Carl Sagan got that wrong. It's not a waste of space if we are alone or among the first few. It is a testament to how important and rare life is that the universe is so big.

Of course the universe doesn't exist to form life unless this is a higher order experiment. Life is just a prominent feature of this natural law. It does operate though as if it wants to statistically get there because it will produce a variety of different environments that can have a chance to get interesting over substantial timescales that they exist, with characteristic time for chemical processes that is so much smaller and an endless place of possible friendly to rich chemistry sites per system, enabling many many experiments. I know the universe is not consciously doing that unless it is an experiment itself by a higher civilization (but then what is the origin of that civilization?) but it does appear as if complexity is its next step in the process of exploring what is possible as a synthesis.

Life is at the pyramid of higher complexity and AI will be the next step. I wish i knew what the next step after AI is in all this game.


I am near 100% sure we will know how life starts this century.

You can have a preview of how we will get there with this video i have linked before but also deserves to be in this thread;




Watch it (and the rest of the series really) and see gradually that he presents many interesting systems that his team studied that start to have intriguing properties which enable other processes that were not possible before opening new doors to other phenomena. It is is indeed all a probability ladder.

I have no idea what 'life is at the pyramid of higher complexity' really means. But there is zero evidence that higher complexity or intelligence have any survival value at all.

Also, sample size.

Good exercise Masque as always, this time I respectfully disagree though.

A couple of things:

You said: "Of course the universe doesn't exist to form life..." My question to you is: How do you know that for a fact? How you could be so sure about that?

You said: " It is a testament of how important..." Testament from whom? Important to whom? By choosing these words are you subconsciously implying/referring to a different entity, higher entity?

You didn't address at all the problem of consciousness. You didn't have to. It was not part of the OP's original question. I mentioned it in my post because I think it's a complementary question with equal importance. Do you think it is a product of evolution? Like the eye and peacock's tail I think it is not. "It is indeed all a probability ladder"? I doubt it.

Regarding your prediction "....this century", I hope you are right. So far Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", for the most part, is still pretty accurate and inspiring.

Good comment. The basic rule in the universe is less complexity, that is higher entropy. Life does the opposite, locally. I view life as kind of a parasite on the normal "dead" world. I'm more inclined to look at life as a fluke, a major aberration, than something "meant" to be.

Sample size is lousy, agreed, exactly one so far. I think you can say there can be niches for higher life forms, for example humans, but everything would have been "fine" without anything more complex than insects ever developing.

When it comes to intelligence, sample size is again one (humans), when talking about using intelligence better than many other properties. Would any monkey have dominated the world? Doubt it.

I'm more thinking that while we happen to be here we may as well try to do something with it. Otherwise nihilism would of course be an obvious choice.

But I think it's consuming energy not to even basically see life as what they say a "meaningful" thing. So much of mental structures usually making life "easier" to live.

That life on earth is a cosmic aberration was the conclusion of a research conducted by Spiegel and Turner. That may or may not be true. If I am not mistaken, at one point Spiegel also said the data on early life on earth becomes ambiguous.

The dinosaurs were around for maybe 100x longer than humans have been, but ultimately mass didn't prove a successful evolutionary path. I'm thinking more bacteria and viruses as the world dominators rather than mammals.

They exceed us in biomass and have been around a very, very long time in a huge diversity of habitats.

Don't forget the plants and fungi of course.

I'm siding with masque here that we may find out how it probably happened. Creating new life from scratch in the lab maybe 100-1000 times, then trying to guide it in the direction it actually went, with RNA, DNA and proteins etc. At least we will get a probability function for how it might have happened, of course with the more probable alternatives in the front. There may even be one alternative that will appear to be the absolutely most plausible, of course too early to tell.

Whether we will find life elsewhere will have an "impact" also on how life on earth might have emerged, at least to some degree, guiding potentially fruitful research options.

I didn't have a problem with his prediction. As I said I hope that he is right. No disagreement here. I always have considered you a good guy and knowledgeable poster.

On a humorous note: If someone chooses to believe that life is an aberration, it's his/her prerogative. Myself, well....I am not going to be so hard on myself.

As a former member of the IDA (doors.org), I find that the Wikipedia page on doors isn't entirely unhelpful in ambiogenesis of entryway blockage devices.

This probably bends the non-overlapping magisterial of SMP and RTG, but it is important to note that PVC strip doors, not to be confused with strip clubs and the Pittsburgh Strip District, are the most certain proof that evil and badness exist in the world.

Is the Las Vegas Strip low life? What if everything started there?

The jury is still out on whether silicon-based life forms started here

I always thought that this is a Science, Math, and Philosophy forum not a low content one..... just kidding.