DNA animation

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 2:38:11 AM UTC+10, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 10:29:46 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpHaxzroYxg

This is insane. This is impossible.

If it's impossible to have complex assemblies without intelligence,
maybe it's also impossible for our intelligence to emerge from a mere
complex assembly. Unless intelligence is something intrinsic to
nature, which explains both.



That sounds mystical, but maybe our universe is mystical. Some things
about QM are seriously weird.

"God does not play dice with the universe."

- A Einstein

In a universe where energy is equivalent to matter and information is
equivalent to energy it shouldn't be surprising.

Actually, information is more like entropy than energy. That got spelled out in the second year of my undergraduate science course when we got onto thermodynamics (which isn't an easy subject).

What is the relation between information and intelligence? There is a
relation but can we define it precisely?

Intelligence uses information to understand its environment and consequently optimise action within that environment. The actual level of optimality attained depends both on the quality and quantity of the information available and the quality of the intelligence processing it.

Organism that can acquire more and better information tend to evolve better quality data processors to exploit it as effectively as possible.

> You see, it's no more mystical than physics in general.

Not mystical at all, if you've done enough physics to know what you are talking about.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 12/5/19 9:49 am, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 11/05/19 22:47, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"

If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?

If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

Consider the possibilities.

Yup, it seems likely that it life has occurred elsewhere.

A more interesting question is what are the chances we
will find out about it and/or converse with them, given
the timescales and distances involved.

The timescale that matters is the ephemeral nature of any technological
society compared to astronomical timescales.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: civilisation kills planets.

Biological progress is driven to increase dissipation. Technology
rapidly multiplies that until resource exhaustion is inevitable and
irreversible.

Clifford Heath

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 1:42:39 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 11:15:08 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 08:49:19 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
A lot of the liquid water now on the Earth arrived in a later
cometary bombardment after the crust had solidified and chemistry in
dense star forming nebulae is capable of making quite a lot of
complex molecules.

It isn't that far fetched that at least some of the precursors were
made in a hard UV illuminated environment as the solar system was
forming. A lot of simple organic chemicals have been seen in star
forming regions.

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

Glycine was first detected in 2003 (Wiki list is out of date):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/375637/meta

Curious C60 and C70 "dust" spectra had mystified astronomers for many
decades before the pure carbon compounds were found on Earth.

Sure, but a pile of TTL gates on a table don't spontaneously orgainze
themselves into a computer running Jill of the Jungle under MS DOS.

They don't reproduce either.

See, it's an even bigger problem.

Not exactly. If you want life to evolve, don't start with a pile of TTL gates.

The big problem isn't evolution, it's the origin of the incredible
cellular mechanisms around DNA. People shout that they are the same
issue, to avoid dealing with the obvious problem of origin.

Macro structures of organs and tissues are pretty complex too, so if
evolution can explain them...

But it can't.

Actually it does. John Larkin couldn't understand the explanations even if he knew where to look for them, but they do exist.

> It's all hand waving.

Example?

> There are biological processes that have 20 steps, where any one step going wrong wrecks the whole process, and none of the sub-sequences have any known function. So how could that evolve?

By analogy with the evolution of the eye, one step at a time. Once the final version has got itself optimised the intervening versions can be hard to imagine.

If you study enough species, you can often find earlier, or at least difference versions, and deduce some of the history, but John Larkin reads inteligent design propganda which rather ignores that kind of evidence.

> "Evolution" is a kind of steak sauce that people dump on everything.

Unlike steak sauce, there aren't any superior alternatives.

At the intermediate scale there is the system of brain cells. Proteins
aren't more complex than that.

How are visual memories, images, stored and retrieved in a fraction of
a second? Simple proteins!

Only John Larkin could be silly enough to call proteins simple.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 1:49:31 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 11:26:24 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

I sure hope the Watchmaker book is better than The Selfish Gene. I
didn't finish that when it became obvious that he was going to keep
repeating a simple concept that deserved a short article at best.

Dawkins is an avid angry atheist first and secondarily a biologist.

People like him have made atheism a dogma, when dogma should be what
they are against. They think that telling people - dogmatically - to be
atheists will make them smart, as if because reason led them to atheism,
then atheism will lead other people to reason. That's so non-sequitur
it's bizarre.

That kind of "education" has led a lot of young people to be very smug
about their intelligence even though they are stupid.

What they should do is just teach people to think, and that has to start
very young.


It was written a long time ago, and I haven't re-read
it recently. Many of the arguments presented are
inevitably framed in terms used when written, e.g. the
term "intelligent design" hadn't been invented. But that
doesn't matter, since the term ID was largely created
as a response to the effectiveness of the arguments in
The Blind Watchmaker.

