Prof Brian Cox on Life

[GeoffW1 (Geoff)]

Joe, you cynic, you

[astroron (Ron)]

Originally Posted by bigjoe

At the end of the day, its all about getting a very smart poster boy to get young and alll interested, thinking, and to take up science

A very Smart poster boy.
Carl sagen went through the same sort of criticism
when COSMOS was released.
Cheers

[el_draco (Rom)]

Hmmm, interesting conversation this and sure to heat up.

This may be worth considering. We have ONE lab experiment running here... planet earth. That lab has had the living crap, (no pun intended), belted out of it for thousands of millions of years. Its been frozen, fried, blasted, radiated and recycled so many times it doesn't worth mentioning... and yet! We can't even count the number of species that exist here, and are constantly amazed by the diversity of environments and the resilience that life has shown in them.

So, if earth can do it, and there are probably countless trillions of other "labs" out there, then the answer to the, "Is there life out there question", is a no brainer.

Still waiting for the intelligence bit though.... Maybe they are all around our solar system saying, "Shhhh, if we stay quiet long enough, maybe they'll evolve or die off..."

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Don't get me wrong! The guys got a winning smile Proton potential s etc thus life follows Human life who knows.The dinosaurs where a winnin superiority over all until a gigantic piece of rock intervened. It seems very intelligent life needs an astonishing number of sequences to go exactly right and just as astonishing, luck.Cheers bigjoe

[joe_smith]

Originally Posted by allan gould

This all sounds theologians arguing about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin.
As a molecular biologist for the last 40 years might I suggest that some of you should get a far deeper understanding of molecular biology as well as evolution before commenting.

Well then could you please explain to us how life started on earth, and how that life evolved into the countless species that have been on planet earth? What have you got for us in that 40 years. As a molecular biologist, what answer's do you have for the questions of how life started and evolved? I'm not talking about evolution as in a finches beak growing long or short using data it already has in its genetic code. but evolution as in the basic building blocks of life forming the genetic code to start it all off. How did it start? how did DNA form? how did the first cells form?
Being a molecular biologist what is your view on the life in the universe question?

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by joe_smith

Being a molecular biologist what is your view on the life in the universe question?

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I am harbouring a lot of similar questions to molecular biologists. Such as:

• When are we going to progress past the spaghetti principle for developing pharmaceutical drugs? Right now, it seems to be all field trials and statistics that determine which drugs are effective and which aren't. How about actual cause and effect?
• At what generation of cell division after intial fertilisation (4, 8, 16, 32,…., 4069 cells, etc) do cells decide who becomes a skin cell, a liver cell, a nerve cell etc, and how do they communicate this among each other, having all the exact same genenic information after all?
• Knowing that you understand a few (maybe even a lot of) individual mechanisms of cell biology, do you concede that you haven't got the faintest clue as to how the whole comes together as a system?

Cheers
Steffen.

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

This is getting interesting

Flash.....

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Well said steffen. Tounge in cheek and a chuckle is always welcome ,but petulance, I don't think so .Cheers all.And don't get too serious please.God only knows what's going on here.Er sorry about that chief.

[mr bruess]

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

The fact that highly informed people disagree strongly about the odds of life existing elsewhere in the universe, suggests that the best approach is to actually do the experiment and to look out there for life.

However, most of the people who have a professional-level knowledge of biology are definitely at the 'very low probability of life existing elsewhere' end of the spectrum of belief....... It seems that it is usually the SETI crowd and the 'passionate believers' who publicize the most wildly optimistic estimates about the odds of life existing in the rest of the universe; after all, their job depends on projecting an optimistic attitude.

Has Cox completed at least a few units of cellular and molecular biology at university? If not, I suggest that his views about the prevalence of life in the universe should be given little weight. You really need to have some tertiary biology to appreciate how 'super high tech' life really is.

An extremely detailed, but clearly written, discussion of the highly-multiple steps that have to be taken for complex organic molecules to organize themselves into a simple self-replicating life-form, can be found in :

"Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe"
by Simon Conway-Morris
(Cambridge University Press)(Published 2004 and 2003)

(incidentally, some of the author's theological views do creep in to this book, but the scientific argument itself is impeccable)

The probability for the occurrence of all of the reactions that need to occur, in the very long chain of chemical reactions that leads eventually to the construction of a simple organic lifeform, is vanishingly small;
The gap in complexity between simple organic chemistry and the chemistry of a very simple lifeform like a bacterium..... is absolutely enormous.

This suggests, at the minimum, that the environmentalist ideology of 'reverence for life' and dismay at the destruction of species, may be justified on scientific grounds; life may be so rare in the universe that the nearest occurence of life away from our Solar System could be billions of light years away.

Added in edit:

P.S.
What is life? Nobody knows!!
But read the introductory book "What is Life?" by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.

This is the book that got me interested in serious study of biology.
Margulis was a controversial biologist who had a brilliant and clear writing style that is very suited to clearly explaining the extraordinary complexities of life. I don't think that physicists like Cox really understand all of the 'observables' when it comes to life....it really takes a few years of full-time study to come to grips with this.

the probability of other life existing in the universe is high in my opinion.Its is just plain silly to claim that life has low probabilty of existing elsewhere.This is just plain "we are at the centre of the universe "type thinking.
It is a statisitical probabilty that life has got to exist elsewhere in the universe.Its like saying no one can ever win powerball or lotto because the probabilty of the event occuring is too low.But someone is always winning it and beating the extremely high odds and getting rich instantly.

