Effect of nearby civilizations on ours

[dimreepr]

1 hour ago, Ten oz said:

We (Humans) have yet to replicate creating life despite seemingly knowing the conditions which were necessary here on earth for it. So I think it is fair to say we don't yet fully understand the process. So it is useful when people attempt to limit extraterrestrial life to our limited understanding of life.

Well, there is Synthia, yes I know... but we are getting there; besides our failure over 100 years or so of trial and error has no real bearing on the possibility.

1 hour ago, Ten oz said:

 We consider Earth's conditions to be good for life and yet life only created here on earth a single time. To me that implies the probability for the creation of life is low even when conditions allow for it. If the probability were high I would expect to see more than one type of life on Earth.

1

There's no reason to assume it only happened once here, all you can infer is, only one type of life survived.

1 hour ago, Ten oz said:

I have never felt the Fermi Paradox is a true paradox.

Of course not, distance and time see's to that.

 

[Ten oz]

11 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

There's no reason to assume it only happened once here, all you can infer is, only one type of life survived.

I disagree. For all I know other life currently exists here on earth and we (Humans) haven't discovered it yet. All I can infer is that we are not aware of any other life. Either way I feel it counters the Fermi Paradox. 

[dimreepr]

On 8/26/2018 at 6:35 PM, Moontanman said:

What would you think the effect of suddenly realizing that dozens of civilizations more less like ours exist within 100 light years of the Earth. Let's say we realized that an odd part of the EM spectrum we hadn't really checked was flooded by signals but we realized none of the planets were Earth like, all were either very hot Venus like planets or very cold Titan like planets.  The Fermi Paradox would be solved for sure and I think the simplest reason we hadn't seen them physically here would be that they would be more or less as confined to their planetary systems just like we are, but how do you think our own civilization/societies/cultures would be affected? Religion would have a new set of ideas to either embrace or fight against no doubt but what other effects would there be, significant or not... 

I would imagine, given our history, that we'd goto full-on paranoia mode and co-operate to invent new and interesting ways to kill them before they kill us. So largely beneficial IMO.

5 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

I disagree. For all I know other life currently exists here on earth and we (Humans) haven't discovered it yet. All I can infer is that we are not aware of any other life. 

 

Sorry I should have said, "from the evidence at hand all we can infer is...".

8 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

Either way I feel it counters the Fermi Paradox.

It's not a paradox, it's a lack of evidence.

[Moontanman]

3 hours ago, Ten oz said:

We (Humans) have yet to replicate creating life despite seemingly knowing the conditions which were necessary here on earth for it. So I think it is fair to say we don't yet fully understand the process. So it is useful when people attempt to limit extraterrestrial life to our limited understanding of life. *Not implying you are doing that.

I'm not sure we ever will replicate life, the process no doubt took millions of years and a lab as big as the earth. Science would seem to have a pretty good understanding of the process, I'm not sure why you would say it does not. While there are many competing hypothesis, some say it might be a synergy of more than one, the science has progressed mightily especially in the last few decades. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

3 hours ago, Ten oz said:

All life on earth has DNA and represents just a single type of life. I have never felt the Fermi Paradox is a true paradox. We consider Earth's conditions to be good for life and yet life only created here on earth a single time. To me that implies the probability for the creation of life is low even when conditions allow for it. If the probability were high I would expect to see more than one type of life on Earth. Rather all life is cellular DNA based evolved from a single source(s).

All life we know of is DNA life, our detection methods are skewed due to the fact we only test for DNA life. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere

 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/02/shadow-biosphere-might-be-hiding-strange-life-right-under-our-noses

The fact that life appeared to arise on Earth as soon as it could would seem to indicate that it is easy for life to come into existence. 

3 hours ago, Ten oz said:

 

I am open to there being life out in the universe which is different than what we can currently imagine. Perhaps we are already inundated with the evidence of their existence but just haven't identified it yet.  

The OP is based on that premise... 

[StringJunky]

3 hours ago, Ten oz said:

All life on earth has DNA and represents just a single type of life. I have never felt the Fermi Paradox is a true paradox. We consider Earth's conditions to be good for life and yet life only created here on earth a single time. To me that implies the probability for the creation of life is low even when conditions allow for it. If the probability were high I would expect to see more than one type of life on Earth.

I think what it means is that DNA won out amongst probably several molecular candidates. Chemically, there's probably no room for enduring cohabitation of different life forms in the same closed environment, and, hence, no other forms exist today. That implies that the probability for the creation of life is high. 

