PV Gap

Rhonda Said:

Astronomy Questions that i need help with?

We Answered:

I know a few:

5. they are looking for intelligent exterestial life
6. the sun
7. i think the last word is moon. the moon crashed into the earth and got disattached and the earth spinning threw it around the earth
8. all things came from that product

I want to let you know I could be wrong

Agnes Said:

Evolution ??????????

We Answered:

A good set of questions. I'll try to answer them to my limits.

1. The big bang is a point where the laws of physics as we understand them break down, or more specifically are not well understood (at 10e-36 seconds) but after the first second, we can more or less explain everything we have seen in the universe.

There is a serious concern in physics regarding the mass available in the universe (dark-matter/energy + normal matter/energy) and should the overall net mass of the universe be too small, then it implies that the universe was in fact "started", what was the causation of that start, is probably not a knowable fact from a scientific perspective, in this case we can as reasonable natural speculation as to the existence of a universal creator.

If however, there is sufficient mass when we discover how to infer that quantity, then we can calculate through normal knowable physical laws, that the state of the universe could be considered both infinite and cyclical, expanding and contracting upon itself - more or less forever.

(no 2)

3. We are not just told that these chemicals are available, we can see vast interstellar clouds of amino acids and chemicals, the very chemicals that we ourselves are composed of. Within the next 30 years, we will likely send space-probes to the outer moons of the solar system.

If - in these less than human hospitable environments, we find something like slime-mold or other organisms which are either in the oceans or on the surface of these moons, and (importantly) can determine that these organisms or life-forms are NOT transplants from Earth, we can know that life can arise independently on two worlds in a single solar system.

To your specific point about the complexity of DNA, while DNA is in fact very complex , it is not to say it is infinitely so, there are certainly more conceivably complex and efficient mechanisms for information storage at a biochemical level. DNA is kind of like the ultra-sleek show-room model of car, very nice, very complex and advanced with all the features we want, in this regard and certainly represents the "state of the art" from a biochemical perspective (at least on this planet).

However, it's not entirely helpful if you want to understand the basic bio-mechanical mechanisms of replication and evolution. When examining for that, you can look at small bits of DNA, but really you want to look at the Model-T or perhaps the ox-cart of biochemical messenger systems - RNA.

Regarding simpler life-forms though, the simplest "life" as we know it at present, are prions, which are simple large proteins and small chunks of RNA or RNA like structures, which replicate and form copies of themselves but are wildly prone to errors due to RNA being pretty unstable.

Much more primitive than viruses, these structures are formed and are made directly out of macro-molecular combinations of amino-acids, and as such could definitely be caused by the proper environmental conditions.

So to start out with DNA is not entirely helpful , however when you look down the food-chain at the simpler models of "pre-DNA" replication tools , it's definitely the case that these structures ARE commonly formed.

And for my money the most exciting field of research humans are investigating right now is evolutionary computing, as you say, throwing random chunks of simulated "code" into a computer environment, and letting SIMPLE evolutionary rules take place.

These methods are ALREADY used to form the basis of machine intelligence, and are the most likely mechanism for the emergence of another sentient "species" on our planet, the age of intelligent machines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4o…

However, what I think is incredibly important to understand and nearly always missed in our pop discussions about these matters, is that neither the Big Bang, or Darwinian evolutionary theories, nor really anything else in science have very much to say - at all about the presence/existence of God.

Evolution and the big bang could both be completely correct (we know that both events occur (or occurred) but we - as yet have an incomplete understanding of both phenomenon).

It's entirely possible that evolution is how God get's his work done. We are - in theory - talking about an entity that has quite alot of time on it's hands, so this may not be such an issue.

However, when we speculate about the existence of God we are really talking about an entity or entities which are capable of performing actions which - to bronze age traders and herdsmen would appear - for all intents and purposes - to be God.

Science shows us that with the application of sufficient energy, it's entirely possible to engineer whole planetary systems, so it's entirely possible and within the realm of scientific possibility that in fact an ENTIRE solar system could be engineered - created - in fact. The energies and timescales necessary are vast and beyond the comprehension of folks but it's not at all beyond possibility.

I've always found Michiu Kaku's explanation about super-civilizations wonderfully pop and simple to understand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7FVjATcq…

When cosmologists and astronomers go 'looking' for intelligent life in the universe, they don't go looking for UFO's and little green men visiting farmers in Iowa, they look to the stars and have classified the kinds of civilizations that "could exist".

Type 1 civilizations - these are civilizations that have control over most of the forms of energy on their home world and any habitable worlds of their main star-system, they can manipulate - to lesser or greater control - the environments of planets they inhabit.

Type 2 civilizations - these are civilizations that have control over a significant percentage of the energy coming from the star or stars around which their civilizations inhabit and are able to engineer projects on the scale of planetary engineering and are beginning to consider or exert some control over the fabric of space-time itself.

Type 3 civilizations - these are civilizations which have varying degrees of control over the energy of regions of a galaxy - anything from a few dozen stars up to civilizations which span entire galaxies and have measure of control over both energy and space-time itself within the local area of their control - creating structures and engineering projects on the scale of galaxies.

We are just, in the last few thousand years becoming a type 0 civilization - we have limited control over the energy available to us - in the form of what comes from the Sun or from the internal heat of the planet, and typically we get most of our energy by either burning dead plants or expending resources.

On the scale of things - we are somewhere between a 0.5 and probably a 0.6, but within the next 200-300 years - if we don't blow ourselves up or something else, it's very likely we could become a type 0.9 or 1 civilization ourselves.

At the end of the day, we are just - within the last 200 years - coming to understand such basic processes of life as evolution or hydrocycles or geology or paleontology or computer science but within the last 200 years we've discovered vast amounts of information about our universe that no one person could even hope to know.

Kimberly Said:

Does Universe Radiation effect human beings emotion?

We Answered:

> Does Universe Radiation effect human beings emotion?

No.
Although... cosmic radiation is supposed to be the cause of hair becoming gray and that certainly annoys me at times. Furthermore it causes the Northern lights which are a beautiful sight to see. Finally I have colleagues in the corridor working at the Pierre Auger Observatory and they get quite lyric at times when explaining "their" physics.

Victor Said:

How can one dispute Sol Invictus's prevalent hand in The Church of Rome(Halos, Solar Wheel..etc)?

We Answered:

You do know halos are in the bible, right? Book of revelation.