exchemist

Yes, for me the spark was kindled at about the age of seven by Lincoln Barnett's book version of "The World We Live In", which had wonderful panoramas of the creatures of each geological period - plus a completely wrong (pre-plate tectonics) account of mountain-building.

Er, well, I do have a degree in chemistry, in the course of which I learned a fair amount about chemical thermodynamics. So yeah I think I do have some understanding of the entropy of chemical systems, actually. I do not assume anything "appeared from thin air". A lot of work has been done on the likely origins of the various building blocks of life. (I've read a bit of it, but it's a fast-moving field and I don't pretend to have kept up with it all.) But you are flailing around so wildly now that it is impossible to discern what point you are really trying to make. The fact is that chemical reactions are repeatable. So your original argument that nothing in nature repeats itself is patently false. If you want to argue that life can't have arisen anywhere else, you will need a far better argument than hogwash like that.

The Earth formed ~4.5bn years ago. The earliest signs of life we have date from about 3.5bn years ago. So it took less than a billion years, apparently. I don't understand what point about entropy you are trying to make. The entropy of a given chemical reaction is a fixed thing. It is the same now as it was 3.5bn years ago.

I really do not understand why you keep repeating this falsehood: "lesser complex reactions are not observed to produce the same thing twice " They do produce the same thing, repeatedly. If they didn't, there would be no science of chemistry. Where do you get this silly nonsense from?

"Biology" is just what biochemistry produces. There can be different "biologies", based on different biochemistries. For instance, there might be a different system for inheritance that didn't use a molecule like our DNA. It might involve different base pairs, or not use base pairs as a coding mechanism at all. Its metabolic biochemistry might not use ATP as a carrier of energy for reactions inside the cell. It could differ from our biology in countless ways. But, so long as it produced biochemical systems that replicated and passed on their characteristics to the next generation, you would get evolution....and then more complex life forms would come into being. As for chemical intent to become life, no, I do not suggest that. But life did arise here on Earth and there is no reason to think the conditions on the early Earth are unique in all the universe. A similar process, if not an identical one, can certainly have taken place elsewhere.

Yes this criticism has a point. It seems to me that the deepest mystery of all about the universe is where the order in it (what we call the "laws of nature", though actually the laws are just our models of the order, as we perceive it) comes from. As far as science can go , it "just is". We have to accept it as a given. Rather interestingly, it seems that, to Einstein and Spinoza, this order effectively is what we commonly call "God".

But, as I have said to you several times over now, it would not be the same thing twice. That life would most likely look different from ours, here. It would involve organisms that metabolise and reproduce, but there the similarities might end. Your question about numbers of singular events is pointless. You will just get some telephone number or other, to set against other telephone numbers representing the number of potential worlds on which life could arise, and the time available for them to do so. That is a fruitless line of reasoning for something like this. It looks to me a lot like the notorious "Argument from Personal Incredulity".

Yes I rather agree with you about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Universe_from_Nothing

So now you are asserting something quite different from the OP: you are saying that abiogenesis is too improbable to occur twice. But you have no basis for saying that. The universe is a big place and has been going for a long time. There is plenty of room, and plenty of time, for all sorts of low probability events to have come up, somewhere.

No. The process (by which life arises, or by which gold veins form in the rock) will be essentially the same, but the outcome will differ somewhat from occasion to occasion.

None of this is relevant to the discussion on this thread.

Yes this is true to an extent. But, to take the radioactive decay example, we can predict that a radioactive nucleus will decay, due to a cause - its instability - that we are aware of. We even know what prompts the decay of an individual nucleus (vacuum fluctuations). But we can never predict when an individual nucleus will decay, because these vacuum fluctuations are random. There is no cause for an individual fluctuation. They just happen.

You're "still waiting", for all of five whole minutes? I'm touched that you hang on my every word, but I'm afraid I do have to attend to some other things besides your posts. I won't keep you in suspense longer than I have to. Stay calm. Yes. Which question do want me to answer, then? I'm not doing both, because I have no intention of getting Gish Galloped.

He's talking about something else here, namely faster than light/backwards in time influences.

