Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids Dust that Japan's Hayabusa2 probe returned to Earth from asteroid Ryugu reportedly contain 20 amino acids, according to Japanese media. Which is very exciting indeed, because amino acids are the stuff of life. They help to build proteins, act as neurotransmitters in the brain, and are utterly ubiquitous and essential in …
Big assumption, though, given that there are potentially thousands of amino acids:
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-proteinogenic_amino_acids"
If the 20 found were limited to the same tiny subset of "amino acids that are known to form proteins in Earth-based life", it would be statistically impossible that it was a coincidence and would have profound implications!!
...it would be statistically impossible that it was a coincidence and would have profound implications
It would be conclusive proof that God is also sick of religious nut bags, salted the comet, and wants them to just leave him alone and go bug Richard Dawkins for a change.
This ties in with a new experiment that showed that basaltic glass can promote RNA molecules to form. The next step will be to see if it can also promote the formation of RNA 'letters' from amino acids.
https://www.science.org/content/article/did-volcanic-glasses-help-spark-early-life
Go boffins.
Journalistic exuberance vs. scientific accuracy...
That been said, it is indeed interesting to know that the spare parts of life are readily available, and any planet so inclined can potentially assemble some in his backyard.
There are obviously always the "so inclined" or the "potentially" parts, but it tells us nevertheless that carbon-based life might be easier to create than we initially thought.
.... that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. The only questions are how much, how evolved, and how far.
Our best guess is that intelligent, technically advanced life is rare enough that the nearest is far enough away that they haven’t noticed us, or their reply has not arrived yet, both depend on the speed of light and the inverse square law.
It is possible that we might find non-intelligent life within our solar system, but as a previous poster implied there are a limited number of places left that we believe might harbour it.
.... alternatively, if we are living in a simulation (aka The Matrix), then the fact that the nearest solar system is (currently) beyond our reach and that we have not observed life outside of our solar system may just be devices employed by the programmer of the simulation to simplify things so that they don’t have to expend much computing power beyond our solar system.
This means that we could just be some school science project!
programmer of the simulation
Makes you wonder what sort of universe the 'programmer of the simulation' exists in, or is he in fact also in a recursive simulation.
The Recursive Universe, Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
The expression "A load of old cobblers" means something is meaningless or in some way not relevant. Apparently Cockney slang "Cobbler's awls" euphemism for "balls" (testes).
Young cobollers aren't yet realistic enough, ironic enough, sarcastic enough, nor paranoid enough, to be universes.
There are young cobollers, I mentor a few. But they are a dying breed. Be afraid. Very afraid ...
Young cobollers aren't yet realistic enough, ironic enough, sarcastic enough, nor paranoid enough, to be universes.There are young cobollers, I mentor a few. But they are a dying breed. Be afraid. Very afraid ... ... jake
Things are significantly fundamentally changed then, jake, if one realises new cobollers are a rare novel core ore breed of raw terrifying talents and resources unafraid of dying .... and some are not too young to be masters and mistresses of universes.
As for the need/the seed and the feed that anything/anyone be afraid, very afraid, is surely wholly dependent upon the computed result of one’s future likely worth extrapolated from one’s past and present base metadata profiles being known to relevant caretaker/gatekeeper authorities/agencies/entities equipped with both awesome and awful abilities and positively inclined to clinically exercise them.
Some things are naturally just not worth saving whenever they are recognised and realised toxic and designedly decidedly deadly, and as a scourge in a swarm to be purged in an endless series of almighty cleansing storms, their fully deserved fate ........ as adjudged by that and/or those enabled by the above.
It is certainly not the only option but it is one of the most sensible of simply complex solutions. Or would that be something to be endlessly argued over, time after time, again and again too .... by humans?
One of the probable effects of being in a simulation would be that when you start looking at extremely small/large interval/scales/movements, in fact most measurable values, you are going to run into upper and lower limits beyond which it is impossible to measure. And these are likely to be the limits of the stored values for position, velocity, charge, etc. for the system that is being used to run the simulation.
Due to this you are likely to observe differences in the laws of a simulated Universe at very small/large scales, increasing the closer you get to the limits of the stored values.
I'm just glad that we don't see such effects in our own Uni ..... Oh! Did someone mention the Planck Scale? And I think someone else is muttering about Quantum Mechanics! And I'm sure I heard time dilation in there somewhere!
"Our best guess is that intelligent, technically advanced life is rare enough"
IMHO, 'intelligent' and 'technically advanced' are independent variables. There are quite a few creatures in this planet that exhibit advanced intelligence but do not employ what we would consider to be 'technologies', and indeed there's plenty of evidence of high intelligence among 'primitive' and 'early' peoples - quite possibly at least as high as ours. Otherwise they would not have survived in much more hazardous environments than we face, despite their technologies being very 'low'.
One of the best evidences of high intelligence could indeed be existing contentedly with minimal technological footprint - and it might in fact be the safest option for survival as a species.
Not disagreeing with that at all. But technologically advanced lifeforms will be several orders of magnitude easier for us to spot, or for them to spot us.
