Mostly observations followed by extrapolation, self evident data, and a vague resistance to state any unknown. Then more words on a page followed by something we could have guessed 50 years ago.
Not bad, the problem though that exists for some, is that the self evident data particularly such certainties as the evolution of life on Earth, or the possibility of Panspermia, and the possibility that their "god" is something like a slime mould from another planet, interfers with their preconceived mythical beliefs. Anyway back onto science. An associated article to the OP...... http://phys.org/news/2015-08-interstellar-seeds-oases-life.html Interstellar seeds could create oases of life August 27, 2015 We only have one example of a planet with life: Earth. But within the next generation, it should become possible to detect signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars. If we find alien life, new questions will arise. For example, did that life arise spontaneously? Or could it have spread from elsewhere? If life crossed the vast gulf of interstellar space long ago, how would we tell? New research by Harvard astrophysicists shows that if life can travel between the stars (a process called panspermia), it would spread in a characteristic pattern that we could potentially identify. "In our theory clusters of life form, grow, and overlap like bubbles in a pot of boiling water," says lead author Henry Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). There are two basic ways for life to spread beyond its host star. The first would be via natural processes such as gravitational slingshotting of asteroids or comets. The second would be for intelligent life to deliberately travel outward. The paper does not deal with how panspermia occurs. It simply asks: if it does occur, could we detect it? In principle, the answer is yes. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-interstellar-seeds-oases-life.html#jCp I am attracted to Panspermia and believe that concrete evidence for that process, just maybe around the corner. god a slime mould. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The mind boggles!
You said "...this is what the public have to believe..." They were saying that decades ago about fission, and we are now powering our world with fission. Would you have had them stop exploring fission power?
Not can - does, and is. You've gotten a little off-track. Tim's point was not about fusion - or even fission. It was about the Higg's particle. He seems to be criticizing the usefulness of studying it (though I can't be sure). I was simply pointing out that his cynicism over new discoveries would, in an earlier decade, about another technology, have quashed the nuclear power we depend on today.
Good. Now we can get back on-topic. I've never really understood the rationale for the panspermia hypothesis. What problems are there that it attempts to propose a solution to? Life started within .5Gy of Earth's cooling. Panspermia doesn't change that.
Fission was from natural process, there was a constant breakdown of uranium, This case is you have to add energy and a lot of energy to reduce the atom into its components
I'm tempted to further this side-discussion, but I don't see how this is the appropriate place to do so. I don't see any connection to the thread topic. So I'm going to reluctantly drop the side-discussion so as not to derail the thread.
Agreed ... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! While the theory of evolution is beyond doubt, how that life started is still debatable.....Panspermia is one possibility. While we are probably 90% certain life does not now exist on Mars, we cannot say that in the distant past when surface liquid water may have been available and a warmer climate with substantial atmosphere may have supported minimal life. The first bit of evidence pointing to "Panspermia" was the famous "ALH84001" found in Antarctica. Not strong by any means, as we all nkow extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that bit of rock with its "flimsy" evidence, is just not strong enough. It appeals to me simply by the fact that it is relatively easy for life to spread on Earth, and even the probes that have been sent to Mars, have been extraordinarily scrupulously cleaned of earth contaminants and microbes that may have decided to hitch a ride to the red Planet and contaminating a possible pristine environment.
Yeah. It's just that it seems to do little more than push the timeline annd distance back by an unknown amount without accomlishing much - a 'turtles all the way down' rationale. In fact, it sort of moves abiogenesis from a nearby hospitable environment - to a distant (possibily very distant) and (statistically) much less hospitable environment.
If the appearance of life is at least in part a function of elapsed time, then it would obviously become more likely the more time is available for it to happen. So if the Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old, while the universe is more than 10 billion years old, life might arguably be more likely on older planets that have been around longer. And it might arguably become more likely far in the future, since more time will have elapsed for it to happen. Those conclusions just seem kind of obvious. Calculating numbers seems to largely be an exercise in speculation. (It reminds me of the Drake equation for SETI.) We don't really know how life originated, how likely it was, or how long it took. Is Earth-life totally unique in the universe, or does something like it appear pretty much everywhere conditions are right? Current evidence suggests ( but doesn't prove) that life appeared on Earth very early, back in the Hadean era only a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. If that's so, then either life forms very quickly, or else life isn't native to the Earth and arrived here from somewhere else. If it forms very quickly, then it might not be as unlikely as people (like me) might think. If life isn't unlikely and forms quickly, then it might be pretty much anywhere, regardless of how old a planet is. If life is seeded on planets by some sort of panspermia, then it might be pretty much anywhere, regardless of how old a planet is. We just don't know.