In QM, the probability of events is predicted, but the actual occurrence of the individual events themselves cannot be. That's not too hard to grasp, surely? In QM there are fundamental limits to how much can be known about systems.

It is what the theory predicts and observation is in line with that prediction. So we have evidence that it is uncaused. We don't have proof of course, because we are doing science and science does not deal in proof.

Well it is what quantum mechanics seems to tell us about the nature of the world. So it is the state-of-the-art model, at least. So, anyway, I'm glad to have got this clear: you are essentially putting forward the good old First Cause cosmological argument for God. The objections to that will be the usual ones.

Oh I don't mean that the disguise was necessarily intentional on your part, just that that is what it amounts to, whether you realise it or not. To claim that the universe must be "evidence of" something implies that something other than the universe must be somehow responsible for its presence - a cause for its existence, in fact. As you will know, if this is your line of country- as it seems to be - this assertion of a First Cause is an old chestnut. You have misunderstood me in imagining I don't think that "things have a cause". That is not at all what was saying. What I said - and if you have studied much science you will know this - is that there are uncaused events. So it is not true to claim that every event must have a cause, though quite obviously most do.

You made an assertion without evidence, namely that the the universe must be evidence "of" something other than itself. This seems to be a disguised way of stating the old canard about everything needing to have a cause. But why should this be true, when we have evidence that some events occur randomly?

But from what you say, it is not clear that sport fishing is any more acceptable. If the people you know who go sport fishing also squash insects, then that suggests that maybe the people find squashing insects objectionable would also disapprove of sport fishing. So perhaps it is quite ethically consistent, with more barbarous people doing both and more enlightened people doing neither. But that may not be the entire explanation. There is also an emotional element involved, when one actually witnesses the killing of a creature, as opposed to just hearing someone talk of an activity they have never witnessed in person and may know little about. People don't generally like witnessing killing. It is perhaps rather bad manners to inflict on someone the spectacle of killing a creature, whether doing so is necessary or entirely gratuitous.

Exponential does not just mean getting bigger and bigger. See the other posts that explain. To put it In words, rather than in maths, an exponential process is one in which the rate of growth or decline is proportional to the magnitude of whatever it is that is growing or declining. So for example, in radioactive decay the rate of decay is proportional to the amount of substance that has not yet decayed. So the rate of decline itself declines as more and more of the material decays. Or, in the unconstrained growth of a bacterial colony, the rate of growth is proportional to the number of bacteria present at any given moment, because each cell divides at a fixed rate so the more cells there are the faster it grows. This does not apply to gravitation. The force an object experiences grows as an inverse square of the distance from the attracting body. That is not an exponential.

So far as I am aware nobody says the process is exponential. But you suggested an inverse square law was followed. And it isn't. And matter is not attracted by black holes exponentially either. It is attracted according to Newton's inverse square law. It looks as if you may not understand what exponential means - which raises the possibility that you don't know what an inverse square law is either. These terms have a mathematical meaning.

I'm now not at all sure what you are arguing. I think we can all agree that if life arises somewhere else in the universe it is very unlikely that it will be identical to the form it takes on Earth. So that seems to be exactly in line with this analogy of yours, about the composition of gold from two locations not being identical. The same geological process took place in both, leading to a gold deposit in the rock, but the outcome was sightly different between the two. However, in your opening post, you said something quite different, namely that you did not think "biology", or abiogenesis, could occur more than once. Now that is saying that the process can't occur more than once, not that the outcome would be different. And that makes no sense. There is every reason to suppose that a natural process that has occurred once will do so again, given suitable circumstances. If you just want to say that if life occurred elsewhere you would probably not see cows, bees and human beings, but some other kinds of creatures, with different biochemistry, we can all agree on that, I think.

I'm sorry, I can't follow any of this. Hubble's Law reflects the observation that recessional velocity (as calculated from the cosmological red shift) is linear with distance. So it's not an inverse square relation.

Processes happen many times over in nature. The outcomes of those processes may not be exactly the same every time. For example, many millions of stars have formed, but no two stars are exactly alike. So, we might expect that life can arise many times over in the universe, but it is unlikely that the form it takes each time will be identical to that we see on Earth.