Post by Ryan Maue
You may have seen the breathless coverage on Fox News of the alien life discovery from NASA’s Dr. Hoover — in some fancy meteorite. The “exclusive” nature of the discovery was hailed as evidence that we are not alone. Last week, we discovered that tangentially with the self-professed origination of Charlie Sheen from Mars. Anyhow, Adrian Chen at Gawker has found that this research is hardly new, and simply an update or recycling of claims made since 2004 by Dr. Hoover:
So, we’re calling bull$h%t on Richard Hoover’s discovery, and Fox News’ ‘exclusive’. Maybe Hoover really has found life (probably not). But it’s not news, and it’s far, far from certain.
However, in his zeal to dismiss Fox News as a propaganda outlet for NASA, or engaging in tabloid journalism, I guess Chen missed Andrew Revkin’s piece over at the NY Times:
The buzz is building over a paper by Richard Hoover, an award-winning astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, concluding that filaments and other features found in the interior of three specimens of a rare class of meteorite appear to be fossils of a life form strongly resembling cyanobacteria.
While this so-called discovery may be entirely correct, perhaps Hoover should have called up the Union of Concerned Scientists instead of Fox News in order to peddle his wares. Revkin publishes first then promises to follow up later:
Rudy Schild, the journal’s editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the paper that reactions to the research, “both pro and con,” will be published on the journal’s Web site between March 7 and 10. I’ll check back in then of course, and I’m reaching out to Hoover and others working in this field now.
Is this a legitimate press release by a scientist with a profound new discovery or another example of “science by press release”? We report, you decide — or you follow up on your own, as in the case of the Ole Gray Lady. Alternatively, just use Google and find a very similar press release from 2004:
Evidence for Indigenous Microfossils in a Carbonaceous Meteorite
Also, don’t forget the discovery and undiscovery of new planets in our galaxy (October 12, 2010). Supposed new planet 20-light years away has been undiscovered
Is it just me or does the picture at the beginning of this article look a lot like this picture from the movie “The Abyss”?
NTI Water Tentacle:
http://www.rankopedia.com/CandidatePix/94914.gif
Why were these two comments snipped? I was so intrigued by the suggestion that the genetic code of terrestrial animals contains the code of all (most? many?) of the other animals that I quoted them to the biologists in the family. Seems to me that idea also has some relevance to the topic of panspermia that permeates (as it were) this thread. Did the moderator think it took us into the ID debate? I didn’t.
/Mr Lynn
Addendum: Well, I see that CTM also snipped John McDonald’s post of March 6, 2011 at 9:50 pm, which did claim that Darwinian evolution “was proved mathematically wrong,” and the other two were responses to that. But, but— They were really interesting responses! I wouldn’t have snipped the trio, and I am sympathetic to Anthony’s rule, having gotten imbroigled in fruitless ID/evolution debates elsewhere.
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn,
“Addendum: Well, I see that CTM also snipped John McDonald’s post of March 6, 2011 at 9:50 pm, which did claim that Darwinian evolution “was proved mathematically wrong,” and the other two were responses to that.”
I’ve just seen the snip and was scratching my head – I couldn’t remember what I’d posted. Your comment jogged my memory. I guess it was off topic, but I felt it was also a valid attempt at a refutation.
I will try to keep this post low-snark, despite my instincts (which is another reason I don’t post very often), but I find it tragi-comic that an attempt was made to exclude religious discussion on this topic, which is almost entirely religious in nature.
Most of the arguing, even outside the specific disallowed controversy, seems very faith-based to me.
Firstly, statistics are used to determine the likelihood of future events, not events that have already happened. I run into this in medicine sometimes, a doctor’s response to, for example, a complaint of a medicine’s side-effect will be that it is “rare.” That, of course, does not address the issue at all, to the point of insulting the patient – it’s like telling someone who has a severe peanut allergy that their condition is so rare that they should eat peanuts.