He should go into his lab and cook up some self-replicating RNA from
inorganic slush. But that would be intelligent design, wouldn't it?

Not if it's just from stirring a pot and giving it energy. We got as
far as amino acids doing that, and it took a matter of hours. Maybe it
just needs more time.



Accidental origin fans could cook up self-replicating RNA in their
labs, and then do the math to demonstrate that it could have happened
accidentally.

Some people have done the latter and gotten preposterous numbers.
Impossible cubed.

Some proponents of "intelligent design" have concocted pseudo-mathematical arguments that produce preposterous numbers.

This is all propaganda designed to impress the gullible, and John Larkin is seriously gullible.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 12/5/19 11:43 am, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 12:35:06 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
Dawkins is an avid angry atheist first and secondarily a biologist.

He was a biologist long before he got into the public atheist role.

As an atheist, he's a lot less impressive that he is as a biologist. "The God Delusion" is essentially a polemic,

I would describe it as a catalog of the arguments (good and bad) against
theism. I was careful who saw the cover as I was reading it while
back-packing around the Philippines!

> while there is probably quite a to be said about why humans are susceptible to the delusions that there's a personal god talking to them. Religious mania is a well known psychological disorder, and the difference between the people who have to be committed up in a psychiatric institution and those who voluntarily commit themselves to a religious institution is merely a difference in degree.

It's a difference in kind - the kind of harm that results. Not in the
kind of psychological process that allows delusion.

We don't mind young girls believing in Unicorns, or children in Santa,
because we know they'll grow up and stop believing in them, not start
cult compounds preparing for the imminent return of their chosen mythic
creature.

Unicorns and Santa are grounded in the purported existence of entities
that combine different actual elements in a non-factual way. E.g. a
unicorn is "a horse with a horn" (both ideas are real and meaningful)
and Santa "an old man with a beard and red clothes who comes down the
chimney to leave gifts" - all possible factual elements, but combined in
a counter-factual way.

Gods on the other hand are grounded in combinations of non-actual
elements in a way that cannot be construed as either factual nor
counter-factual - because the elements themselves are abstract
constructions; things like infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, first
cause, creator, etc. These are all abstract categories for which there
is *no observable* therefore the combination is unobservable.

That's what I mean when I say "the term 'God' *does not refer*".

It's not that there is no answer, rather there is *no question* that can
be answered.

When there is no possibility of grounding, there is no restraint on the
behaviour (including the evil) that might result.

Clifford Heath

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 12:50:16 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 08:49:19 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/05/2019 03:10, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:

It may take a lot longer than 50 years. We may never know how the
universe, or life, started.

I expect us to get close enough to a workable solution within a few
decades now and possibly the same for simulating consciousness.

Since we know sparking primordial gasses makes amino acids, why did it
become common decades after that discovery to speculate about origins
from comets or something?

A lot of the liquid water now on the Earth arrived in a later cometary
bombardment after the crust had solidified and chemistry in dense star
forming nebulae is capable of making quite a lot of complex molecules.

It isn't that far fetched that at least some of the precursors were made
in a hard UV illuminated environment as the solar system was forming. A
lot of simple organic chemicals have been seen in star forming regions.

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

Glycine was first detected in 2003 (Wiki list is out of date):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/375637/meta

Curious C60 and C70 "dust" spectra had mystified astronomers for many
decades before the pure carbon compounds were found on Earth.

Sure, but a pile of TTL gates on a table don't spontaneously orgainze
themselves into a computer running Jill of the Jungle under MS DOS.
The big problem isn't evolution, it's the origin of the incredible
cellular mechanisms around DNA. People shout that they are the same
issue, to avoid dealing with the obvious problem of origin.

Piles of TTL gates don't have any mechanism to create the wiring that might link them up into an assembly that might run MS DOS.

Self-replicating RNA does have this kind of option, and seems to have had the capacity to exploit DNA as a more stable data storage system.

John Larkin does claim to believe in evolution, but he clearly doesn't understand the implications of that belief.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 12:42:44 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 07:50:18 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
On 11/05/19 03:48, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 4:45:56 AM UTC+10, Neon John wrote:
On Thu, 9 May 2019 11:42:12 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

I'm not a bit religious and I don't know exactly what your definition
of "creationist" is.

Someone who refuses to accept that evolution driven by natural selection
is quite capable of generating the diversity of life we see around us.

Proof?

That's a scientific claim, not a mathematical formulation, which might be
susceptible to proof.

