Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out

Apr 21, 2020
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I have been a Pediatrician for 44 years. Every time I see a newborn baby I find the traditional view of how life formed to be lacking. That view holds that somehow inert molecules through random collision joined together to form peptides and precursors which somehow eventually formed actual living entities. A newborn baby has perhaps 20 trillion cells or more, each cell is a factory unto itself. While I have no idea how life formed, and I think it is largely unknowable, it does strike me as utterly miraculous. And by the way, even if somehow this happened somewhere else, the sheer time and space coordinates make it just about impossible we would ever cross paths.
 
Dec 3, 2019
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Being a pediatrician or some other kind of medical specialist doesn't necessarily make you qualified to make any conclusions about the origins of life beyond purely subjective or fanciful speculation unless your main focus of study is (paleo)biology and/or biochemistry. It is a well-known fact of anthropology that humans have tended to relegate anything they don't understand or anything that is not readily observable by their senses to the realm of the supernatural, i.e., myth and religion.

As for the article at hand, if this author is right that life may be a one-off in the observable Universe, imagine how improbable INTELLIGENT life with a potential for highly developed technological civilization is even in the entire Universe.
 
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Apr 21, 2020
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"I wouldn't be with you if you were the last man on Earth!", she said. He said, "So you're saying there's a chance!".

I'm not a scientist, but in my mind, if the universe is infinite in size, then all possibilities in nature (provided they obey the laws of physics) are being played out somewhere in the universe. The more probable they are, the more frequently they show up in any given finite part (observable) of the universe.

Figuring out how may take us some time, but our mere existence says our existence is possible. Our rarity indicates how improbable our existence or another like ours in our observable is. Maybe in someone else's observable, there are multiple beings interacting with one another (in a galaxy far, far away).

Or, God did it.
 
Apr 21, 2020
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Being a pediatrician or some other kind of medical specialist doesn't necessarily make you qualified to make any conclusions about the origins of life beyond purely subjective or fanciful speculation unless your main focus of study is (paleo)biology and/or biochemistry. It is a well-known fact of anthropology that humans have tended to relegate anything they don't understand or anything that is not readily observable by their senses to the realm of the supernatural, i.e., myth and religion.

As for the article at hand, if this author is right that life may be a one-off in the observable Universe, imagine how improbable INTELLIGENT life with a potential for highly developed technological civilization is even in the entire Universe.

I don't know why you felt it necessary to take a gratuitous shot at my profession, but it is typical of online posts. My profession has allowed me to observe brand new babies for decades, I am simply saying that the traditional scientific explanation for life doesn't quite work for me. I haven't replaced it with a guy in the clouds you know. It's all speculation on everyone's part. I have read the scientific record all my life and I find it inadequate to explain cellular life.
 
Dec 10, 2019
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I fully believe that Dr.Dave is as good of an authority as ANYBODY when it comes to ideas about the origin of life. Besides, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Dave gave any conclusions at all, What he DID do (for me) was to say that even though he has had at least 7 or more years studying his profession, and 44 more years PRACTICING his profession, that he still finds life to be miraculous and current theories to be lacking. I totally agree.

Until scientists actually create LIFE in a lab, there is only FAITH in their theories. And evolution itself *IS* miraculous *EDIT*. Complex biological entities that are programmed to improve themselves through genetic mutation of their offspring, whose predecessors came from basic non living elements *sounds like fantasy,* For anybody to say that anybody's ideas or theories on *the origins of life* are in the realm of the supernatural, mythical, or religious, is total hypocrisy. I'm not religious, and I definitely don't condone the idea of scientists simply saying "god did it"...on anything. Yet I find high value in the fact that a scientifically minded and educated medical professional can still be amazed by a new born baby.
 
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Dec 10, 2019
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"I wouldn't be with you if you were the last man on Earth!", she said. He said, "So you're saying there's a chance!".