And in the long run not having technology is a sure fire way to extinction as well. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Humanity will not be around on those sort of timescales, or at least not as anything we would recognise. We're fast approaching the point where (if we don't make ourselves extinction) we will start modifying ourselves into some uber-post-homo-sapien species where we tinker with ourselves genetically or cybernetically according to our needs.
How about the antifreeze-like blood of the wood frog. That might be a shortcut to cryo sleep, allowing us to build slow boats to other solar systems.
Or the regeneration from starfish, allowing limbs to be regrown.
Or the water handling capability of a camel, allowing you to survive for weeks without access to water.
One thing I'm sure of is that much of the human genome is redundant code, and when we truly start to understand it we should be able to rip out all of that junk dna to come up with a human 2.0.
.
But then all I really said was that the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have an advanced enough space industry. I never said that I thought that humans had a better long term survival strategy than them.
I think that when you compare humanity to the dinosaurs we will be the candle that burns twice as bright, but burns for half as long. I'm just glad to be alive at a time when I can have this sort of discussion with someone who may be on the other side of the planet!
>> One thing I'm sure of is that much of the human genome is redundant code, and when we truly start to understand it we should be able to rip out all of that junk dna to come up with a human 2.0.
But you also need to remember, that a lot of the "junk" DNA is basically "do not store the heart in the scrotum".
"[...] when we truly start to understand it we should be able to rip out all of that junk dna to come up with a human 2.0."
The number of times in my long career when someone has said after a failure "but that bit of code didn't seem to do anything".
It is not unusual to hear someone had corrected "an obvious code error" - that was there to reverse the effect of another error. If it ain't broke........
Human life can't last forever because it (the universe) existed priorly without human life. Assuming an inifinite life for the universe then human life's finite duration is effectively zero compared to an infinity. Thus we never existed anyway. So much for the strong anthropic principle.
...if humanity survives for more than approximately another 164 million...
Not really comparing like with like, there were a zillion dinosaur species and I doubt if any species around at the start were still there when it started raining rocks. A better comparison would if Mammals last for 164my.*
Homo Sapiens, assuming we don't completely bugger up our habitat, is still unlikely to remain unchanged over those sorts of timescales.
* Mammals first emerged about 210my ago so as a species we have outlived the dinosaurs **
** But birds are direct descendents of dinosaurs so maybe mammals still have a bit to catch up.
And in the long run not having technology is a sure fire way to extinction as well. Just ask the dinosaurs.
A surprisingly good read with a very emotional scene at one point. I read it first many years ago, sadly also a little too topical again.
"plenty of evidence of high intelligence among 'primitive' and 'early' peoples - quite possibly at least as high as ours."
Uh, dude, you do realize that if you brought a baby in from the pate paleolithic and raised it as a modern child, chances are good nobody would know the difference between him and his peers. Look up "anatomically modern human", and try to remember that includes the brain. Even among old stone-age humans.
> 'intelligent' and 'technically advanced' are independent variables
Totally. "Technical advanced" means too lazy to forage all day for a meager meal and freeze your backside off every night (and all of the cold season). "Intelligent" means being able to analyze a situation and find potential solutions to a problem.
You need intelligence for technical advancement, but technical advance doesn't require intelligence to work, as you might observe day after day in real life. Will a cow become intelligent if you give her an iPhone? No, she will just not stand out when she walks into a Starbucks (other hip franchises available).
Humans originated in an environment to which evolution had adapted them. Small groups who needed to forage for only part of the day - in a year round natural cornucopia.They still used their human intelligence to organise their lives.
Moving outside that environment required technology to maintain an adaptation. Populations expanded with farming - and that also brought hardships in both daily life, natural disasters, and wars.
Well yeah. If that meteorite hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs here on Earth, who knows what the dominant species would be right now. Changes in the atmosphere might have made such large beasts less favourable, but would small mammals have got a foothold? Intelligent (I'm giving us human that label as a matter of courtesy) life could have taken many millions more years to evolve without that upset. Maybe life on other planets is still happily eating what it wants, when it wants, and pooping anywhere it wants. (insert Luton joke)
"Well yeah. If that meteorite hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs here on Earth, who knows what the dominant species would be right now."
Dinosaurs were "in charge" for many, many millions of years. Longer than humans have been around. On the other hand, if a similar asteroid hit Earth today, what evidence would there be of human civilisation to be found 65,000,000 years from now?
> if a similar asteroid hit Earth today, what evidence would there be of human civilisation to be found 65,000,000 years from now?
None. The next dominant species would be insects or fishes or whatever.
We love to flatter ourselves on being the crown of creation the whole universe has carefully been working towards, but in reality we're just another species among many: Here today, gone tomorrow.
Meteorite, Yellowstone supervolcano, WWIII, a lot can happen to wipe us from existence, especially since we're now so desperately dependent on our fragile globalized technology.
65,000,000 years, I imagine nothing would be left. The plastics we created would have degraded, the structures weathered and rotted away. Maybe some of the stuff we left on the Moon would survive, but 65,000,000 years is a long time. Although I do have a couple of fossilised sharks teeth, which are over 5M years old. Could something from now be preserved like that?
