Theory of Evolution

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#2167016 24-Jan-2019 16:03

tdgeek:

Coil:

For highly functioning intelligent life to form and flourish you need the conditions that we have currently, those conditions are found in multiple different solar systems.

I recall either Carl Sagan or Brian Cox on this. We need the environment, yes. BUT, there is a KEY other thing we need, and that is TIME. 99% of life that Earth has ever had is already extinct. Things happen that wipe many creatures out. We still have a few dinosaurs despite the Yucatan meteor, such as crocs. Some that can manage underground, some that can hibernate. Evolution can give us humans but you have to live long enough to evolve. How we have evolved is quite staggering. Hominids date back a few million years (apes), homosapiens 200,000 years. Now we land stuff on comets and asteroids. We needed time, and the time before apes to evolve to that family. A meteor could have erased that. Climate Change might, if we destroy our environment before we learn to buy another home to ruin. But time seems a key ingredient, enough to allow evolution to bake us into a finished product. If you have a stable diverse goldilocks environment you can create all sorts of life.

Yep and it is all these things that have to perfectly align, The 1 in 1000 idea puts it into perspective for people. Imagine if what took out our ancestors did not happen, then what are the chances that humans did not evolve? Time, Time, Time as you say. Imagine all the other things that could happen, heck. What were the chances we wiped ourselves out before 1900? We had plagues and everything, one of the other key factors to intelligent life is the decisions that life form makes, like hygiene.

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#2167167 24-Jan-2019 19:46

What I see form those who see us as the only intelligent life that ever existed, is an emphasis on numbers. Huge odds against us. Barriers, which if you give them odds and extrapolate out, are massively against us, and we are lucky. A mate loaned me a book, and I have it somewhere that explained all that, I must read it, as I like to read both sides of everything.

Time.

Life was created about 4 billion years ago, when the Earth was a few hundred million years old.

Complex life although just multi cellular occurred about 500 million years ago

Fish, insects about 400 million years ago

First dinosaurs 225 million years ago T Rex at 68 ago

66 ago, Yucatan meteor hit

25 ago, many animals we know today are there and increaisng

6 ago, Hominids, apes etc

350,000 years ago Neanderthals

250,000 Humans

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

So, it took a LONG time for life to evolve, but it evolved exponentially. 3.7 Billion years to get a human. 250,000 to get a human on the moon.

What I see is that life can be everywhere. It needs time, but time can involve catastrophes, such as hot ages, ice ages, meteors. Once it starts, you cannot stop life.

The Universe is an amazingly stable place. The Earth has been orbiting its star for 4.6 billion years. That star has another 5 billon to go. Time is there. The solar system is 1/3 the age of the Universe. So other systems have had a lot more time to create life.

I can't see life as a one off piece of luck. Once you get an option, it takes over. The Earth doesnt have to be its size, or exactly the distance from its star, the moon doesnt have to be its size, moons are common. Many things do need to align, but its not Lotto odds from one ticket. In our small solar system there is a lot of water, a lot of heat. One planet in the right place, Mars got a start but it was too small so it cooled, goodbye magnetic field and most of its atmosphere, but Mars was close. AND it got a start, it had a rotating iron core, water, weather, so even though it was not in the goldilocks zone, it got a start.

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#2167199 24-Jan-2019 21:57

Rikkitic:

I have often thought about the communication issue. We have only been generating RF for about 140 years. Initially, the signal was pretty poor and would have quickly vanished into background noise. Later most of it would probably have bounced back to us due to the spectrum used. Only during WWII did we start generating some serious stuff with radar, and even with that the question is how far it would have carried.

In the 1950s we had VHF television. I think (no doubt someone else will know better) that we only began producing worthwhile emissions in the 1960s, also around the time we began investigating signals from space. So there have been maybe 60 years during which we might have had a minuscule chance of having a one-way conversation with anyone else out there.