Scientific hypotheses merely have to be falsifiable, and not yet falsified.

The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated
the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even
bother to try.

Yes indeed.

The good thing about The Blind Watchmaker is that
it uses baby steps to take you through
- the mechanisms that evolution has available
- simple examples of how they can produce complex
results
It falsifies the "complexity requires a designer"
contention that is the mainstay of creationism. Or
at least it does for someone with an open enquiring
mind.

I really hope JohnL manages to put aside his
emotional baggage, and takes the time to read the book.

I've ordered it. I couldn't finish all of The Selfish Gene. I hope his
style, and especially content, had improved some.

His style doesn't seem to have improved. His content, in both the Selfish Gene and the Blind Watchmaker, is absolutely orthodox biology, and correspondingly difficult to improve. John Larkin doesn't like actual science but that's a problem with John Larkin, rather than Richard Dawkins.

What I'm arguing here is *against* emotional baggage. The history of
biology is punctuated by the mainstream asserting that things are
impossible, that turned out to be so.

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

The "mainstream" making the assertions weren't the people doing the work, but rather people who thought that they were entitled to have opinions about it.
Few of them were as un-entitled to have opinions as John Larkin is, but the less entitled you, the more entitled you seem to feel.

Nobody here but me will even consider anything but self-replicating
RNA crawling out of promordial soup and going on to invent all the
stuff in the video. They can't allow themselves.

It's not so much that they can't allow themselves the option as that they know enough to recognise that it isn't an option. John Larkin might try to trisect angle while he's about it.

None of these guys seem to design electronics either. That also
requires allowing ideas to happen.

John Larkin doesn't seem know much about electronic design either.

That's OK, I know that I live in a world of people who refuse to
think. At least they can write purchase orders.

Some of them can even design special purpose transformers for specific jobs, rather than making excuses about it being too hard to find a local coil-winder to wind them for you.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
<fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said
that I am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate
conception thing (remember when spontaneous generation was
orthodox? You're too young) is improbable, so something else might
be considered. The response from people without ideas is
"creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

Well they though fish "spontaneously generated" from water, and flies
from rotten meat, so if they saw visible mold they'd think the same.

Folklore should have informed people that if you get hit on the head you
lose consciousness, yet it took a long time to realize that mind was the
function of the brain. The Egyptians preserved a mummy's organs in
separate jars but threw the brain away. Aristotle thought it was a
cooling system for the heart.

Folklore about contagion led to theories about "bad air" or something.

And AFAIK the Greeks didn't even think to speculate about gravity, which
is not hard to observe, but they seem not to have noticed it. They
noticed that things fall (heavy bodies fall faster, right) but didn't
wonder why.


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?



If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 12/5/19 12:49 pm, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said
that I am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate
conception thing (remember when spontaneous generation was
orthodox? You're too young) is improbable, so something else might
be considered. The response from people without ideas is
"creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

Well they though fish "spontaneously generated" from water, and flies
from rotten meat, so if they saw visible mold they'd think the same.

Folklore should have informed people that if you get hit on the head you
lose consciousness, yet it took a long time to realize that mind was the
function of the brain. The Egyptians preserved a mummy's organs in
separate jars but threw the brain away. Aristotle thought it was a
cooling system for the heart.

Folklore about contagion led to theories about "bad air" or something.

And AFAIK the Greeks didn't even think to speculate about gravity, which
is not hard to observe, but they seem not to have noticed it. They
noticed that things fall (heavy bodies fall faster, right) but didn't
wonder why.


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?



If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?

All known methods of photosynthesis rely on copper or iron atoms, that
have a high enough valency to they react with oxygen in reactions that
are reversible at reasonable energies. The potential wells of
lower-numbered elements take more than just photons to catalyze.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 12/5/19 1:04 pm, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 12/5/19 12:49 pm, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said
that I am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate
conception thing (remember when spontaneous generation was
orthodox? You're too young) is improbable, so something else might
be considered. The response from people without ideas is
"creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

Well they though fish "spontaneously generated" from water, and flies
from rotten meat, so if they saw visible mold they'd think the same.

Folklore should have informed people that if you get hit on the head you
lose consciousness, yet it took a long time to realize that mind was the
function of the brain.  The Egyptians preserved a mummy's organs in
separate jars but threw the brain away.  Aristotle thought it was a
cooling system for the heart.

Folklore about contagion led to theories about "bad air" or something.

And AFAIK the Greeks didn't even think to speculate about gravity, which
is not hard to observe, but they seem not to have noticed it.  They
noticed that things fall (heavy bodies fall faster, right) but didn't
wonder why.