Edited August 28, 2018 by StringJunky

[dimreepr]

6 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Chemically, there's probably no room for cohabitation of different life forms in the same closed environment.

 

Life seems to argue that point, sorry to be so pedantic...

8 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

I think what it means is that DNA won out amongst probably several molecular candidates.

Maybe, but another possible maybe is, DNA is the only method available.

[StringJunky]

2 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Life seems to argue that point, sorry to be so pedantic...

Maybe, but another possible maybe is, DNA is the only method available.

 

Quote

All of a sudden, DNA has no reason to feel special. For decades it seemed that only a handful of molecules could store genetic information and pass it on. But now synthetic biologists have discovered that six others can pull off the same trick, and there may be many more to find.

The ability to copy information from one molecule to another is fundamental to all life. Organisms pass their genes to their descendants, often with small changes, and as a result life can evolve over the generations. Barring a few exceptions, all known organisms use DNA as the information carrier.

A host of alternative nucleic acids have been made in labs over the years, but no one has made them work like DNA.

This problem has now been cracked. “This unique ability of DNA and RNA to encode information can be implemented in other backbones,” says Philipp Holliger of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.

“Everyone thought we were limited to RNA and DNA,” says John Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. “This paper is a game-changer.”

Evolving XNA
Holliger’s team focused on six XNAs (xeno-nucleic acids). DNA and RNA are made of a sugar, a phosphate and a base. The XNAs had different sugars, and in some of them the sugars are replaced with completely different molecules.

>>>> 

The finding is a proof of principle that life needn’t be based on DNA and RNA. Astrobiologists have long suspected as much.

“This is very interesting with respect to the origin of life,” says Jack Szostak of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. Nowadays, all life-forms use either DNA or RNA to store genetic information. Many biologists suspect that the first life-forms used RNA, and DNA was adopted later. But we don’t know why those two molecules were chosen: are they the best possible storage media, or were they simply the only things available?

Holliger suspects RNA was an opportunistic choice. “Clearly, there is no overwhelming functional imperative to use DNA and RNA,” he says. Instead, life may have started with RNA simply because it was made in large quantities on the early Earth.....

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21720-move-over-dna-six-new-molecules-can-carry-genes/

 

[dimreepr]

I did say maybe...

And life seems quite content with cohabitation...

[StringJunky]

14 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I did say maybe...

And life seems quite content with cohabitation...

But there's only one kind of dominant life on Earth; DNA life and a precursor of that in RNA.

[dimreepr]

2 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

But there's only one kind of dominant life on Earth; DNA life and a precursor of that in RNA.

I'm not sure how that argues my point?

[StringJunky]

4 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I'm not sure how that argues my point?

Your post seemed to imply that what we call 'life' can cohabit with another fundamentally different life form, which doesn't seem to be the case.

[Ten oz]

1 hour ago, Moontanman said:

I'm not sure we ever will replicate life, the process no doubt took millions of years and a lab as big as the earth. Science would seem to have a pretty good understanding of the process, I'm not sure why you would say it does not.

We have still never seen it happen. Our own relative view towards our own understanding not withstanding we haven't verified. So how can we know how close we are to understand how? Our confidence is measured against nothing. When we find other types of life or able to record life coming to be we will know more than we do today. 

[dimreepr]

10 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Your post seemed to imply that what we call 'life' can cohabit with another fundamentally different life form, which doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm not sure where you got that from... 

[Moontanman]

4 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

We have still never seen it happen. Our own relative view towards our own understanding not withstanding we haven't verified. So how can we know how close we are to understand how? Our confidence is measured against nothing. When we find other types of life or able to record life coming to be we will know more than we do today. 

Very few murders are seen to happen, we still solve them. We do not have to see something happen to have a very good understanding of how they happened... 

[dimreepr]

5 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

Our confidence is measured against nothing.

 

Indeed..,

[StringJunky]

Just now, dimreepr said:

I'm not sure where you got that from... 

Well, what did you mean?

[Ten oz]

2 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Very few murders are seen to happen, we still solve them. We do not have to see something happen to have a very good understanding of how they happened... 

It is an imperfect process though. Innocent people have been found guilt. Besides a person can only be murdered once. Life can come to exist indefinitely. 

[dimreepr]

2 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Well, what did you mean?

All I said is, life can and does cohabit; and fundamentally life is what we see today despite maybe.