re: Edinburgh/MIT scientists to announce evidence for life in Venus’ atmosphere

Would love a reply other than a laugh. Seems like you are pretty confident in your position

DNA forming by chance is more complex than gold forming in a supernova. We can explain one and cannot explain the other for example.

We can observe DNA, but can we observe it forming from scratch? It’s easier to explain gold forming when stars collide or explode than DNA forming by chance. The math just doesn’t add up

The same stuff that is in DNA is in stars. Dude you are a star.

Nonsense. AI will facilitate biological life in space, not obsolete it.

You can do anything with enough money, and energy is the currency of the universe.

Create a Dyson sphere and you open up mars and Venus.

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AI will facilitate biological life in space, not obsolete it.

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Humans are bound to earth by gravity, literally, and cannot live without it over long periods. There’s no such thing as artificial gravity. Other dangers that cannot be overcome are interspatial radiation and the long distances between stars, meaning long journey times, for short-lived humans. These are some of the issues that no amount of money can resolve.

A Dyson sphere is not practical because it would never produce an ROI big enough to justify its construction.

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We can observe DNA, but can we observe it forming from scratch? It’s easier to explain gold forming when stars collide or explode than DNA forming by chance. The math just doesn’t add up

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1. The jury is still out on whether DNA or RNA came first.
2. It doesn’t really matter, though, because scientists have synthesized both from materials thought to exist on primordial Earth.
3. “The math” makes a lot more sense when you consider that there are potentially millions of different molecules that could serve the purpose of a genetic sequence.

While I agree that gold is easier to explain since it’s an element, it’s still chemistry.

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Go read about the Cambrian Explosion. So much evidence has come out against evolution since the 1960s but everyone still pretends evolution is settled science

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Do you know why most of that evidence has come out since the 1960’s? It’s because that’s when evolution was reintroduced into the US public school curriculum (after being effectively banned for about 50 years). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published for 100 years at that point, but it was the reintroduction of evolution into the school curriculum that birthed the modern day intelligent design movement.

The reality is this: there have always been, and will always be, gaps in the fossil record. We understand the history of life better each day, and we can observe natural selection in real time among microorganisms. Most scientists agree that, while the Cambrian Explosion was certainly a rapid period of evolution, it was within the expected limits. In fact, recent findings are blurring the lines between the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian periods, filling in some of the aforementioned gaps.

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Humans are bound to earth by gravity, literally, and cannot live without it over long periods. There’s no such thing as artificial gravity.

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There are multiple ways to simulate gravity. One is by constantly accelerating. Centrifugal force is another.

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Other dangers that cannot be overcome are interspatial radiation

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Why would you assume this “cannot be overcome” through materials science?

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and the long distances between stars, meaning long journey times, for short-lived humans.

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This is certainly the most obvious problem, but again - saying it “cannot be overcome” is a stretch. Even if you don’t believe FTL travel is possible (and according to our current understanding of physics, it’s not), interstellar travel within a human lifespan would be possible at speeds slower than light but much faster than our current capabilities.

Even if we can’t travel at speeds fast enough to make an interstellar trip in a human lifetime, we may find a way to use some sort of stasis to extend our lives during flight.

Even if we never achieve fast flight or the technology for stasis, we could build generational ships.

There are multiple solutions to this problem.

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A Dyson sphere is not practical because it would never produce an ROI big enough to justify its construction.

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What??

Ask yourself this: Do you think a solar panel can produce enough energy to build another solar panel? If so, it’s ridiculous to think the ROI isn’t there. Even if the net energy gain is marginal, once you get to self-replication it doesn’t matter. The larger issue with Dyson spheres is figuring out how to efficiently store/transfer the energy.

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Would love a reply other than a laugh.

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Ok.

The Cambrian explosion is not a "problem" for evolution. It is just one of many periods of rapid or otherwise notable evolutionary changes.

It may have been a "blink of an eye" in evolutionary terms, but it was still ~20 million years. For complex animals that could be 20 million generations. For simpler life it could be billions of generations. And each generation could be thousands, millions, or billions/trillions/quadrillions of organisms. And each individual organism is an opportunity for many different mutations.

You are trying to make a mathematical argument against evolution here?


Consider the "math" this way:

Maybe there were more species before the cambrian explosion. Maybe not as many total living organisms, but more different species.

But fossilization is an extremely rare event, especially for soft-bodied animals, so we just haven't found most of the species that existed.

Then maybe one of the numerous major climate events occurred. Maybe it made life easier, or maybe it made life harder. Either way, large changes in the environment are evolutionary pressures. If life got harder, maybe the tougher creatures survived and enjoyed less competition for food sources, their numbers exploded and created more fossils. If life got easier climate-wise, maybe most populations exploded very briefly, and then the most well-adapted out-competed the rest, most species died off and the remaining few exploded in population.

Maybe the cambrian "explosion" was actually an implosion. Maybe more varied but smaller populations collapsed into relatively fewer species but much larger populations, and that's what is reflected in the fossil record.

I'll be honest, I'm not going to watch a 1 hour vid produced by a political institution about their version of science.

And you shouldn't, either.