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ragingloli's avatar

What implications does this experiment have for the origin of life?

Asked by ragingloli (52277points) August 4th, 2024

Researches ran an experiment where a soup of random code snippets randomly move around and interact with their neighbours with a chance to exchange code, as well as backround noise causing mutations. After not much time at all, self replicating programs emerged that quickly overtook the environment.
What implications do these results have on the probability of alien life in the universe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpRRwgyeBak

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9 Answers

gondwanalon's avatar

True “life” as we know it requires DNA.
I don’t know what “artificial life” requires. Perhaps it just needs a DNA equivalent code that will enable artificial life to take off.

Tropical_Willie's avatar

Isn’t this “The room full of monkeys with typewriters making a dictionary” ? ?

Life doesn’t come from a dictionary.

flutherother's avatar

It might explain how cancers arise but I don’t think it means alien life is any more likely than it was before.

Response moderated (Unhelpful)
Blackwater_Park's avatar

Software is just as real as the universe around us. It’s all still physics and math in the background. I would think this paper makes life emerging on its own more likely than we thought it was. Hossenfelder is one of the better physics influencers.

Call_Me_Jay's avatar

Software is just as real as the universe around us

Current software is an infinitesimal fraction of a baby step towards recreating the infinitely complex universe around us.

To paraphrase Chicago’s Mayor Washington (“politics ain’t beanbag”), astrobiology ain’t Tetris.

Maybe the video’s premise is beyond my understanding, but regardless, the size of the universe, with 100s of billions of galaxies each containing 100s of billions of stars, makes it virtually impossible that Earth is the sole planet with life.

So the video does not change my thoughts on the likelihood.

Dutchess_III's avatar

I believe that is exactly how life began.

Caravanfan's avatar

I LOVE that YouTube channel. Good find rags

MrGrimm888's avatar

I believe that the ingredients for “life,” are plentiful in the universe.
It likely does require a bit of luck too. But. The universe is SO vast, whatever special needs life required to come out of a primordial soup, have lots if chances of becoming life.

Once “life” begins, it seems to go rampant. On Earth, every single small puddle, or hidden cave, or practically everywhere is just full of life.

A glass of river water, could contain all types of life.

Wherever there is room, essentially, there is life here.
Even a bunch of things live in inhospitable places like by deep sea lava vents, and in our stomach acid. There are microorganisms in the atmosphere.

We have found what seems to be evidence of advanced amino acids, on meteorites.

Recently, they found an object in our Khyper Belt, that essentially is a giant piece of sugar.

We know that water, and many other important elements have come here via meteorites.

Scientists have found, that extreme changes in temperature, radiation, and magnetism, combined with the right circumstances should lead to life.

This video, discusses other ways that seem to promote the beginning of life.

I believe that life, is plentiful in the universe. Not necessarily like us, or better, but living creatures or microorganisms.

“Put two ship in the open sea, without wind, or tide, and at last, they will come together.”
Jules Vern.

A science fiction writer? What does he have to do with this subject?
Well.
JV, in his writings and novels, practically told the future.
He imagined star ships, submarines, a different world in the center of the Earth, and a plethora of things that were beyond imagination in his time.

An open mind, is just better.

The religious, and mythological bullshit that most of humanity would prefer to believe, are FAR more nonsensical than theories from the latest advances in technology.
There is clearly no God, or collection of deities, that watch us and judge and love us. That’s TOTAL BULLSHIT, and the more time that goes by, since these ideas were conceived, the more obvious that it was all mythology. A lazy guess.

The universe is FAR more interesting, than people stuck on Earth, believe.
We are offspring of people that believe that life was manufactured by the work of some imaginary “god.”

The more we look around, the less we seem to KNOW.
We are constantly finding things that shouldn’t exist. There are thousands of celestial things that we have just witnessed, or that don’t fit the “rules.”

Given our path; first believing that the universe revolved around us, to believing that the Sun was at least, what we are revolving around.
To current day, we’ve come a long way. It’s pure stupid, to believe that we have so much figured out. Science is ever changing. Always being scrutinized by peers, and always having to be something that we can recreate, makes Science more evidently constantly changing.

We don’t even know most of our own past. Humans, have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We have “recorded” history, that was mostly written by the most powerful people. (And therefore likely factually incorrect, or spun in a way that made men heroes, and made for good stories.
We have just 2,000 years really, of barely recorded history.

For a people who don’t even understand how we got here, some of us like to think that we’ve mastered the physics of the universe already.
We know WAY more, than before. But our JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is constantly challenging our understanding of things like physics, with it’s discoveries.
As one researcher put it; we know so little about the universe, that we don’t even know what questions to ask. Instruments of science, while ever evolving, like the JWST, will hopefully tell us, what to even ask about.
So far. There are many findings, that contradict our understanding of the universe.

Life, “wants” to live. Wherever it can.

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