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?



If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?

All known methods of photosynthesis rely on copper or iron atoms, that
have a high enough valency to they react with oxygen in reactions that
are reversible at reasonable energies. The potential wells of
lower-numbered elements take more than just photons to catalyze.

I should have said "photosynthesis and oxygen transport", i.e. in blood
as well.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 12 May 2019 15:11:40 +1000, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 12/5/19 1:04 pm, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 12/5/19 12:49 pm, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said
that I am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate
conception thing (remember when spontaneous generation was
orthodox? You're too young) is improbable, so something else might
be considered. The response from people without ideas is
"creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

Well they though fish "spontaneously generated" from water, and flies
from rotten meat, so if they saw visible mold they'd think the same.

Folklore should have informed people that if you get hit on the head you
lose consciousness, yet it took a long time to realize that mind was the
function of the brain.  The Egyptians preserved a mummy's organs in
separate jars but threw the brain away.  Aristotle thought it was a
cooling system for the heart.

Folklore about contagion led to theories about "bad air" or something.

And AFAIK the Greeks didn't even think to speculate about gravity, which
is not hard to observe, but they seem not to have noticed it.  They
noticed that things fall (heavy bodies fall faster, right) but didn't
wonder why.


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?



If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?

All known methods of photosynthesis rely on copper or iron atoms, that
have a high enough valency to they react with oxygen in reactions that
are reversible at reasonable energies. The potential wells of
lower-numbered elements take more than just photons to catalyze.

I should have said "photosynthesis and oxygen transport", i.e. in blood
as well.

All life forms in the universe must be exactly like us!

That has to be true, because all the aliens in Star Trek look a lot
like us (with some makeup maybe) and breathe our air.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 3:32:57 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 12 May 2019 15:11:40 +1000, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 12/5/19 1:04 pm, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 12/5/19 12:49 pm, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 18:25:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 11 May 2019 17:27:28 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
fizzbintuesday@that-google-mail-domain.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Absurd. I never suggested any such thing, and specifically said
that I am not invoking some diety to explain DNA-based life.

All I have suggeted is that the primordial soup immaculate
conception thing (remember when spontaneous generation was
orthodox? You're too young) is improbable, so something else might
be considered. The response from people without ideas is
"creationist!"

I think you're too young to remember spontaneous generation too.

But what are the other alternatives, at least in general terms?

I read a book about Louis Pasteur when I was a kid. It's amazing that
people didn't already understand about germs, from mere folklore.

Well they though fish "spontaneously generated" from water, and flies
from rotten meat, so if they saw visible mold they'd think the same.

Folklore should have informed people that if you get hit on the head you
lose consciousness, yet it took a long time to realize that mind was the
function of the brain.  The Egyptians preserved a mummy's organs in
separate jars but threw the brain away.  Aristotle thought it was a
cooling system for the heart.

Folklore about contagion led to theories about "bad air" or something.

And AFAIK the Greeks didn't even think to speculate about gravity, which
is not hard to observe, but they seem not to have noticed it.  They
noticed that things fall (heavy bodies fall faster, right) but didn't
wonder why.


If intelligence was involved, whether it's god or aliens, then the
intelligence still needs its origin explained.

If not intelligence, then what?



If life popped up spontaneously on Earth, a few billion years ago,
from lifeless origins, it probably popped up somewhere else billions
of years before. The universe is maybe 1e10 years old and has maybe
1e21 stars. Big numbers.

But life needs heavy elements from at least 2nd generation stars.

How do you know that?

All known methods of photosynthesis rely on copper or iron atoms, that
have a high enough valency to they react with oxygen in reactions that
are reversible at reasonable energies. The potential wells of
lower-numbered elements take more than just photons to catalyze.

I should have said "photosynthesis and oxygen transport", i.e. in blood
as well.

All life forms in the universe must be exactly like us!

That has to be true, because all the aliens in Star Trek look a lot
like us (with some makeup maybe) and breathe our air.

John Larkin might be being sarcastic, but he's gullible enough that one can't be sure.

Clifford Heath's point isn't entirely persuasive. If you string enough conjugated double bonds together in a hydrocarbon - carotenes comes to mind

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

you can get low enough energy excited states for visible light to excite electrons, whence their popularity in biological photosensors and photosynthesis.

On the other hand, bunging in transition metal elements does seem equally popular.

If terrestrial life forms could get by without the transition metal elements, they probably would - these elements aren't all that common or readily available.

