Life

[Sexton Blake]

Just yesterday I read a post on another forum saying that only God can create life.

 

The bible has a ridiculous God who has only been around for a few thousand years, making a pile of dirt into a living human being, though not actually making it flesh.

 

The post was of course based on an old book of fairy tales and a total ignorance of science.

 

Go down small enough to the molecular scale and nothing is alive. It is all UNLIVING chemical elements and compounds like you may find in glass jars.

 

The smallest viruses are said to sometimes be alive and sometimes not. They are at the boundary between living and not living things.

 

It is only at large scales like the world around us that we see what we call "life", that we see complex reactions happening.

 

Over four billion years, these reactions have become increasingly complex.

 

Computers use just 0's and 1's computer code. Some of you may have written your own programmes on the most basic of computers 40 years ago. If A = 1, goto line 20. If A = 2, goto line 21. If A = 3, goto line 22 and so on. From that we have created artificial intelligences as computer mechanically evolved and got ever more intricate using millions of lines of code.

 

So with life, though we cannot be sure how the first life started but we have some good ideas:

 

https://phys.org/news/2015-03-chemists-riddle-life-began-earth.html

 

and it looks like life could exist under the surface of Mars (Methane released every Martian summer), and few would be surprised to find life under the surface of some moons, in the clouds of Venus, etc.

 

We have increasingly found the ingredients for life in clouds of complex molecules in deep space and we know the early Earth was bombarded by such chemicals in meteorites as well as getting more and the necessary heat from volcanic vents deep under the oceans.

 

It is believed it took hundreds of millions of years on a mainly water covered planet full of organic and inorganic chemicals to form the first life, which could have been a simple catalyst.

 

There are just four basic molecules in RNA and the later DNA from just five common elements in a zillion different configurations to produce all living things and scientists have created their own XNA:

 

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

 

From which one day we may make life like nothing we have ever seen before.

 

I worked in a lab long ago and we used an acid bath to clean glass of unwanted viruses, bacteria, etc but though it was very caustic, we had to change it regularly as molds, etc started growing in the strong acid.

 

We now know of extremophiles. Microscopic life that can live in boiling acids, in water at 400C (vents in the ocean), in nuclear reactors, in a vacuum, deep underground, etc. Once life gets started, it is difficult to eradicate and as we see with the China virus, Covid 19, it can very quickly mutate into other forms.

 

So with the first life. Like catching flu or whatever, you start with just a few viruses and next thing you know, you have trillions of them.

.

 

[pantheory]

3 hours ago, Sexton Blake said:

Just yesterday I read a post on another forum saying that only God can create life.

 

The bible has a ridiculous God who has only been around for a few thousand years, making a pile of dirt into a living human being, though not actually making it flesh.

 

The post was of course based on an old book of fairy tales and a total ignorance of science.

 

Go down small enough to the molecular scale and nothing is alive. It is all UNLIVING chemical elements and compounds like you may find in glass jars.

 

It is only at large scales like the world around us that we see what we call "life", that we see complex reactions happening.

 

Over four billion years, these reactions have become increasingly complex.

 

Computers use just 0's and 1's computer code. Some of you may have written your own programmes on the most basic of computers 40 years ago. If A = 1, goto line 20. If A = 2, goto line 21. If A = 3, goto line 22 and so on. From that we have created artificial intelligences as computer mechanically evolved and got ever more intricate using millions of lines of code.

 

So with life, though we cannot be sure how the first life started but we have some good ideas:

 

https://phys.org/news/2015-03-chemists-riddle-life-began-earth.html

 

and it looks like life could exist under the surface of Mars (Methane released every Martian summer), and few would be surprised to find life under the surface of some moons, in the clouds of Venus, etc.

 

We have increasingly found the ingredients for life in clouds of complex molecules in deep space and we know the early Earth was bombarded by such chemicals in meteorites as well as getting more and the necessary heat from volcanic vents deep under the oceans.

 

It is believed it took hundreds of millions of years on a mainly water covered planet full of organic and inorganic chemicals to form the first life, which could have been a simple catalyst.

 

There are just four basic molecules in RNA and the later DNA from just five common elements in a zillion different configurations to produce all living things and scientists have created their own XNA:

 

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

 

From which one day we may make life like nothing we have ever seen before.

 

I worked in a lab long ago and we used an acid bath to clean glass of unwanted viruses, bacteria, etc but though it was very caustic, we had to change it regularly as molds, etc started growing in the strong acid.

 

We now know of extremophiles. Microscopic life that can live in boiling acids, in water at 400C (vents in the ocean), in nuclear reactors, in a vacuum, deep underground, etc. Once life gets started, it is difficult to eradicate and as we see with the China virus, Covid 19, it can very quickly mutate into other forms.

 

So with the first life. Like catching flu or whatever, you start with just a few viruses and next thing you know, you have trillions of them.

.

 

 

Yes, life is amazing and very interesting. After all, we are also talking about ourselves. 

 

If we're talking common sense, the creation of life in Genesis is just another of the great many fairy tales in the Bible.

 

We have a bunch of science theories attempting to explain the beginnings of life on Earth. And theories trying to explain how life could have started away in space or another planet, then it raining down on us in the very beginnings of life on Earth. These theories are called Panspermia. And as you said, our lab attempts have created XNA, but it has not produced life of any kind that eats and reproduces itself. Even the simplest life on Earth is still very complicated. I would guess that we will find life on Mars underground somewhere, and that that life will be more closely related to life on Earth, than being something unique. There have been many asteroid and comet collisions here on Earth that could have sent Earth life elsewhere in our solar system.

 

For life, I think a key ingredient of it is potential energy which creates change and perpetuates the motions within it. For example, you take a human and stop the heart via shock for an hour, you have all the same ingredients but there is no life there. The difference between life and non-life is the perpetuation of metabolism and motion, which is a function of its potential energy and time. Bacteria of some types can be preserved for millions of years, then put it back in its  environment and it will re-animate as life. It's potential energy is expressed again.

 

Yeah, viruses are a little different story. We know of no viruses that can self replicate without the mechanisms of cells of living organisms, so I expect they evolved form cellular life.

 

As you , I  also did basic programming using General Electric's Basic language more than 40 years ago. Also Bill Gates said he began his programming carrier with that same language, which he said was about at age 16 for him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

If Adam is made of dirt, his name should have been Claude...