"Could something from now be preserved like that?"
I presume that since we are finding fossilised dinosaurs from well over 100 m years ago, that future civilisations could find some trace of fossilised humans 65 m years from now.
Similarly there might be some form of process that can preserve some human artifacts, or traces thereof, for that time span
Yes and no: We are probably more numerous than dinosaurs, but on the other hand we tend to stay away from bogs and swamps and tar pits, so the chances our skeletons might get fossilized are probably slimmer than those of the dinosaurs. You don't fossilize on concrete.
Paleontologists from the future (assuming they exist) will certainly find the odd partial human skeleton here and there, maybe even some miraculously preserved artifacts (the pyramids more likely than a laptop), but not much more. In our scale, it would be like remains from the Cretaceous–Paleogene limit.
Any statistician worth their salt would say:
a. a sample of one is insufficient evidence upon which to reliably make any kind of probability prediction.
That doesn't stop said statistician having a personal view, it's just may not be one they can backup with good statistical analysis.
I suppose I should have said a gambler rather than a statistician.
A gambler would take that sample of one and say that the chances of life evolving around a star are greater than zero. Then they would multiply that value by the 400+ billion stars in our (medium sized) galaxy. And then by the 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. He'll then realise that if the chances of life evolving are even 1 in 1020 then there should be another half dozen examples of life out there somewhere. And they would quite happily go all in on odds like that.
Which is fine for a gamble, but in the end it is a gamble based on assumptions and without any knowledge of the actual probabilities, so a gamble indeed.
For all we know 'life'1 is as common as muck, OTOH the entire universe2 may be the statistical requirement for a single example of 'life' to exist.
Or, somewhere in between.
We don't know.
---
1. 'life' - I assume we are talking about 'intelligent life' (whatever that means).
2. important to discount the 'size indicates significance' fallacy—the fact that there are lots of stars does not necessarily indicate any correlation with 'lots of life', nor that the fact that 'life on Earth' is an astronomically small portion of the 'universe' that it is necessarily 'insignificant'.
".... that there is life elsewhere in the Universe."
First problem is to define life.
The second is to work out what steps have to be undergone to create the sub-systems it needs in a pre-biotic situation.
The next is to bring those subsystems them together. Not only do they have to have come about in the same place but also at the same time. It's no use, for example, if an energy handling system comes about after all the amino acid/nucleotide stuff has developed but fallen apart because something destructive has happened to the components.
They have to come together in a way that enables them to function together.
They also have to survive whatever changes that befall their planet including what they evolve into; the development of green plants, for instance, was a big threat to earlier life forms because it released free oxygen for the first ime, which is very poisonous to life that can't cope with that.
Although life as we know it is very good at perpetuating the otherwise improbable it is, itself, extremely unlikely.
As far as I can see the traditional statistical argument has been there are a lot of suitably sized planets (whatever suitably sized might mean) in the habitable zone and we know life started here on Earth (so how can might it be?) so there must be lots out there and where are they? Well, we know of one: here, us. Without looking at the individual requirements, estimating their likelihood (not easy, I'd have thought) and combining them there isn't a realistic assessment of how likely it is that eliminates observer bias.
What we do know is that simple single celled life emerged almost as soon as the Earth had cooled down enough and was wet enough to allow life.
This suggests that if the conditions are favourable simple life will emerge.
However getting from pond slime to theoretical physicists is probably really tricky requiring millions if not billions of years of a relatively benign climate and that crucial step from single celled to multi celled which took a bloody long time in our sample of one.
Actually it is, fossils of cyanobacteria from Archaean rocks of western Australia are dated to 3.5 billion years old.
The oldest rocks are just 3.8by old so just a 300my gap between rock formation and the earliest known life which is not all that long on geological scales.
Joni Mitchell would probably be gratified, as she suggested this in 1969 (Woodstock). And indeed Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī made reference to a suggestion broadly along these lines in the thirteenth century CE. Admittedly (rather like Lucretius' touching on atomic theory) he was not being scientific in the modern sense (nor was Joni), but the idea has clearly been tantalising thinking minds for centuries, so it's great that some evidence is emerging to potentially support its validity.
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"Nature published research suggesting that amino acids had a crucial role in the evolution of the first self-replicating molecules."
What that actually says is that RNA can act as a catalyst is joining random amino acids together to make peptides. It's not self replicating but it is an important step in showing how one of the important subsystems of life, translation of nucleic acid sequences into proteins, could have evolved given the appropriate components.
Aminos labeled "space dust" and "star dust" and the like were being sold as human supplements by quacks back in the '70s. This was after it was confirmed that the Murchison Meteorite did, indeed, contain aminos in 1971, which (naturally) was all over the news. I remember my dad commenting on how fast the charlatans picked up the idea.
The 20 or so amino acids used by life on Earth are just a fraction of the possible amino acids, most of which are not used. E.g. we use only alpha-amino acids, with the amino (NH2) group attached to the same carbon atom as the carboxyl (COOH) group. Then there is the question, are the ones found 'left-handed' or 'right-handed' stereoisomers?
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