[Suzy]

Surprise, surprise,that's me out from watching the series....
After watching two, I just can't get into it. He talks as slow as a tortoiuse walking up a mud slide. Pick up the pace Brian!
Looks will only take him so far in my book.

At the end of the day, its all about getting a very smart poster boy to get young and alll interested, thinking, and to take up science

Joe, I couldn't agree more. He's done a great job.
But I'll add to that by saying that he also presents things in a very easy to understand manner & talks slower so we can have time to digest what he's said. Except for this current series- he talks too slow & too many pauses. Get to the point already.

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Hi Suzy hi all.Watching our hero dithering. around picking up earbones umpteen times etc,calling gators croc(there are major and obvious differences)
Etc does not inspire any sort of confidence at all.He was advised on certaiin aspects but it may just be that he is out of his or anyones depth. Ill still be a watchin though, because after all its, our hero

[Satchmo]

Originally Posted by mr bruess

This is just plain "we are at the centre of the universe "type thinking.
It is a statisitical probabilty that life has got to exist elsewhere in the universe.Its like saying no one can ever win powerball or lotto because the probabilty of the event occuring is too low.But someone is always winning it and beating the extremely high odds and getting rich instantly.

Obviously you didn't appreciate the main point of BadMads's post at all. He was saying that life is likely to be much rarer than we think, which is a poignant point that should give us more passion about protecting the planet and all the species which go extinct every day .

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Originally Posted by Suzy

... He talks as slow as a tortoiuse walking up a mud slide. Pick up the pace Brian!...

.. you need to start that FB page Suzy

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Originally Posted by Satchmo

Obviously you didn't appreciate the main point of BadMads's post at all. He was saying that life is likely to be much rarer than we think, which is a poignant point that should give us more passion about protecting the planet and all the species which go extinct every day .

+1 to that.

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

Even though Ive been lampooning the series etc,in all seriousness.THE PROBABILITY that highly intelligent beings able to evolve, have something like an opposable thumb to build tools , a fire, let alone a spacecraft, is vanishingly small.Just to get to paramecium ,amoeba type stage and find that kind of life anywhere within thousands of light years ,would be an historic achievement.Unless some being has found a way to overcome the monster effects of aging ,inertia on an accelerating body, fuel etc,and cover vast tracks of space just to say hello!, and visit the cesspool we are creating? .And what for ?I KNOW to save us from our utter stupidity! cheers all

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Originally Posted by bigjoe

Even though Ive been lampooning the series etc,in all seriousness.THE PROBABILITY that highly intelligent beings able to evolve, have something like an opposable thumb to build tools , a fire, let alone a spacecraft, is vanishingly small.Just to get to paramecium ,amoeba type stage and find that kind of life anywhere within thousands of light years ,would be an historic achievement.Unless some being has found a way to overcome the monster effects of aging ,inertia on an accelerating body, fuel etc,and cover vast tracks of space just to say hello!, and visit the cesspool we are creating? .And what for ?I KNOW to save us from our utter stupidity! cheers all

I would imagine 'curiosity' would the main reason to visit. We are the product of a 4 billion year experiment and that would be very difficult to simulate on computers of any conceivable size. If another intelligence has evolved and is capable of star travel, finding other examples of that process would have to be interesting. Especially if it is exceedingly rare.

ps. They certainly won't be coming to eat us or colonize... access to energy, raw materials and engineering at the nano scale should have been solved long ago...if they are cruising between the stars.

[Steffen]

The probability for any particular life form to evolve seems vanishingly small, yet Earth is full of them. Given enough time and an ever so small pressure, or tendency, for matter to organise itself it can be argued that the emergence of life is inevitable.

As I have alluded above, molecular biology is not the prism through which we will be able to discover and understand the nature of life. Just like we cannot understand the function of the etax program by studying transistor patterns on a microchip. DNA molecules and base pairs and amino acids and even proton gradients are mere implementation details. They are essential, but they're not the big picture.

I think the big picture has to do with information – its storage, transmission and interpretation. Having only fairly recently been inducted into the circle of physical entities I think information itself is the key to understanding life, and it will take cutting-edge physics to understand information.

If anyone can explain life it'll be a physicist.

Cheers
Steffen.

[lacad01 (Adam)]

And here I was thinking all along that it was 42

[bigjoe (JOSEPH)]

I believe in abiogenesis.Life forming from self replicating molecules like ribozymes then dna which alone to form from them is a wonder of structure and arrangement.
Its almost as if it was put together by intelligence..Fred Hoyle himself a physisist and many others, ( Watson and Crick were astounded) thought it almost impossible to form in the time frames just from randomness.But it has and here we all are.So dont get me wrong.Life here even needed the existance of impacts, according to many and ultimately to us humans ever evolving.There could even be evidence that Mars had its own ribozymes etc so God only knows. I gotta stop sayin that hmm.cheers bigjoe
Ps: we have made synthetic self replicating ribozymes in the lab under strict conditions but they usually decay quickly.ribozymes are a form of information from which it appers life follows so maybe Steffens right on track
But are self replicating molecules in themselves life .I dont think so.cheers

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Originally Posted by bigjoe

...Its almost as if it was put together by intelligence..Fred Hoyle himself a physisist and many others, ( Watson and Crick were astounded) thought it almost impossible to form in the time frames just from randomness...

Problem is we are missing a good chunk of the fossil record. Possibly a billion years worth. 4.5 - 3.5 billion year ago. A billion years is a long time for all sorts of things to evolve. Sadly for us, rocks from that period are very rare on Earth. So randomness is not the right way to think of it...think in term of a billion years of pre-biotic evolution.