DNA Code...Proof of a Divine Creator?

[excaza]

By you? Okay, explain to me why water is a liquid at 70^oF, but CO₂ (a much heavier molecule) is a gas. I find it amazing.

Water is a polar molecule, it takes more energy to separate water molecules than it does to separate carbon dioxide molecules. Basic chemistry and thermodynamics, it's nothing revolutionary.

 

[bokonon]

Water is a polar molecule, it takes more energy to separate water molecules than it does to separate carbon dioxide molecules. Basic chemistry and thermodynamics, it's nothing revolutionary.

I never said "revolutionary", I said "amazing".

While you are correct, I still think it's amazing. Carbon monoxide is also a polar molecule, but it's a gas at room temperature. Ozone is a polar molecule, much heavier than water, still a gas at room temperature. Acetone is a polar molecule, and while it's a liquid at room temperature, it boils at 56^oC, while water, a much lighter molecule, boils at 100^oC.

One of the things that makes water so unlike other polar molecules is the fact that the two hydrogens have only one electron. This makes water MORE polar than other polar molecules, and accounts for its surprisingly high boiling point for a molecule of its size.

Yes, it's a fact that liquid water, upon which life on earth depends, is abundant here (and nowhere else in the solar system, with the possible exception of Europa) and its unique properties can be explained without supernatural causes. You need not think it's amazing, but you'll have a hard time convincing me to see it any other way.

 

[temporalillusion]

Yes, really. Even one atom per cubic inch would be 99.9999999% empty, and intergalactic expanses are a lot emptier than that. InterPLANETARY expanses are a lot emptier than that.

You said no matter at all, one atom per cubic inch is not no matter at all.. Which is why I said not really. The remnant neutrino density is something like 100 neutrinos per cc. But I understand your point and agree, space is mostly empty. I think the actual density of the observable universe is like 1 atom per cubic meter or something.

Well, no, it's still amazing, since the matter didn't all clump together in one big clump, or a few big clumps that were nothing but black holes, or a few more slightly smaller clumps that were just humongous stars that subsequently became black holes when they burned out and collapsed, etc.

It didn't form one big clump because of quantum fluctuations stretched to macroscopic scales during inflation.. differences in density resulted and any area of higher density will have more gravitational pull on the surrounding stuff. You can still measure those variations in the CMBR.

So amazing meaning cool, yes. Amazing meaning improbable or inexplicable, no.

It's amazing that the clumping formed galaxies composed of stars of varying sizes about which rotated planets of various sizes and compositions at various distances.

Only amazing if you start with a perfectly uniform cloud of gas, but we didn't start with a uniform cloud, so variations of density will lead to what we see. Cool, but physics dictates this will happen.

It's amazing that stars could digest the hydrogen and helium which composed the early universe, and then puke it out to become OTHER stars and planet systems instead of just burning out and going cold. It's amazing that a cloud of hydrogen and helium of sufficient size could collapse under its own gravity to the point where it became a floating nuclear furnace in the first place.

I still don't know what you mean by amazing then, amazing in that it's very cool yes, but it's all dictated by the laws of physics.

I stand corrected. 99% of the universe TODAY still consists of nothing but hydrogen and helium, so I consider myself extremely fortunate to be living on this tiny oasis of elements OTHER than hydrogen and helium. Especially since, as far as we know, hydrogen and helium are not capable of the kinds of chemistry required to kick-start (or even sustain) life.

This is kind of like saying the water in the puddle considers itself fortunate to be in a hole so perfectly shaped like itself.

Since hydrogen and helium are not capable of the kind of chemistry required to kick start life, and the surface of our planet is, it's the opposite of amazing to find ourselves here. This is exactly where you'd expect life to arise and evolve.

It would be truly amazing if we found life among the hydrogen and helium.

The fact that such rules exist is amazing to me. The fact that atoms exist is amazing to me. You're free to adopt a ho-hum attitude toward it all, but don't pretend you know why it happened.