The earth is around four billion years old. Life has existed on it for two, maybe three billion years. We evolved into existence around two million years ago and developed brains that could comprehend crystal sets about 200,000 years ago. So in two billion years of evolution, there have been 60 years in which we could have communicated with ET.

Adding to that... our first signals are now 60 light-years from Earth. So our nearest possible neighbours at Alpha Centauri could only have seen them 56 years ago. Or, put it another way, they have reached only only a few hundred stars ATM.

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#2167204 24-Jan-2019 22:43

frankv:

Rikkitic:

I have often thought about the communication issue. We have only been generating RF for about 140 years. Initially, the signal was pretty poor and would have quickly vanished into background noise. Later most of it would probably have bounced back to us due to the spectrum used. Only during WWII did we start generating some serious stuff with radar, and even with that the question is how far it would have carried.

In the 1950s we had VHF television. I think (no doubt someone else will know better) that we only began producing worthwhile emissions in the 1960s, also around the time we began investigating signals from space. So there have been maybe 60 years during which we might have had a minuscule chance of having a one-way conversation with anyone else out there.

The earth is around four billion years old. Life has existed on it for two, maybe three billion years. We evolved into existence around two million years ago and developed brains that could comprehend crystal sets about 200,000 years ago. So in two billion years of evolution, there have been 60 years in which we could have communicated with ET.

Adding to that... our first signals are now 60 light-years from Earth. So our nearest possible neighbours at Alpha Centauri could only have seen them 56 years ago. Or, put it another way, they have reached only only a few hundred stars ATM.

EXTENT OF HUMAN RADIO BROADCASTS

(click for larger image)

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#2167340 25-Jan-2019 10:02

Fred99:

EXTENT OF HUMAN RADIO BROADCASTS

(click for larger image)

And that entire image is just one galaxy, and there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

Even if the odds of intelligent evolving on a planet are 1 in a billion; with over 100 billion galaxies (each with 100s of billions of stars) there would still be billions of planets with intelligent life on the universe. In fact at those (arbitrary) odds it be over 100 billion in the Milky Way alone.

I haven't read this entire thread, so I apologise if this has been mentioned already:

A big argument anti-evolutionists use is that the odds of intelligent life evolving on a planet on it's own are so astronomically small that there must be a creator. To that I say rubbish. It's like saying the odds of winning lotto are so low as to be statistically zero - this may well be true, but try telling that to the guy that won.

Coil

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#2167341 25-Jan-2019 10:06

Paul1977:

Fred99:

EXTENT OF HUMAN RADIO BROADCASTS

(click for larger image)

And that entire image is just one galaxy, and there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

Even if the odds of intelligent evolving on a planet are 1 in a billion; with over 100 billion galaxies (each with 100s of billions of stars) there would still be billions of planets with intelligent life on the universe. In fact at those (arbitrary) odds it be over 100 billion in the Milky Way alone.

I haven't read this entire thread, so I apologise if this has been mentioned already:

A big argument anti-evolutionists use is that the odds of intelligent life evolving on a planet on it's own are so astronomically small that there must be a creator. To that I say rubbish. It's like saying the odds of winning lotto are so low as to be statistically zero - this may well be true, but try telling that to the guy that won.

We live in a ~~world~~ Universe of infinite probability. Don't ever forget that.

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Coil

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#2167348 25-Jan-2019 10:28

Why is this the second or third time I have seen @batman reply but then see no reply, deleting the comment?

Batman

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#2167358 25-Jan-2019 11:12

Sorry, not sure why, was off topic. I won't do that again.

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#2167414 25-Jan-2019 12:56

Paul1977:

A big argument anti-evolutionists use is that the odds of intelligent life evolving on a planet on it's own are so astronomically small that there must be a creator. To that I say rubbish. It's like saying the odds of winning lotto are so low as to be statistically zero - this may well be true, but try telling that to the guy that won.

To me that looks like two straw men fighting each other.

I'd say that improbability arguments are common but in the form you describe it is hardly a "big" one in either significance or priority for those experts criticizing aspects of evolutionary theory.

