From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Mon Sep 16 2002 - 01:25:46 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Avatar Polymorph [mailto:avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, 16 September 2002 13:37
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Re: Postsingularity civilizations interceding on a lesser's
> behalf...
>
>
> Eugen Leitle: wrote in response to my statement "Because life
> started on
> Earth as soon as it could..."
>
> This statement is basically invalid due to anthropic effect.
> You're the
> (currently) end result of that process. If you exist clearly your
> predecessors did exist. It's all backwards entangled in the bias.
>
> Avatar Polymorph: True. But my points relates not to life
> starting here and
> us being here to comment on it but the timing of life
> starting. If life
> started later - after general conditions became appropriate -
> then the
> chemical probabilities of DNA formation etc. would be lower,
> as argued by
> many, and we COULD be the only occurence in the universe - at
> least by some
> people's calculations. But if it starts as soon as the
> general conditions
> start, then the probability of it existing elsewhere where general
> conditions have been present for billions of years before
> they were on
> Earth increases. A stronger counter argument would have to
> revolve around
> the effects of the Earth-Moon collision/re-formation right at
> the start
> including its effects on the core and the magnetosphere and therefore
> radiation and atmosphere (and also the tides). However, this argument
> doesn't convince me in regards to unicellular life.
All of the evidence is based on 1 sample - us. Did life start as soon as
possible? Maybe it started uncharacteristically quickly, because of a freak
accident. Maybe there was a 1 in a zillion chance that life would kick off
as early as it did, but it did anyway. We can't tell, because whatever the
probabilities, we are the only successful outcome that we know of, and we
don't know of any failures.
But that's just the anthropic effect. The moon has squat to do with it.
I read an interesting proposal by Paul Davies in one of his books, that life
may have arisen multiple times, mostly independently, during the bombardment
of earth 4 billion years ago; I think he took some of the weirdo
extremophiles as evidence (can't remember). If he were right about that,
then you'd have some solid evidence for life arising easily.
The filter paradox always leads me to believe that it might be really very
uncommon for higher life to arise. I think this is because I don't much care
for the alternatives :-)
Emlyn
***************************************************************************
Confidentiality: The contents of this email are confidential and are
intended only for the named recipient. If the reader of this e-mail is not
the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any use, reproduction,
disclosure or distribution of the information contained in the e-mail is
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please reply to us
immediately and delete the document.
Viruses: Any loss/damage incurred by using this material is not the sender's
responsibility. Our entire liability will be limited to resupplying the
material. No warranty is made that this material is free from computer virus
or other defect.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:03 MST