Clearly the original article is ambiguous enough to invite controversy and needs further study. If no one else wants to study it, we may have to wait a while, but statistics doesn’t really enter into it, the objects are or are not micro-fossils regardless of past experiences.
The second most common major flaw in the argument so far is the rather surprising certainty on the part of some as to the difficulties of future deep space travel and the likely behavior of alien civilizations, two things that we have only the vaguest guesses about (UFO Contactees left out of the discussion for the moment).
It could be that current ideas are predictive and there are no new discoveries waiting, and that travel over great distances will be prohibitively expensive or one-way. It could also be that someone finds a clever method of reducing that expense to make the action practical, we just don’t know yet. Wild guesses.
As to the behavior of aliens, we can’t even predict the behavior of our neighbors, and they’re the same species. The correct answer is the terrifying phrase, “I don’t know.”
It is kind of interesting seeing how some topics turn otherwise rational people to “questionable” arguments almost instantly.
If the goal is to avoid divisive, faith-based arguments, the entire topic of life outside of Earth may have to be avoided, because everywhere I’ve seen it discussed, the discussion largely followed this pattern. We’re kind of like people who have yet to discover metalworking trying to design a skyscraper.
D. Patterson says:
March 7, 2011 at 8:15 am
The step between amino acids to a prokaryote is like the step between wood and graphite to the Library of Congress. Naturally occuring chemistry has not been shown capable of even making the step of turning amino acids into the simplest of widgets made of protein. This would be analogous to making pen, pencil, and paper out of wood and graphite which is itself still very far removed from developing an alphabet, words, syntax, and then stringing it all together into a meaningful tome.
I’d at least be a bit more inclined to believe that happened by law & chance alone if every comet in every solar system in the entire milky way were organic chemistry labs cooking up chemical precursors of living things but I’d still find it far less likely than a volcano spitting out a chunk of molten rock that hardened into a perfect replica of the faces of presidents carved into Mount Rushmore.
Most people have very little inkling of how complex is the basic machinery contained within the simplest known free living organism. Machines don’t just pop up out of nowhere. The very idea is absurd yet it’s widely accepted that it just happened by accident. It’s the biggest argument from ignorance ever conceived – no direct observation of any agency that could have constructed the most complex machinery known to man so it must have been a result of a random dance of atoms, law, and chance. Ignorance cubed. Non sequitur!
No, but it is also possible that (as Smokey postulated in the other thread), given 92 elements and enough energy (and time), you might inevitably end up with life: there may be an inherent tendency toward organization in the Universe. At this point we just don’t know enough to even begin to answer the question of how (and where) life originated. The only problem I have is with those who would shut off inquiry (and speculation) by pronouncing the question ‘settled’, or even worse, ‘unanswerable’.
/Mr Lynn
dp says:
March 6, 2011 at 8:01 pm
“Seriously – life of this kind would exist for what purpose?”
According to mainstream ToE (theory of evolution) life doesn’t have a purpose. It simply exists because law and chance happened to cobble it together. Evolution doesn’t plan for the future. That requires a mind capable of abstraction. Evolution is a process of trial and error with feedback (no planning!). The feedback consists of genetic memory where successful trials are recorded and passed along to offspring. The error part is degraded reproductive success. The trials are random recombination (sexual reproduction which randomly mixes alleles from two parents) and random errors in copying DNA. None of these things is able to envisage possible futures and select for them. Evolution is reactive not proactive.
Brian H says:
March 6, 2011 at 7:12 pm
re; The Fermi Paradox
There are a number of unknown factors in the Drake Equation which could explain why we aren’t swimming in aliens. For that matter we may not be native to this planet.
Anyhow, popular solutions to the Drake Equation you don’t mention relates to the average length of time that civilizations at our technologic level persist. One solution says that they all annihilate themselves before they progress to the point of being able to colonize other solar systems. Another solution supposes that once they reach our level of technology its a short time before they change themselves into something that no longer lives on mudballs like the earth or in bodies made of meat. Either of these possibilities seems reasonable based on our history so far.