I'm not a scientist, but in my mind, if the universe is infinite in size, then all possibilities in nature (provided they obey the laws of physics) are being played out somewhere in the universe. The more probable they are, the more frequently they show up in any given finite part (observable) of the universe.

Figuring out how may take us some time, but our mere existence says our existence is possible. Our rarity indicates how improbable our existence or another like ours in our observable is. Maybe in someone else's observable, there are multiple beings interacting with one another (in a galaxy far, far away).

Or, God did it.
I don't know if "infinity" is very scientific...I know that it sucks at math
 
Apr 21, 2020
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I appreciate the shout out from Sylas. I am not a slouch by the way. I was taught biochemistry in medical school at NYU by Dr. Severo Ochoa, a Nobel Prize winning biochemist from Spain. I believe in evolution. But science has been trying to say that the process of evolution somehow applies to the origin of life, and it really doesn't. Somehow a cell has to come into existence. The smallest particles which qualify as living are RNA viruses (like Corona virus). They have a protein jacket and a piece of RNA which is in charge of the virus particle. But a cell is a very complex entity with a nucleus, cytoplasm, organelles, and by the way it has DNA and RNA repair enzymes--where did they come from? Not knowing the answer doesn't make me religious. But it still fires my imagination each time I hold a new baby. That baby started as a zygote the size of the head of a pin. In that fertilized egg is a blueprint to synthesize a human being, pretty much correctly every time. As Einstein said , if you ask me if I believe in a personal God the answer is no, but if you ask me how I feel about the mysteries of life, I am a deeply spiritual man.
 
I don't believe that randomness and probability exist. I believe that natural interactions are 100% predicable.

But living molecules have choice. The un-predictability of this choice, has led to the concept of probability and randomness........even though that choice was not random.

Our existence is within an unbreakable order.
 
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Apr 22, 2020
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Being a pediatrician or some other kind of medical specialist doesn't necessarily make you qualified to make any conclusions about the origins of life beyond purely subjective or fanciful speculation unless your main focus of study is (paleo)biology and/or biochemistry. It is a well-known fact of anthropology that humans have tended to relegate anything they don't understand or anything that is not readily observable by their senses to the realm of the supernatural, i.e., myth and religion.

As for the article at hand, if this author is right that life may be a one-off in the observable Universe, imagine how improbable INTELLIGENT life with a potential for highly developed technological civilization is even in the entire Universe.

At the present time the fields of Archaeology and Paleontology are dominated by the dogma of Darwinian Evolution. Modern observations have shown that many nanomachines cannot be explained by evolution. Also, the Cambrian Explosion proves that evolution did not occur. What you are missing is what our beautiful doctor is saying to you: there is something miraculous about the origin of life, a miracle that he has witnessed in his profession. You think you may know something, well, tell me if you comprehend what it means for the universe to be as many as 100 billion light years in diameter. If you claim that you comprehend such a distance, I would suggest that you are fooling yourself. You need to appreciate what the good doctor is saying to you.
 
Apr 22, 2020
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I appreciate the shout out from Sylas. I am not a slouch by the way. I was taught biochemistry in medical school at NYU by Dr. Severo Ochoa, a Nobel Prize winning biochemist from Spain. I believe in evolution. But science has been trying to say that the process of evolution somehow applies to the origin of life, and it really doesn't. Somehow a cell has to come into existence. The smallest particles which qualify as living are RNA viruses (like Corona virus). They have a protein jacket and a piece of RNA which is in charge of the virus particle. But a cell is a very complex entity with a nucleus, cytoplasm, organelles, and by the way it has DNA and RNA repair enzymes--where did they come from? Not knowing the answer doesn't make me religious. But it still fires my imagination each time I hold a new baby. That baby started as a zygote the size of the head of a pin. In that fertilized egg is a blueprint to synthesize a human being, pretty much correctly every time. As Einstein said , if you ask me if I believe in a personal God the answer is no, but if you ask me how I feel about the mysteries of life, I am a deeply spiritual man.