<snip>

Atoms exist because of the strong and electromagnetic forces, protons exist because 2 up and 1 down quark got together as the universe cooled, eventually capturing a free electron, etc etc.

Everything you talk about is a result of the nature of this universe, what you list science understands and can explain how it happened.

I don't get your point for saying all this though.. are you trying to say that there's things science doesn't understand yet? Well of course. But it's not like the things you list are crazy things that are beyond comprehension. So amazing cool, sure, but a direct result of the nature of the universe.

But set all that aside, and just tell me the "set of rules" which would cause the O2 molecule to split into a pair of O atoms, and a pair of H2 molecules to split into 4 H atoms, and the six of them somehow arrange themselves into two water molecules, way out there in the near-vacuum of interstellar space.

Well what you describe is called combustion.. If you bring those things together with enough energy, they will do what you describe, break apart and recombine into a new molecule and release heat. If you do it in a lab you use a flame to provide the energy to start it. In the interstellar medium it'll still happen, just at a much lower rate since most of the molecules won't have enough energy when they collide. But some will, I think it's called a gas phase reaction, but chemistry isn't my strong point so maybe someone else can add more info.

And there's probably lots of chemical reactions that end up with water as a byproduct, it doesn't have to be H2 and O2 flying around.

But why do you ask the question? Even if we don't know the exact answer at this point, obviously the laws of the universe allow for such things to happen... you're not saying the fact that there's interstellar water out there is a result of a supernatural force or something are you?

Or, if that's not how you think it happened, explain how you think all those ice-drenched comets got to be ice-drenched comets. I think it's amazing.

Amazing cool yes, but not amazing improbable.

By you? Okay, explain to me why water is a liquid at 70^oF, but CO₂ (a much heavier molecule) is a gas. I find it amazing.

See above.

What other word would you use than amazing in this sentence that would mean the same thing? I'm still trying to understand what you are driving hat.

You speak of "life" as though it's an agent recruiting members for its team.

That's pretty much what life does, make more life.

I agree, how abundant something is is only one factor, which is why I found noreligion's challenge to "list the abundance of elements in the universe/air/crust" to be not only wrongheaded (since what we end up with is very much different than the elements of life) but kind of pointless (since the raw elements are a necessary but far from sufficient condition for life to begin).

But the elements have to be there to begin with, so finding ourselves on the thin skin of a planet that happens to have those elements makes sense. And in the vast universe there will be many other planets like ours, even by random chance, and the nature of planets is dictated by processes far tighter than random chance.

Plus keep in mind what we find in the air/crust now is very different than what it was when life first started up.. life has modified the surface of the planet for itself very significantly over 4.5 billion years.

I disagree, but I could certainly be wrong. I think "happened only once" is a very plausible scenario.

It's a very implausible scenario.

Think of it this way, take all the variables that contribute to the likelihood of life arising on a planet... type of star, how long the star lives, type of planet, distance from sun, composition, all the events that lead up to it (geological events or whatever), etc etc.. lots of variables. Lets pretend we know all the possible values of those variables and know the outcomes, and come up with a number that is the actual probability of life arising on a planet. Unrealistic I know, but lets just pretend.

Ok so we've got our probability. Now to figure out how many times it happened we have to count the number planets in the universe.

So lets just pick pretend numbers.. say our probability is one in a thousand. Now if there's only one planet in the universe, the probability of life appearing on it is pretty small. If there are million planets in the universe then one would expect a thousand planets with life. An if there were 1000 planets one would expect one planet.

For any probability of life, there's only a narrow range of counts of planets in the universe where it's probable life only arose once, but there's a far far greater range of counts of planets that lead to more or less than one. And since there's no correlation between the number of planets in the universe and the specific probability of life on a single planet, to say that it is plausible for that probability and that count to work out to a single planet strains credulity. That's why I called it like balancing on the edge of a knife. You'd have to hand pick your probability based on the number of planets.