Life on planets of population one stars (no transition metals or very little) might have to stick with pure carotenes, but they might have to spend so much longer evolving molecules that would work that their couple of billions years earlier start might get wiped out.

Nobody says that life evolves all that quickly, even on the metal rich planets orbiting population two stars (like the sun).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Tim Williams]

"Rick C" <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:78b56e5a-0fec-4232-a517-5ae29b2a3edb@googlegroups.com...

JL is the top poster here I'd bet. Make of that whatever you like.

I'm just reading what he writes. His words speak for themselves. He may
be the most frequent poster, but he is also the most frequent troll.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

I would dare say the frequency point emphasizes, not excuses, the troll
point. "Make of that whatever you like."

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 12 May 2019 05:42:09 -0500, "Tim Williams"
<tiwill@seventransistorlabs.com> wrote:

"Rick C" <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:78b56e5a-0fec-4232-a517-5ae29b2a3edb@googlegroups.com...

JL is the top poster here I'd bet. Make of that whatever you like.

I'm just reading what he writes. His words speak for themselves. He may
be the most frequent poster, but he is also the most frequent troll.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.


I would dare say the frequency point emphasizes, not excuses, the troll
point. "Make of that whatever you like."

Tim

There are lots of fascinating things that are analogous to electronic
systems. Control dynamics and signals-and-systems aren't always
electrical.

And the people here who know nothing about electronics need something
to have an opinion about. I guess they haven't figured out how to use
Facebook. The longest threads in sed have nothing to do with
electronics. The on-topic threads have few participants and fewer
intelligent contributors.

I spent the entire long day yesterday tuning trace impedances and
crosstalk on a giant 6-layer board. That sort of thing leaves most of
my brain free to think about other stuff.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mfmgqnc6msqh2jw/Tem_Plus_Test_39.jpg?dl=0

My discovery here is to fan out most everything with BUF602s so I can
ignore a lot of ugly termination issues. (I will now be accused of
posting on-topic.)


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

On 2019-05-12 01:02, Rick C wrote:

[..]

It's actually almost certain that there is life elsewhere in the
universe. In fact, it is nearly certain that intelligent life exists
somewhere other than Earth. It's actually much of Earth where we
have our doubts.

.... and hope there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth.
-- Monty Python, Meaning of life.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 12 May 2019 19:56:48 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2019-05-12 01:02, Rick C wrote:

[..]

It's actually almost certain that there is life elsewhere in the
universe. In fact, it is nearly certain that intelligent life exists
somewhere other than Earth. It's actually much of Earth where we
have our doubts.


... and hope there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth.
-- Monty Python, Meaning of life.

Jeroen Belleman

Do little green men have newsgroups?


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

Tom Gardner wrote:

A more interesting question is what are the chances we
will find out about it and/or converse with them, given
the timescales and distances involved.

Start with the technology. They didn't have to go the long and hard way
we followed. If they had brilliant mathematicians and were of the
hardcore "think first" nature, their way could have been like "Sunday:
we have realized that EM waves exist. Monday: started implementing a
1024 QAM global communication network". Not that implausible as it may
sound.

Best regards, Piotr

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

John Larkin wrote:

> Do little green men have newsgroups?

Do humans have newsgroups?

We have been trying to detect electromagntically active extraterrestial
forms of life since the beginning of the radio epoch, but often refuse
to notice that our own activity window is closing quickly. The era of
huge transmitters emitting easily detectable periodic signals is mostly
over, the quest for optimal bandwidth utilization makes our signals
indistinguishable from noise and they are mosty of localnature (WiFi,
cellular telephony). On top of that, the signal is scrambled for
security reasons. What's left? The over the horizon radars like Duga and
LORAN? Soon to be extinct.

Best regards, Piotr

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

Neon John wrote:

He has to know that in the US, maybe 3/4 of the population will
instantly hate him and a significant portion of those left will lose
interest in associating with him in the future.

So it is better to be liked than right? That's one approach...

I prefer "the truth will set you free".

Best regards, Piotr

 

[Piotr Wyderski]

Bill Sloman wrote:

> The creationists have to demonstrate that evolution couldn't have generated the observed level of variation in the time available, and they don't even bother to try.

What has always amazed me is the creationists' ability to claim
simultaneously that natural processes are not enough to create something
as complex as life, but seeing no problem with the existence of an
infinitely more complex entity that needs to be brought as a basis for
an "alternative explanation". In other words, life is too complex to
be created "by accident". Gods apparently aren't.

OK, evolution theory is wrong, genetics is a random fluke that happens
to work by pure accident, be that as it may. So now let's talk about a
credible theory of theogenesis...

Best regards, Piotr