Your Screen Saver Could Help Create New Life

Unless they're designing this software to act intelligently, rather than just randomly, they better be prepared to wait a very very very long time.

The current estimate for building a single 150 amino acid long, functional protein, (that's a very small protein) by pure chance plus the laws of physics and chemistry is around 1 to 10^164. And that is with due consideration of the Plank distance and Plank time values for the number of possible events that could occur since the beginning of the universe!

And that's the optimistic figure! Some scientists (Sir F. Hoyle for ex.) have given the estimate are far worse - 1 to 10^40,000 !! In other words impossible.
"The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order." -Sir F. Hoyle

Famous mathematician Kurt Godel was of the same opinion:"The formation within geological time of a human body, by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components." -Kurt Godel

In other words, you have a chance - orders of magnitude greater - at pinpointing a single elementary particle in the entire universe than "stumbling blindly" on to the "jump from organic compounds to large-scale proteins"

They will have to put some intelligent search algorithms and conditional statements in that software or give up.

It just ain't gonna happen in any happenstance manner.

Hmm...sounds a bit matrix like to me, that is if it even works...

I think that you don't quite understand how much primordial soup there was. We're talking about individual atoms forming molecules in the /entire volume of all the oceans on Earth/ over the course of a billion years or so.

Solace : "I think that you don't quite understand how much primordial soup there was."

I don't think you read my comments correctly. 1) It isn't even a question of how much "soup" there may have been.

Not at all! It's entirely a question of "is this possible given any amount of soup?" And the answer appears to be a solid no.

2) Do you know what the Plank values represent? Do you realize the values I gave were calculated with due consideration our best guess of what the "soup" contained? There are an estimated 10^80 elementary particles in the universe. And an optimistic 10^139 possible events in the universe since 14.5G ya!

A single 150 amino acid long functional protein is estimated at having a probability of chance formation of 1 in 10^77 - without consideration of the fact that they must be formed of only L-amino acids and only peptide bonds!
Now, add those 2 factors, plus the fact that blind nature isn't even trying to make a protein and you end up with only "impossible" as the most reasonable answer.

The rough calculations I presented were calculated by top scientists - do you think they forgot about the "soup"?

Truth is, no one really knows what the so-called soup really was like.

Chance appearance of life is really a no-brainer. It ain't gonna happen. Thus we may logically conclude that it never did happen by chance and law alone.

Vigier if what you are saying is correct then no paticles would exsist. If we choose a random elementary partical and looked at the odds of it exsisting then the answer will still be impossible odds.

How many possible directions can a ball go in if you release it from your hand? The answer is an infinite amount of directions. By Vigier's logic, the chances of a ball falling in one direction out of an unlimited amount of possibilities is impossible. Give me a break. A ball does not fall towards the earth by random chance. A water molecule does not form by random chance. Snowflakes do not form based on random chance. There are natural laws, consistent occurrences that happen for natural reasons. Nature is not a drunk stumbling forward aimlessly with a blindfold and no intention. It has behaviors which can seem like intention to unintelligent copypasting laymen like you, vigier.

If your math disproves the existence of life I think it's time to check your math.

I thought the fact that the numbers were huge was what made the chances greater for discovering things in this way , its like the lottery if I buy just one ticket I cant possibly hope to win , but if I buy as many tickets as I can say billions of them winning becomes destiny .

so many devote religious scientists I see.. as much of a contradiction that may be.

we sure as 'hell' did not appear out of thin air, amino acids were generated by scientists centuries ago in experiments that recreated the same conditions that primordial earth experienced.

Makes a ton of sense to comment on a Popular 'Science' article when you don't support the most controversial science theory.

Quoting Vigier:
Vigier09/29/09 at 2:11 pm

And that's the optimistic figure! Some scientists (Sir F. Hoyle for ex.) have given the estimate are far worse - 1 to 10^40,000 !! In other words impossible.
"The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order." -Sir F. Hoyle

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That's a pretty outdated source for one. It's common biochemistry for fatty acids to form membranes and self-polymerizing vesicles, along with the biological functions of nucleic acids and proteins.

It's been shown that the essential organic molecules required for life existed in primordial earth, leading to the formation of the first cells and starting evolution.

In other words, there was no 'high order power', no lighting striking a puddle..just chemistry.

Second, you're quoting is from 1982, back when supercomputers were less powerful than a xbox 360. The compouter simulations they run require a lot of computing power (leading to the screensaver..) and basically predict the outcomes of the chemical reactions. It's the same principle as the folding@Home program, which simulates protein folding.

Anyway, I'm a biomedical engineer but I gotta say it's incredible how fast it all advances...

Wait....isn't hypotheses about ever bigger numbers to make incredibly unlikely events possible the naturalists equivalent to the whole 'God of the Gaps' philosophy? I mean, if it is unlikely to happen in one universe, lets hypothesis the multiverse (which doesn't have a hope of being proven to exist) just so we can say life is bound to show up in one of those universes.

Lets be honest, trying to make those chances work is no more or less scientific than just saying God did it and moving on.

If they haven't built in natural laws of how molecules are formed then this research project could go on forever. I wouldn't say it's infinite, but the number is massive for you to randomly stumble upon an answer. Thats basic Statistics

Ebrainer1, where did these natural laws you wrote about come from? If there is no intelligence beyond the natural world, why is nature not "a drunk stumbling forward aimlessly with a blindfold and no intention"?

Natural laws don't have to come from anywhere. A natural law is not something for matter and energy to follow willingly. A natural scientific law is defined as merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. In other words, something that has repeatedly been observed to the point of being able to be predicted. A scientific natural law is not a rule to be enforced by an institution. Why would nucleosynthesis require intelligence behind it? Why can't a star form without intelligence? The universe looks exactly as one would expect it to look without a guiding intelligence. Even if you did find an unexplainable aspect of matter, the conversation would stop there until you found a reason to formulate an explanation. It's like with a UFO. The very concept of a UFO is that it's unidentified. You don't see flashing lights in the sky and immediately say "it's a UFO! It has to be aliens from outer space!".

Ebrainer1, could you give me a believable scenario for the origin and current position and size of the Earth's moon?

Comments from a Bible-thumping fundamentalist.

Look up a peer reviewed scientific publication. It's a helluva lot more reliable than anything i could tell you.

Look up a peer reviewed scientific publication. It's a helluva lot more reliable than anything i could tell you. If you're about to give the moon thing from allaboutcreation, then stop right there, unless you want it to be proven wrong.

Distributing the processor load of a thousand computers is a nice idea, but how about CUMULATING the processor power of the same thousand computers.

Instead of running a million discreet simulations, you could ramp up the complexity of a single massive simulation to such a degree that complex interaction of particles is guaranteed.

It's comparable to a thousand monkeys on typewriters, verses using the typewriters to wire all the monkey's brains together into a super-consciousness.

The Quad Core I'm using now can simulate 70,000 particles, as long as every possible combination of particles doesn't have to be checked for proximity or collision.

It would be interesting to see the visual output of a truly cumulative screen saver, where all the particles run by all the computers...

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