NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin of Life 115
William Robinson (875390) writes "A new study from researchers at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has proposed the "water world" theory as the answer to our evolution, which describes how electrical energy naturally produced at the sea floor might have given rise to life. While the scientists had already proposed this hypothesis called 'submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life' the new report assembles decades of field, laboratory and theoretical research into a grand, unified picture."
Re:It's alive (Score:5, Interesting)
inanimate matter
What does ‘inanimate’ mean? The problem is that people are always making this bizarre differentiation between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, when really there is just matter interacting with matter; some sets of interactions are more complex and organized (or, shall we say, repetitive and sustained) than other sets of interactions. Indeed, sometimes that complexity and organization is so great that we call it ‘life’ and even ‘intelligent life’, but it’s all one and the same:
Matter interacting with matter.
When you eat some metal such as calcium, that calcium may become incorporated in your bones. Is that calcium all of a sudden ‘animated’ and ‘living’? Is the water that you drink somehow ‘animated’ because it flows through your brain cells?
A child is a continuation of that complex interaction between matter that we call the parent.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:5, Interesting)
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos:
If the general picture, however, of a Big Bang followed by an expanding universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the universe devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly, somehow created? How did that happen?
In many cultures, the customary answer is that a "god" or "gods" created the universe out of nothing. But, if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: Where did God come from?
If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, then why not save a step, and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? There's no need for a creation—it was always here.
These are not easy questions; cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, with the questions that were once treated only in religion and myth.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:4, Interesting)
We can't "save a step and conclude that the universe always existed" because we think the universe had a beginning, the Big Bang. We could have saved that step if we thought the universe was Steady State. Dr. Sagan is asking this as a rhetorical question, yet he himself gave the answer not 20 pages earlier in the same book when he addressed the Steady State/Big Bang controversy in historical physics. That's showing a completely non-scientific bias and committing a logical error, and I really hoped for better from the good doctor. Fortunately, if there Is a real God, I suspect "he"s not going to be that hung up on whether his creations beleived without evidence or not.
Re:NASA Proposes "Water World" Theory For Origin o (Score:3, Interesting)
What scientist call the universe and what philosophers call the universe are two different things, for the philosopher the universe means absolutely everything, it can not have a creator because the creator would have to create it's self, if you exclude something from the universe to explain its creation then you are not answering the question of how did their get to be something in the first place. For scientist the universe can have different meaning depending on the context, it can mean the space and time we occupy, it can mean just points in space and time which we are connected to. This is why scientist can talk about multiverses, if they where talking about the philosophers universe this would make no sense. When the god question comes up it in relation to the philosophers universe, but to use this argument for god is cheating because you are excluding something and so no longer talking about everything.
Why no cells in the lab yet? (Score:4, Interesting)