I believe that indirect chemical evidence (isotope concentrations in Australian zircons) suggests that life may have existed on Earth as far back as 4.1 billion years. That's the 'hellish' Hadean eon in which the surface of the Earth was still cooling and recovering from the planetary impact with a Mars-sized body that is hypothesized to have created the Moon. In other words, the Earth might not have had a solid surface stable enough for life to form for much of the time previous to life's first appearance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis This new evidence would put the origin of life on Earth prior to the Late Heavy Bombardment that pocked the Moon with its craters and probably involved tens of thousands of 'planet killer' asteroid impacts on Earth. So, if the evidence for the early appearance of life I just mentioned up above is true, either the earliest life would have had to have somehow survived the LHB, or else life will have had to have originated on Earth more than once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment The point is that if life seemingly appeared on Earth very early in its history, in an eon in which the Earth's crust was newly solidified and when the Earth was still subject to constant asteroid bombardment, then there would have been little opportunity for prebiotic evolution of simpler chemical replicators to result in the origin of the first procaryotic cell. The alternative to a lengthy prebiotic process would seem to be the idea that bacterial life originated all-at-once, by some hugely improbable leap from a bunch of chemicals in a hypothetical "primordial soup" to a fully-formed cell, complete with its molecular genetics, chemical metabolism, cellular anatomy and everything else. That's like blowing up a pile of building materials with a bomb and expecting the explosion to produce a house. (Bacteria are vastly more complex than houses.) It might not be absolutely impossible, but the probabilities would be so low as to effectively be the same thing. Addy Pross says in his 'What is Life - How Chemistry Becomes Biology' (2012, Oxford U. Press) p. xi, "The simple truth is that the most basic living system, a bacterial cell, is a highly organized far-from-equilibrium functional system, which in a thermodynamic sense mimics the operation of a refrigerator, but is orders of magnitude more complex. The refrigerator involves the cooperative interaction of at most several dozen components, whereas a bacterial cell involves the interaction of thousands of different molecules and molecular aggregates, some of enormous complexity themselves, all within a network of thousands of synchronized chemical reactions." Moving the origin of life elsewhere, earlier in the universe's history, supplies time, time in which the origin of the first cells could have happened more incrementally, step-by-step, through evolution operating on pre-biological chemical replicators. That's the advantage of panspermia. The disadvantage is explaining how life made its way here.
I have to pretty much concur with you, DaveC426913, on the "push(ing) back" view. Truth is, that as a Civilization, as far as our Knowledge of the Science of Life, or the True Mechanics of the Origination of any Form of Life - be that life limited to the "as we know it" or not - is, at best, mediocre, when realistically viewed on any "Cosmic" scale. As I have opined before on this subject, even though it is in no way my "belief" : There is the distinct possibility that "life" is somehow "inherent" in or to or with the basic chemical building blocks of the universe.
But perhaps we have more hospitable environments within the galaxy/Universe that the so far limited statistics show. Remember only a couple of decades or so ago, extra solar planets were only hypothetical. And over that same period strong observational evidence that space in general, contains all the "ingredients" of life particularly with water, which appears to be everywhere we damn well look! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I agree that at this stage, mainstream science has not yet accepted the hard core claims of modern panspermia, that whole cells seeded life on Earth. [the god would have something to say about that in that I'm holding a view not yet generally accepted by mainstream! "shock, horror!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!"] But again I have read somewhere, where cosmologists/Astrobiologists are confident of finding strong evidence for Panspermia in the near future. It would kill two birds with one stone, being that life did not first evolve on Earth, and that it certainly does exist throughout the galaxy/Universe. Then of course we do have that other hypothetical..."Life, as we don't know it" Anyway it certainly seems that we are in for bright and Interesting times ahead with the discovery of new extra solar planets, the improved ability to test and check any atmospheres on them and the composition of those atmospheres, and any signatures of ETI.
The reason I mention statistically is because the vast majority of everything in the galaxy is hard vacuum - and what isn't is mostly fusing hydrogen. And the iota that aren't either are still at tthe bottom of deep gravity wells, etc. Those count as obstacles - huge ones. Like saying this one foot puddle at the bottom of a 60 foot ditch in the middle of the Sahara might have been populated by another one-foot puddle at the bottom of a 60-foot ditch elsewhere - oh, and if the Sahara were 10 million miles across. And there was no rain. Or water table. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Since we are making all sort of quotation , allow me to quote from Genesis 1 9 to 13 note especially verse 11 to me implies as if the land had life before . Note I am not preaching just quoting from an ancient book. 9 And God said, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
If you forget that bible is a religious book , It is an ancient writing with some information . Why would you then discard the information. We in reality don't know much on the past what those living people have seen or how they become informed. You rely on zircon information , but this is only a deduction to the direction to what you want to believe How about if I ask how did thorium appeared on the planed Earth what will be the scientific answer The problem with you guy that you believe the so called scientific information is infallible , yet I or you can see changing from year to year. Our wisdom have not discovered as how the Incas have cut large stones to fit , We are not sure how the pyramid of Egypt were put together . We say agriculture started 9000 years ago , yet man crossed the Bering strait supposedly 14000 years ago , that means pre agricultural time , but the South American indian cultivated potato prior the European arrived . So how teal is the time for agriculture 9000 years ? There are many more questions which are obscure