And that's all assuming the universe is finite, when it could very well be spatially infinite.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...
I don't know how life managed to bootstrap itself on this planet. I assume the process will be understood some day, though I doubt I'll be alive long enough to see it myself. I just think dismissing it as "inevitable" is facile and lazy. It's no such thing.

Inevitable is likely correct given that we are here. What may not be correct is the oversimplified explanation that the initial ingredients were simply amino acids in the oceans.

Did you look at my thread on the state of abiogenesis research yet. I'd love it if anyone had additional links to the current research in this field. I don't know how much time you have left in your lifetime, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss progress in this field unless you are very very old.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Oxygen: 46.6 %
Silicon: 27.7%
Aluminum: 8.1%
Iron: 5%
Calcium: 3.6%
Sodium: 2.8%
Potassium: 2.6%
Magnesium: 2.1%
Other: 1.5%

Mostly Iron and Silicon?

You left out the hydrogen. And it depends if you are measuring the atmosphere, the crust, include the oceans, or the core or all four. Because if you include the atmosphere I think there is more helium in the components as well, but I'm not positive.

 

[temporalillusion]

Yes, it's a fact that liquid water, upon which life on earth depends, is abundant here (and nowhere else in the solar system, with the possible exception of Europa) and its unique properties can be explained without supernatural causes. You need not think it's amazing, but you'll have a hard time convincing me to see it any other way.

It's abundant here because the processes of life maintain our atmosphere's composition, moderating the temperature, preventing it from boiling away.. a still strong magnetic field keeps the solar wind at bay keeping it from being blasted away.

Mars is smaller, cooled off, and a much smaller magnetic field and has lost most of its atmosphere, so most of the water is either blasted off into space or frozen underground. Venus's water boiled off because of runaway greenhouse effects. Mercury is too close to the sun, blasted clean.

The other places where there is liquid water it's protected by other circumstances. Probably Io, Ganymede and Callisto too.

Most of the solar system is too far away from the sun to have liquid water, that's not amazing that's just the inverse square relationship between distance and luminosity of light from the sun.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Where did I say anything other than life was an inevitable product of a series of chemical reactions? What you are doing is called lying. Expect no further replies from me since I do not play well with liars.

Not that I want to get involved in this tiff, but do consider people don't read meaning in any post exactly what the writer intended. It doesn't mean they are somehow intentionally trying to distort your words (lying). It could just be when you wrote one thing, the reader's brain reads it differently.

It's one of those communication problems we would all do well to be more tolerant of.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The chance that life would originate on Earth is 1.

Not necessarily. It is 100%, obviously because we are here. But it's possible early life arose more than once but eventually exchanged genes until the branches began to take direction.

Tree of Life Web Project

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I think if you'll go back and check the statement to which you replied, your reply was the first mover of the goalposts, and I was only moving them back. But setting that aside...

I've been unable to verify your assertion that UV light causes H2 and O2 to form water. I've found statements that UV light can split water in the upper atmosphere into H2 and O2, or can transform water in the presence of oxygen into H2O2, but I haven't found one which confirms that it causes H2 and O2 to combine to form water. I'm not saying that it doesn't, just that I'd like a reference. It's really beside the point, but I always welcome an opportunity to learn something new.

Discover of Water Vapor Near Orion Nebula Suggests Possible Origin of H20 in Solar System

A team of U.S. astronomers, including a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has discovered a large concentration of water vapor within a cloud of interstellar gas close to the Orion nebula.

The concentration is 20 times larger than that measured previously in other interstellar gas clouds and may provide an important clue to the origin of water in the solar system...."For reasons that aren't entirely understood, when stars are born, their birth is accompanied by a strong outward wind of gas and dust. When this outflowing material eventually impacts the surrounding gas, the shock waves that are created compress and heat the gas. The water we observe is rapidly produced in this warm dense gas."

 

[bokonon]

Inevitable is likely correct given that we are here.