If you really understood the improbability arguments against evolutionary theory then you wouldn't be using Lotto to refute the one you presented. It is NOT "like saying the odds of winning lotto are so low as to be statistically zero":

Lotto is a well-defined and well-understood system versus the diverse and often speculative theories about our origins and the universe.
Lotto has numbers and probabilities that the average person can envisage whereas improbability arguments are based on the numbers being so large (or so small) as to be considered implausible.
Both the descriptive and predictive statistics of Lotto, and lotteries in general, are widely available and easily understood. Not so the statistics for the development of intelligent life.
This also means that there are many experts who can speak authoritatively on the statistics of lotteries but nowhere near as many experts regarding the evidence for and odds of intelligent life.

My most basic criticism is that your example is based on introducing a rounding error that doesn't actually exist in the statistics of lotteries. Do you really believe that people think that non-zero equals zero if it is small enough. Except for you, I can't think of anyone who would say that "this may well be true". Here's one example where most people don't make nearly zero equal zero: a tiny probability can become a near certainty if there is a a long enough period of time or enough cycles.

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#2167747 26-Jan-2019 10:12

Hammerer:

Lotto has numbers and probabilities that the average person can envisage whereas improbability arguments are based on the numbers being so large (or so small) as to be considered implausible.

You can't envisage a number greater than a billion... you live less than a billion seconds, so you can't actually count a billion of anything. Any numbers greater than a billion are therefore abstract concepts. You know that a trillion is 1,000 billion but you can't actually count (and therefore can't envisage) either of them. The best you can do is to think of a billion as a large single composite entity, and then think of a trillion as a thousand of those. In fact, I'd say people generally can't envisage 100. Envisage a stack of 100 coins. Now, envisage a stack of 101 coins. Can you tell the difference? You can do it by using a trick like envisaging a square 10x10 of coins, but that's not exactly the same thing.

(Supposedly the same thing applies to animals, but on a smaller scale. To a bird or a dog, numbers count 1, 2, 3, several, several, several, ....)

Getting back to the topic: The astronomically small improbability of life is completely overbalanced by the astronomically large number of opportunities for life.

If the probability of life starting are 1 in a billion and there's about a billion opportunities or less, then it seems likely we're the only life in the universe. If however, there are 2 billion or 3 billion or 4 billion or 5 billion or 1,000 billion opportunities, the chances that we are alone get very small indeed. The diameter of the observable Universe is 93 billion light years, containing 10^24 stars. That's a million billion billion. Even if the probability of life existing somewhere around a star was 1 in a billion billion, a million life-forms exist in the observable Universe, let alone the part we can't yet see. What's more, the size of the universe is unknown, but *could* be infinite, in which case there would be infinite life opportunities, and infinite numbers of life-forms.

OTOH, if those life forms are scattered around the universe at (say) 1,000 light-year intervals, the chances of sensing another life-form are small. Assuming another life-form evolved to radio-transmission at the same time as us, it would be another 900 years before we could detect each other, and another 1,000 years before we or they could receive a reply. Can we survive another 1,900 years?

Another question: What is the best environment for life to start, how soon could that have occurred in the universe, and what's the best environment to evolve and sustain life? If there's no better starting point than Earth 4 billion years ago, and no better evolutionary environment, then we're first, and we're unlikely to see any other life for thousands or millions of years, effectively alone. Otherwise, given the age of the Universe is 14 billion years or so, it's likely that other life-forms are thousands to millions to billions of years ahead of us. Where could we be in 1,000 years, let alone a billion?

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#2167789 26-Jan-2019 11:39

Nice points.

While there is no doubt that many things need to align, to me, life is not amazing. It's normal. Some chemicals, and/or Amino acids, liquid water, heat, electricity, then you can have life. All of those factors are common. If you could remove every life form on Earth right now, tomorrow there will be life, as the ingredients are common, and they are here, and thus, they are everywhere in the Universe as I believe the Universe make up of elements is the same. With some variability if a star was super big or too small, and where you get some special events such as quasars, the elements probably vary. But in general, the ingredients we have in our small solar system are no doubt common and typical.