Mr Lynn says:
March 6, 2011 at 5:36 pm
re; evolution isn’t random
Mutations are ostensibly random with respect to fitness. Evolution isn’t predictive. Evolution isn’t proactive. Evolution is reactive. It’s a process of trial and error with feedback.
Mr Lynn says:
March 8, 2011 at 3:03 pm
“No, but it is also possible that (as Smokey postulated in the other thread), given 92 elements and enough energy (and time), you might inevitably end up with life:”
Given enough time it isn’t just possible it’s inevitable. A finite number of monkeys banging away randomly in typewriters for an infinite length of time will no just reproduce the works of Shakespeare they’ll reproduce them an infinite number of times with an infinite number of variations.
The universe isn’t generally considered to be spatially or temporally infinite.
“there may be an inherent tendency toward organization in the Universe.”
The hypothetical self-organizing nature is a minority hypothesis called process structuralism. It isn’t popular with the dominant Darwinian lobby and subscribers to it generally get their Friends of Charles Darwin membership card cancelled (along with any hope of publication in mainstream journals or being awarded tenure in any secular university).
IMO the most interesting reading isn’t what biologists think of evolution but rather what mathmaticians and physicists have to say as these are the go-to guys when it comes to what can be reasonably accomplished by law & chance.
Theoretical physicists don’t puzzle so much over the probability of self-organization of life. They puzzle over how a finely tuned universe that allows any kind of organization at all to persist came to be by pure happenstance. This is referred to as the “fine tuning problem”.
Here’s an article I wrote a few years ago commenting on a particularly frank admission from a very prominent physicist (in an unexpected source) about the current thinking with regard to the fine tuning problem:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/after-40-years-of-silence-analog-magazine-finally-tackles-intelligent-design/
Physicist Carl Frederick writes:
Frederick then quotes Lee Smolen (another prominent theoretical physicist) describing the four possible solutions to the fine tuning problem:
I’m quite sure the largest number of very intelligent people argue for schema one but that one is generally excluded by modern fashion from the definition of “science”. I’m not convinced it should be as it seems to be a religious argument that god (or God, or gods) is/are untouchable by science and will forever remain that way. That would seem to depend on the nature of the deity and if that nature is being characterized without evidence to support the characterization then that makes it a religious opinion not a scientific opinion.
Mutations may be random, but natural selection is not, at least from the perspective of the organism. “Trial and error” can be channeled quite severely.
/Mr Lynn
Since with a little energy and a few elements you can get amino acids, it shouldn’t take so awfully long (by cosmological standards) to generate even more complexity, especially if there were some inherent factors in elementary particles or some substratum that encouraged organization in energetic environments. This alone says nothing about subsequent evolution, though it might, too.
Cf. Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker
Ours was but one of his cosmoses.
/Mr Lynn
Mr. Lynn: “Since with a little energy and a few elements you can get amino acids, it shouldn’t take so awfully long (by cosmological standards) to generate even more complexity, especially if there were some inherent factors in elementary particles or some substratum that encouraged organization in energetic environments.”
Generating some amino acids is a question of having a small number of the right molecules in close proximity, coming together in a reaction, and I think you are right that there is good evidence that generating many kinds of amino acids is a relatively simple process. Would you propose a similar process for the structures of the first life, such as proteins, DNA/RNA, metabolic pathways, cellular structures? And if so, by what law or process would the amino acids join together to form these more complex structures?
I’m struggling to understand what “inherent factors in elementary particles” would encourage organization (beyond the known interactions of physics and chemistry). What kinds of factors did you have in mind, and would those factors always be operational, or could they be switched on and off?