Only in the sense that it was inevitable that you would submit a post to the JREF forum at 31 minutes after the hour in which the first word would be "inevitable". Yes, it happened, but there are any number of plausible alternative outcomes which could have made another word first, another time posted, or no post at all just as "inevitable". You could have been making a sandwich, or your internet connection could have gone down, or you could have chosen to start reading in a different thread. Saying that anything that has happened was "inevitable" is only true if one adopts a perverse interpretation of the meaning of "inevitable".

Did you look at my thread on the state of abiogenesis research yet. I'd love it if anyone had additional links to the current research in this field. I don't know how much time you have left in your lifetime, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss progress in this field unless you are very very old.

I did look at your link when I first encountered it. I think it's interesting, and I look forward to further developments, but from what I understood of it (and I'll admit that was a bit less than 100%) it seems like a working model of how chemical reactions could have become the first cell is still a long way off. With luck, I should still have a few decades to follow new developments, so we'll see.

 

[bokonon]

Discover of Water Vapor Near Orion Nebula Suggests Possible Origin of H20 in Solar System

So UV still not confirmed, but 200^oF + shock wave near the birth of a star is one way to get from H2 and O2 to H2O.

I think spectroscopic readings have also detected that water is created within active stars themselves.

So yes, it's not inexplicable, and it's reasonable to think that water will not be rare, but it's not as simple as "if an oxygen atom bumps into a couple of hydrogen atoms for a billion years, you're going to get water".

 

[marplots]

Because that's what they did? There are no new ideas. Everything you've ever thought of or said is built upon something said or written by someone else. It's impossible to create a completely new text. All we can do is add, substract or otherwise embellish and hope that the result is more than the sum of it's parts. That doesn't mean our words aren't our own.

Or did I read too much into what wasn't meant as a philosophical question?

I said exactly this just last week. Except I used italics.

 

[marplots]

Is abiogenesis going to one of those things (like AI) where I die before finding out how the story pans out? Cause I'm gonna be disappointed for sure.

So, if you are keeping track, I am not going to die for awhile yet.

 

[noreligion]

Not that I want to get involved in this tiff, but do consider people don't read meaning in any post exactly what the writer intended. It doesn't mean they are somehow intentionally trying to distort your words (lying). It could just be when you wrote one thing, the reader's brain reads it differently.

It's one of those communication problems we would all do well to be more tolerant of.

Life is a product of a series of chemical reactions is nothing like life arose out of a primordial ocean. I am not going to be tolerant of a moron that changes my words.

 

[tsig]

I never said "revolutionary", I said "amazing".

While you are correct, I still think it's amazing. Carbon monoxide is also a polar molecule, but it's a gas at room temperature. Ozone is a polar molecule, much heavier than water, still a gas at room temperature. Acetone is a polar molecule, and while it's a liquid at room temperature, it boils at 56^oC, while water, a much lighter molecule, boils at 100^oC.

One of the things that makes water so unlike other polar molecules is the fact that the two hydrogens have only one electron. This makes water MORE polar than other polar molecules, and accounts for its surprisingly high boiling point for a molecule of its size.

Yes, it's a fact that liquid water, upon which life on earth depends, is abundant here (and nowhere else in the solar system, with the possible exception of Europa) and its unique properties can be explained without supernatural causes. You need not think it's amazing, but you'll have a hard time convincing me to see it any other way.

You're amazed that water is wet?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Life is a product of a series of chemical reactions is nothing like life arose out of a primordial ocean. I am not going to be tolerant of a moron that changes my words.

[necessary sidetrack for communication's sake] Have you ever noted your own initial errors in interpreting someone's post upon rereading one?

I'm not familiar with your disagreements with Bokonon, and am not weighing in on this particular exchange except to point out 'lying' implies purposeful telling of a known falsehood. The vast majority of the time people accuse folks here of 'lying' and 'dishonesty' those descriptions are misnomers. It's one of my pet peeves so I apologize for butting in, but...

