And that kind of hand-wavey statement seems to convince most people. Universe is hella-old, and really big. Ergo, incredibly rare stuff has happened basically infinitely many times. Life everywhere, etc.
Only…it's actually not that old, we have some idea how big it is (not that big, just lots of space between atoms), and thanks to computer science, we're pretty good at analyzing issues surrounding computation complexity.
And as it turns out, the DNA-to-protein pathway is much much much less likely that our initial hand waving made it seem.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying with our current level of knowledge we have no idea how. The math based around being old and big doesn't work. So we need better math, more studies, etc. and less hand waving.
>Ergo, incredibly rare stuff has happened basically infinitely many times.
This wasn't my argument though. In fact it was the complete opposite.
I was proposing that it was in fact likely and thus pretty much guaranteed to happen in a large universe, as opposed to being unlikely but still likely given a large enough universe.
So we're working with different assumptions here.
In fairness I put my assumption way at the beginning of my post, so it probably got forgotten about by the end of it. Quoting myself:
> What if amino acids and proteins are in fact likely to arise naturally and in favorable circumstances?
We haven't yet conclusively found all of the pathways these can arise, and we continue to discover more. People just tend to assume it's pretty unlikely. I'm not so sure.
Comparing amino acids to proteins is a category error, almost akin to comparing individual x86 instructions to a full x86 Linux kernel binary. The level of complexity increase is not just in size, but it's a fundamental different thing altogether.
The amount of information (via DNA) needed to create a useful protein from the 20 amino acids is absolutely incredible.
So…finding more potential (note: not demonstrated) pathways to create amino acids ex nihilo does literally nothing for producing viable DNA strands and proteins. DNA and proteins are a totally different problem, and we've made basically no progress at all, and the more we look at it, the less likely it seems.
And then people (not you per se) hand wave about the size of the Universe to explain the problem away. I think we should instead accept the problem exists and work to solve it.
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Separately, we have no known examples of any natural process producing what we, as humans, would call "information." DNA is much closer to information than any other concept, to the point where if we were sent something similar to DNA from space in, say, a radio transmission, we would absolutely assume intelligent life had made that transmission.
That is, with our current knowledge, it takes something vaguely "intelligent" to product the kind of information we have in DNA. Maybe such processes exist, but this is an absolute far cry from producing amino acids from chemical precursors, which are not information-like at all (and thus, it is unsurprising that we can do it).
I have found your comments on this thread very intriguing. The computational analogy applied to DNA and proteins is apt for me. Also, this strikes me as a potential resolution to the Fermi Paradox. What do you think?
Well, they're obviously related in that we really need to discover/determine how useful DNA came to be, starting with just the primordial soup. If we can get more accurate numbers for the Drake equation, that would certainly go a long way towards explaining the paradox.
I brought it up on HN because relatively few people seem to know this is still a problem, and progress on resolving it has been slow.
And that kind of hand-wavey statement seems to convince most people. Universe is hella-old, and really big. Ergo, incredibly rare stuff has happened basically infinitely many times. Life everywhere, etc.
Only…it's actually not that old, we have some idea how big it is (not that big, just lots of space between atoms), and thanks to computer science, we're pretty good at analyzing issues surrounding computation complexity.
And as it turns out, the DNA-to-protein pathway is much much much less likely that our initial hand waving made it seem.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm saying with our current level of knowledge we have no idea how. The math based around being old and big doesn't work. So we need better math, more studies, etc. and less hand waving.