I wish I knew. Back in the 19th century, writers used to speculate about a ‘life force’, that somehow infused inanimate matter and gave it the energy of life. We still face a gap (which Dave Springer has described well) between simple organic molecules and the extraordinary organization of the genetic code and even the simplest living entities we know of now. It is a narrower gap, but still large and unbridgeable. So what if there were a ‘built-in’ factor at the most elementary level that, given the right conditions, encouraged the organization of ever-more complex, information-storing molecules?
Beyond this simplistic science-fiction speculation, I have no idea. Perhaps there is a line of research that could put flesh on this bone, which we could call ‘the missing anti-entropic factor’. I do think it a cop-out to give up and attribute it all to some hypothetical Star Maker—though nothing is impossible, not even that.
/Mr Lynn
Mr. Longstaff,
Looking at your original comment, you said, “However (and relating to a point earlier in this thread) material from our own planet could have reached all of these other planets [within 100 ly] within about 70,000 years, and vice versa.”
Again, this is patently false. The Voyager 1 probe achieved a peak velocity six times greater than Earth escape velocity, and significantly greater than Solar escape velocity, and still won’t go a mere 4.2 light years in less than 73,000 years.
It is physically impossible for an object from Earth’s surface to be blasted off its surface by the natural impact of another object in solar orbit at sufficiently high velocity to escape the Solar gravity well. The law of conservation of momentum dictates this.
The only possibility would be if an Earth-originating asteroid were boosted out to the neighborhood of Jupiter, happened to accidentally make the same perfect maneuvers Voyager 1 made to slingshot past Jupiter, gaining velocity from its gravity, from there threading the needle on a similar slingshot past Saturn. The odds of all these events occurring successfully are incredibly unlikely.
Mike Lorrey says: March 9, 2011 at 4:09 am
Agreed – see my post @ur momisugly 3.35pm, 6th March: “BTW, I think that my figure of 70kyr was wrong – should have been 700kyr -however this adds nothing to the discussion”.
The point that I was trying to make is that it is theoretically possible (with slingshots) for planetary ejecta to traverse 100 ly within the timeframe of life on Earth. The point that I hoped others would pick up on was the 100 ly communication limit with an equivalent technology, as I was never certain this was correct (I have since seen claims that the “Arecibo message” in 1974 could be detected over most of the galaxy (given time) – but never the calculation).
Re. my earlier post, “…over most of the galaxy” should have been “over galactic distances”.
Mr Lynn: “I wish I knew. Back in the 19th century, writers used to speculate about a ‘life force’, that somehow infused inanimate matter and gave it the energy of life. We still face a gap (which Dave Springer has described well) between simple organic molecules and the extraordinary organization of the genetic code and even the simplest living entities we know of now. It is a narrower gap, but still large and unbridgeable. So what if there were a ‘built-in’ factor at the most elementary level that, given the right conditions, encouraged the organization of ever-more complex, information-storing molecules?”
We may view the gap in a slightly different light, but I don’t think it is any smaller now than it was then. Indeed, in many instances, we have a much better appreciation now for just how massive the gap really is. I agree with you that it appears seemingly unbridgeable.
Incidentally, I’m not sure how the concept of a “built in factor at the most elementary level” differs from the 19th century concept of a “life force.” Seems awfully similar — certainly in the sense that it is little more than a speculation that there is some mysterious as-yet-undiscovered factor responsible for life.
I’m not taking you to task for not knowing, I’m just trying to see if we can think through the idea a bit to see if it has any legs. What kind of entity/thing could cause the organization of complex, information-specific molecules? Apparently such an entity/thing doesn’t constantly perform its work in all cases under all circumstances, so what kind of switching mechanism turns it on/off?
“I do think it a cop-out to give up and attribute it all to some hypothetical Star Maker—though nothing is impossible, not even that.”
I do think it is a cop-out to give up and attribute it all to some hypthetical “built-in factor” of matter that we have no reason to believe exists.
The 19th century writers certainly didn’t understand the makeup of life too well, but at least their basic observation was correct that life possesses some special property that inanimate matter doesn’t. We now know that that special property is information. So the fundamental question for us now is, where does information come from?