Life is probably bursting to happen, it just needs the common ingredients to be in one place at the same time to exist or start

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#2167804 26-Jan-2019 11:53

Paul1977:

Fred99:

(click for larger image)

A big argument anti-evolutionists use is that the odds of intelligent life evolving on a planet on it's own are so astronomically small that there must be a creator. To that I say rubbish. It's like saying the odds of winning lotto are so low as to be statistically zero - this may well be true, but try telling that to the guy that won.

Well, I'm an evolutionist, with nearly a decade of university level mathematics, biology and chemistry education under my belt, from 4 different universities in 3 different countries. What became increasingly apparent to me as I continued my scientific education journey, was of the multiple proofs for evolutionary theory that really only the uneducated, dishonest or stupid could argue against, but also the scarcity of coherent and logical origins theories given the restrictions imposed by mathematics, chemistry and biology. As I stated in an earlier post, it is more probable to find a planet with oceans of Coca-cola and continents of marshmallow, than it is to find one where a self-replicating cell emerged by random processes, as the latter event is vastly more improbable due to its complexity. Just because we have all the matter in the universe and all the time since the universe existed, does not mean that absolutely anything absurdly improbable will happen. Ok, it might be theoretically possible that oceans of Coca-cola and continents of marshmallow can form, but I think everybody reading this forum would not expect it to happen anywhere in the universe. It would be much more difficult for self replicating life to form, upon which natural selection can then act; we need all the molecular machinery for self replication to form together at the same time, in the same location, and function as a coherent and accurate self-replicating system. Of course people win lotteries, but those kind of probabilities are simply not in the same league as life starting de novo by undirected random processes. If you missed my earlier post discussing the problems of origins theory, please go back to the 2nd post of page 4, and you will see the kind of odds we're talking about.

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#2167810 26-Jan-2019 11:58

tdgeek:

Nice points.

While there is no doubt that many things need to align, to me, life is not amazing. It's normal. Some chemicals, and/or Amino acids, liquid water, heat, electricity, then you can have life. All of those factors are common. If you could remove every life form on Earth right now, tomorrow there will be life, as the ingredients are common, and they are here, and thus, they are everywhere in the Universe as I believe the Universe make up of elements is the same. With some variability if a star was super big or too small, and where you get some special events such as quasars, the elements probably vary. But in general, the ingredients we have in our small solar system are no doubt common and typical.

Life is probably bursting to happen, it just needs the common ingredients to be in one place at the same time to exist or start

I'm sorry, this is total nonsense. Having the basic chemical ingredients does not mean life will occur.

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#2167814 26-Jan-2019 12:06

Why don't you read what I write? I said then you can have life. Can being the operative word.

There are other locations in our small and puny solar system that are ;likely to have liquid water, and heat. I forget which moons that expel gas from underneath the ice crust. Many scientists see that as a place where organic life might exist, is what they see are likely underground seas.

What if that was found to be correct? It would mean that the unbelievable odds of life that as you say, occurred form randomness, may have occurred twice. Thats would appear to be impossible

Is it incorrect that the ingredients for life are common?

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#2167829 26-Jan-2019 12:20

There are two ways of looking at the existence of Coca-Cola oceans and marshmallow continents. On the one hand, this would provide the best proof we could ever find of a Supreme Creator because this truly would be a miracle. Only an all-powerful God could do such a thing. Of course, such a deity could also rewrite the rules so 'natural' processes would lead to this.

On the other hand, this has already occurred in one sense, because human beings are a result of natural processes and we already know how to make Coke and marshmallows and scaling that up to a planetary level is just a matter of time and technology. So Coke and Marshmallow planets may not be exceptional at all. Someone just has to want to do it. No God required at all.

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