It's just a fact of the nature of the human brain to alter incoming information from a small to a large amount in the process of putting that information into our brains. It's also a fact of nature that most of the time the brain is totally unaware it altered the incoming information. The most common example is the brain filling in the retinal blind spot. But that same thing occurs with more complex information, not just with optical illusions.

When one reads the words written by another person, both are operating on different meaning applied to those words. If one's concept of the primordial soup is amino acids in the oceans, then one can see why that person might read "a series of chemical reactions" to be referring to the amino acids in the ocean. Your definition of "a series of chemical reactions" is obviously very different from the version where someone adds to your words extra information about the location, conditions, and which chemicals.

Was it correct to add those additional characteristics? Of course not. But was it "lying"? Very unlikely. [/sidetrack]

 

[tsig]

Not necessarily. It is 100%, obviously because we are here. But it's possible early life arose more than once but eventually exchanged genes until the branches began to take direction.

Tree of Life Web Project

My post didn't say it only originated once but that the chance was 1 that is unity or 100%.

It's one of those communication problems we would all do well to be more tolerant of.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Only in the sense that it was inevitable that you would submit a post to the JREF forum at 31 minutes after the hour in which the first word would be "inevitable". Yes, it happened, but there are any number of plausible alternative outcomes which could have made another word first, another time posted, or no post at all just as "inevitable". You could have been making a sandwich, or your internet connection could have gone down, or you could have chosen to start reading in a different thread. Saying that anything that has happened was "inevitable" is only true if one adopts a perverse interpretation of the meaning of "inevitable".

Chemical reactions are predictable and dictated by the chemicals' characteristics. Atoms coming in contact with other atoms don't act randomly. They act based on their chemical properties. The question is not settled if my actions are deterministic or by choice.

So the question becomes, how much leeway is in those precursor events and how common are the events. If abiogenesis occurs only in the most rare or exact circumstances, then abiogenesis would still be inevitable, but very rare.

I did look at your link when I first encountered it. I think it's interesting, and I look forward to further developments, but from what I understood of it (and I'll admit that was a bit less than 100%) it seems like a working model of how chemical reactions could have become the first cell is still a long way off. With luck, I should still have a few decades to follow new developments, so we'll see.

From the exponential speed of science of genetics, a few decades or less is not an inconceivable estimate.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

My post didn't say it only originated once but that the chance was 1 that is unity or 100%.

It's one of those communication problems we would all do well to be more tolerant of.

I'm perfectly tolerant. Would it be correct to call it "chance of 1"? Don't you need a denominator?

 

[noreligion]

[necessary sidetrack for communication's sake] have you ever noted your own initial errors in interpreting someone's post upon rereading one?

I'm not familiar with your disagreements with bokonon, and am not weighing in on this particular exchange except to point out 'lying' implies purposeful telling of a known falsehood. The vast majority of the time people accuse folks here of 'lying' and 'dishonesty' those descriptions are misnomers. It's one of my pet peeves so i apologize for butting in, but...

It's just a fact of the nature of the human brain to alter incoming information from a small to a large amount in the process of putting that information into our brains. It's also a fact of nature that most of the time the brain is totally unaware it altered the incoming information. The most common example is the brain filling in the retinal blind spot. But that same thing occurs with more complex information, not just with optical illusions.

When one reads the words written by another person, both are operating on different meaning applied to those words. If one's concept of the primordial soup is amino acids in the oceans, then one can see why that person might read "a series of chemical reactions" to be referring to the amino acids in the ocean. Your definition of "a series of chemical reactions" is obviously very different from the version where someone adds to your words extra information about the location, conditions, and which chemicals.

Was it correct to add those additional characteristics? Of course not. But was it "lying"? Very unlikely. [/sidetrack]

claiming i said something i didn't when it is there for everybody to see if they open their eyes is lying. You are defending the actions of a liar.