Attaboy, Dr. Dave. You have experienced the birth of life personally and your experience is wonderful to hear about. Unfortunately, Darwinism has created secular humanism, which demands a materialistic explanation of life and the universe. Why was Socrates a Wise Man: Because he knew that he did not know.
 
Apr 22, 2020
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Is anyone else overwhelmed by the conclusion that we are completely alone, a random outcome of forces we do not understand, whose existence is of utter inconsequence to the Universe (at the risk of sounding cliched, seems like I read this in existentialist literature 40 years ago)? I believe this should be brought home to human beings who abuse their environment and waste the infinite possibilities inherent in existence. I guess human beings have the task of proving the Universe wrong.
 
Dec 10, 2019
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Is anyone else overwhelmed by the conclusion that we are completely alone, a random outcome of forces we do not understand, whose existence is of utter inconsequence to the Universe (at the risk of sounding cliched, seems like I read this in existentialist literature 40 years ago)? I believe this should be brought home to human beings who abuse their environment and waste the infinite possibilities inherent in existence. I guess human beings have the task of proving the Universe wrong.
Yes, I was troubled by the fact that we have yet to detect and/or confirm signals or other evidence of intelligent life from space. The reason I was troubled is because I am fascinated by, and have thoroughly studied the many UFO reports/sightings from the past 75 years. After reading "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects: The Original 1956 Edition" by former Project Blue Book Director Edward J. Ruppelt, it altered my perception of the reality of UFOs. It wasn't just the book, but all the other really well documented occurrences that convinced me. There are but a handful:

The 1952 Washington DC "flap" in which a press conference was given by Major General John Samford. In that press conference he did not explain the recent flyover of our most sacred no fly zone by unidentified flying objects. He simply stated that "most sightings can be explained as weather, planets, etc"...But then he says " there is a small percentage of incredible sightings, witnessed by credible observers." That was the last time the USA officially talked about UFOs. The video is on YouTube and is a must see for UFO enthusiasts. Another fascinating sighting was by a man named Clarence "Kelly" Johnson in 1953, who at the time was head of Lockheed Skunkworks, and probably the most qualified person on the planet to identify clouds vs aircraft. There are more, but my point is that the UFOs were really there...causing a mismatch with me because I naturally associated the UFOs with ET.

I don't have an answer, but I've come to accept that SOME UFOs could possibly be ET..or time travelers from future Earth? Maybe the saucers were just like the dendritic cells in our own bodies, here to inspect "infections" by the numerous nuclear bomb tests going on in that era? Perhaps these were aircraft from a different dimension..also responding to nuclear explosions? We haven't even scratched the surface of knowing all there is to know in the universe, so I wouldn't discount ET just yet. NASA states that we will find them within the next 20 years. Now the real troubling prospect is that we confirm we're alone in 20 years, and then WE die out shorty after that.
 
Apr 22, 2020
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Being a pediatrician or some other kind of medical specialist doesn't necessarily make you qualified to make any conclusions about the origins of life beyond purely subjective or fanciful speculation unless your main focus of study is (paleo)biology and/or biochemistry. It is a well-known fact of anthropology that humans have tended to relegate anything they don't understand or anything that is not readily observable by their senses to the realm of the supernatural, i.e., myth and religion.

As for the article at hand, if this author is right that life may be a one-off in the observable Universe, imagine how improbable INTELLIGENT life with a potential for highly developed technological civilization is even in the entire Universe.

If the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has taught us anything is that life here 'is' a gamble, an evolutionary one (I know how terrible it sounds but pandemics are nature's way of cleaning house). By the law of averages though, a one-off does not make sense in an almost infinite universe. I prefer to think of it in terms of the double-slit experiment (superposition) which suggests that our reality may be something other than what it appears to be.
 
