unless you bring an example of a time period when  reptiles were replaced by jellyfishes or insects were replaced by worms.
Not just in one specific lake, but on the Earth totally.

DNA/RNA is not an example here, because this is much lower level. Sub-life level.
Say, protons, neutrons and electrons the DNA is made of, have not evolved at all. Should we say because of this, that an evolution has never happened?

A physical value similar to entropy, but its delta has opposite sign.
While the entropy is a measure of chaos, the information is a measure of order.

delta-Entropy = - delta-Information

Entropy ~ log(W), where W - statistical weight, i.e. number of possible states of a (thermodynamical) system.

Say, you have a coin. It can lay with heads or tails up. 2 cases with equal probability.
You throw the coin and get an exact answer. You have gotten log₂2 = 1 bit of information.
(If you prefer,, you can use a natural logarithm and get the answer in nits, or ternary logarithm - and get it in trits, doesn't matter).
If you roll a die, it gives you log₂6 = 2.5849625 bits of information.So, every time when a probability turns into a certainty for you, you get some information - a logarithm of inversed original probability.

(The system doesn't "remember" the information, but the information is how much the system differs from chaos, numerically.)

When a system gets less chaotic, this means that it has accumulated a thermodynamical information.
It's state and behaviour gets more predictable, its inner processes gets more predictable and stable.
Negative loobpacks form and make the system behavior stable.
Life is exactly this. A chaotic mess of chemical compounds turned into stable structures with predictable behavior, based on negative loopbacks (ecology, so on).

The more numerous and complex structures appear - the more material they possess and rule, like a whirlpool.

When an unpredictable mess turns into the crops and meat, then into a sandwich, then into you, and this repeats for decades, the system in whole is not chaotic, but predictable, and the information is the value which defines how much do you, sandwich, crop and cow differ from a random molecular mess.

In turn, when you do your work (as I can understand, you are a biochemist or so), you observe random events, record them as (measured) facts, find out the patterns.
When you have finished a study, the humanity picture of Universe becomes a little more  predictable, some information has been accumulated by the terrestrial life.

A Namibian peasant takes some clay, makes bricks and builds a hut. Original mess of clay has been structurized into bricks and now forms a structure with predictable behavior - the hut.
The picture of Universe becomes a little more  predictable, some information has been accumulated by the terrestrial life.

As we can see, the life evolution on the Earth goes from random mess to primitive local cycles of material (early unicellulars), then into more and more global and complex systems.
(Except the poor Ediacarans, when the complexity falled, accumulated information got lost, entropy raised.)

Oh, boy . . . . . what a stretch. The leaf of a plant 1 mm thick and  1 mm from the ground can capture hv emitted from the sun, most is turned to reflected light and heat, a very tiny portion is used to reduced a nucleotide which is then used to make a simple sugar which is then elongated to form glucose. This is what drives the ordering of life, alot of disordering of hv and a little ordering of chemistry. From the point of view of the light (which is ageless) disordering light a millimeter away from the next reflector or 13.8 billion light years away does not alter the entropy argument, disordering the light in other forms of energy which degrade into heat is energetically favorable.

And if you think about pure hv is converted into the bond formation energies of a seeming randomly assortment of biological compounds. If you were going to do the energy math:

hv (200 to 800 nm) ---------> reflected green light + far infrared hv + H20(l)-> H20(g) + Air(T -> T+) + C-H bond energy + bond energies in CO2, H20 and SO4^2- to C-C bond energy +C=C bond energy + C-N bond energy + C=N bond energy + C-S bond energy + P-O-P + bond energy + C-O bond energy . . . . . . . . . At the lowest levels of examination life seems to favor entropy.

[HebaruSan]

I saw a new (to me) version of panspermia speculation recently, that there may have been a period early in the history of the universe when the temperature and pressure of the entire universe was similar to conditions on contemporary Earth, that simple life may have developed in that period, and that seeding by such organisms is how simple life arose so soon after Earth reached a non-molten state. I thought that was fascinating, although I don't know how you'd get enough "astronomer metals" so early.

[Diche Bach]

54 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

I saw a new (to me) version of panspermia speculation recently, that there may have been a period early in the history of the universe when the temperature and pressure of the entire universe was similar to conditions on contemporary Earth, that simple life may have developed in that period, and that seeding by such organisms is how simple life arose so soon after Earth reached a non-molten state. I thought that was fascinating, although I don't know how you'd get enough "astronomer metals" so early.

Interesting. I have as much difficulty comprehending this as I do comprehending the apparent finding that: the interstellar medium (which is NEARLY an empty vacuum? right? I am right on that point . . . right?) is also extremely "hot" ?? (Eh, what!? How can a nearly empty medium with almost no atoms to bang around in it be "hot?") . . .

Based on reading cosmologist descriptions of the evolution of the early universe, where "epochs" can range in temporal duration from a few nanoseconds to billions of years, and where at various points, "matter" was nothing" and nothing was "everything" and "elements didn't exist," etc., I have a strong suspicion there WAS an epoch somewhere along the line where the interstellar medium DID in fact reflect the "chocolate pudding" consistency which is depicted in the spacecraft physics in EVE Online.

Small solace for a massive confusion I say.