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I don't know why you felt it necessary to take a gratuitous shot at my profession, but it is typical of online posts. My profession has allowed me to observe brand new babies for decades, I am simply saying that the traditional scientific explanation for life doesn't quite work for me. I haven't replaced it with a guy in the clouds you know. It's all speculation on everyone's part. I have read the scientific record all my life and I find it inadequate to explain cellular life.
May I refer you to Aron Ra's Abiogenisis series? The ones that don't specificly target creationist claims, but the ones that explain it.
But complexity doesn't nessicarily mean it wasn't natural processes, you should know that as a pediatrican looking at that baby relizing that complicated processes are going on inside it, but it came from a mother's womb by natural process.
 
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Yes, I was troubled by the fact that we have yet to detect and/or confirm signals or other evidence of intelligent life from space. The reason I was troubled is because I am fascinated by, and have thoroughly studied the many UFO reports/sightings from the past 75 years. After reading "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects: The Original 1956 Edition" by former Project Blue Book Director Edward J. Ruppelt, it altered my perception of the reality of UFOs. It wasn't just the book, but all the other really well documented occurrences that convinced me. There are but a handful:

The 1952 Washington DC "flap" in which a press conference was given by Major General John Samford. In that press conference he did not explain the recent flyover of our most sacred no fly zone by unidentified flying objects. He simply stated that "most sightings can be explained as weather, planets, etc"...But then he says " there is a small percentage of incredible sightings, witnessed by credible observers." That was the last time the USA officially talked about UFOs. The video is on YouTube and is a must see for UFO enthusiasts. Another fascinating sighting was by a man named Clarence "Kelly" Johnson in 1953, who at the time was head of Lockheed Skunkworks, and probably the most qualified person on the planet to identify clouds vs aircraft. There are more, but my point is that the UFOs were really there...causing a mismatch with me because I naturally associated the UFOs with ET.

I don't have an answer, but I've come to accept that SOME UFOs could possibly be ET..or time travelers from future Earth? Maybe the saucers were just like the dendritic cells in our own bodies, here to inspect "infections" by the numerous nuclear bomb tests going on in that era? Perhaps these were aircraft from a different dimension..also responding to nuclear explosions? We haven't even scratched the surface of knowing all there is to know in the universe, so I wouldn't discount ET just yet. NASA states that we will find them within the next 20 years. Now the real troubling prospect is that we confirm we're alone in 20 years, and then WE die out shorty after that.
True, true, UFOs are just flying things we don't know the origin of.
 
I don't believe that randomness and probability exist. I believe that natural interactions are 100% predicable.

But living molecules have choice. The un-predictability of this choice, has led to the concept of probability and randomness........even though that choice was not random.

Our existence is within an unbreakable order.
Have you considered quantum randomness and Hiesenburg's uncertainty principle? Quantum mechanics disproves that claim. The last sentence seems philisophical in nature.
 
At the present time the fields of Archaeology and Paleontology are dominated by the dogma of Darwinian Evolution. Modern observations have shown that many nanomachines cannot be explained by evolution. Also, the Cambrian Explosion proves that evolution did not occur. What you are missing is what our beautiful doctor is saying to you: there is something miraculous about the origin of life, a miracle that he has witnessed in his profession. You think you may know something, well, tell me if you comprehend what it means for the universe to be as many as 100 billion light years in diameter. If you claim that you comprehend such a distance, I would suggest that you are fooling yourself. You need to appreciate what the good doctor is saying to you.
Please provide a link to a paper that supports the nanomachines claim
 
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I fully believe that Dr.Dave is as good of an authority as ANYBODY when it comes to ideas about the origin of life. Besides, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Dave gave any conclusions at all, What he DID do (for me) was to say that even though he has had at least 7 or more years studying his profession, and 44 more years PRACTICING his profession, that he still finds life to be miraculous and current theories to be lacking. I totally agree.

Until scientists actually create LIFE in a lab, there is only FAITH in their theories. And evolution itself WOULD be miraculous if it's all true. Complex biological entities that are programmed to improve themselves through genetic mutation of their offspring, whose predecessors came from basic non living elements? For anybody to say that anybody's ideas or theories on this topic are in the realm of the supernatural, mythical, or religious, is total hypocrisy. I'm not religious, and I definitely don't condone the idea of scientists simply saying "god did it"...on anything. Yet I find high value in the fact that a scientifically minded and educated medical professional can still be amazed by a new born baby.
We have created many steps in the process of developing reproducing molecules. It wasn't a single event it was a gradual one. Evolution is the change in Allele frequency in a poputlation. Abiogeneisis is very different.
 
Have you considered quantum randomness and Hiesenburg's uncertainty principle? Quantum mechanics disproves that claim. The last sentence seems philisophical in nature.


I have never been able to understand, why someone who has measured quanta, the exact same quanta, everywhere in the universe, thru-out all time.........and then reason it with randomness and uncertainty.

The charged particle is the only physical entity in our universe. It's a very sure thing.

It's exact. The spec is rock solid. All other structures come from this pillar.

A variable pi structure can explain the unique quantum levels and the transition between them.

This model was the zenith of classical physics. A physical cause for all measured properties.

I do not believe in philosophy, I believe in mechanical motion.
 
I have never been able to understand, why someone who has measured quanta, the exact same quanta, everywhere in the universe, thru-out all time.........and then reason it with randomness and uncertainty.

The charged particle is the only physical entity in our universe. It's a very sure thing.

It's exact. The spec is rock solid. All other structures come from this pillar.

A variable pi structure can explain the unique quantum levels and the transition between them.

This model was the zenith of classical physics. A physical cause for all measured properties.

I do not believe in philosophy, I believe in mechanical motion.
Classical theories were thrown out when we began our delve into the quantum. I belive some places have double slit experiments you can watch. When everything reopens, of course. The reason we can't exactly measure quanta is because of Hiesenburg's uncertainty principle. I recomend my favorite book Einstien's Dice and Shrodinger's Cat on the subject of the transition to the quantum.
 
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I have a feeling that the current concept of light, will be known as the greatest mistake in science history.

I believe EM propagation is very different to what we have been taught.
 
Apr 23, 2020
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I have been a Pediatrician for 44 years. Every time I see a newborn baby I find the traditional view of how life formed to be lacking. That view holds that somehow inert molecules through random collision joined together to form peptides and precursors which somehow eventually formed actual living entities. A newborn baby has perhaps 20 trillion cells or more, each cell is a factory unto itself. While I have no idea how life formed, and I think it is largely unknowable, it does strike me as utterly miraculous. And by the way, even if somehow this happened somewhere else, the sheer time and space coordinates make it just about impossible we would ever cross paths.


Good for you Doc. Don't know why Internet people always get so aggressive. People should respect each other's beliefs. My background is in condensed matter physics so I'm not an expert on the topic but I'm also amazed by life and things I have seen in my research. As a Christian though, I believe the beginning of the universe started with God. Evolution and related topics are things that I also believe in but overall, there is a lot more work we need to do to get answers about life on earth. It is possible we may never know.
 
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If the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has taught us anything is that life here 'is' a gamble, an evolutionary one (I know how terrible it sounds but pandemics are nature's way of cleaning house). By the law of averages though, a one-off does not make sense in an almost infinite universe. I prefer to think of it in terms of the double-slit experiment (superposition) which suggests that our reality may be something other than what it appears to be.

it very well may be something other that what it appears to be. Humans really don't know much at all and I think it is arrogant when a person claims to know the mysteries of life and the universe because they read a science article or two on the Internet. One of the things in physics that we always stick in research is "material evidence" but I wish some scientists these days dabbled in philosophical topics such as metaphysics like scientists of the past.