The Astronomy Thread

Or: If we had no mysteries, faith would lack meaning.

Edit: I think they use that one already, come to think of it.

TheBeagle_sl said:

Plus it will be fun watching the religious zealots continue to tie themselves up in knots arguing against evolution despite life on another planet. Especially if somehow its DNA is built from the same ATCG/AUCG building blocks that ours is.

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Screw that I want an entirely new type of DNA so they can't just claim god created dna and evolution took over, you know they will make yet another claim that when they say god created man on whatever day it was in the 6 days that 1 day is billions of years and that is how he created us in his own image. If you want to also stick it to religious people to go along with the discovery of life, you want that shit to be so different than just about anything else. Like finding a silicon based life forms with completely different building blocks.

Also I am aware that Silicon is the most likely source of life different than our own but that is still far enough away from carbon based life to put erase all this god shit and life being the same.

I think expecting life on an Earth like planet to not evolve using just about the same building blocks is like expecting water to not be wet on a different planet. It probably won't use the exact same 20 amino acids that we use to build proteins, but will still probably follow the Central Dogma, its just too elegant and good at reproducing and delivering huge amounts of information in a very precise manner not to exist where life does. It does appear that our particular universe is set up just right for carbon/water based life forms predominating, that will give the zealots a few hundred more years of moving the goalposts.

Of course this whole post is probably just a great example of selection bias and the next life we find will be silicon/arsenic/sulfur based.

One of the theories is that life originated on Mars and ended up on Earth via panspermia, in which case we would find DNA/RNA like that on Earth.

TheBeagle_sl said:

I think expecting life on an Earth like planet to not evolve using just about the same building blocks is like expecting water to not be wet on a different planet. It probably won't use the exact same 20 amino acids that we use to build proteins, but will still probably follow the Central Dogma, its just too elegant and good at reproducing and delivering huge amounts of information in a very precise manner not to exist where life does. It does appear that our particular universe is set up just right for carbon/water based life forms predominating, that will give the zealots a few hundred more years of moving the goalposts.

Of course this whole post is probably just a great example of selection bias and the next life we find will be silicon/arsenic/sulfur based.

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I'm not disagreeing with you but if you truly want to shut the religious people up, Silicon is probably your best bet.

Except you'd have to breathe volcanic ash and shit sand, which would be difficult. Not impossible, but...

I'd also expect life on chemically similar planets in the same solar system might take similar forms. Mars life, if it exists, may more closely resemble Earth life than say, Titan life.

Couldn't non-carbon based life forms also exist on earth?

Theoretically they could but we haven't found any evidence of that yet. NASA had a small blunder a few years ago when they announced silicon based life forms only to backtrack after.http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

btw, i have always heard talking about silicon based life but no other possible chemical base. Are carbon and silicon the only atoms theoretically able to form organic cells?

You hear about Si so much because it is more chemically similar to C than any other element. They are both tetravalent, i.e. four valence shell electrons, which gives them their extreme versatility. However Si is a little less reactive than C due to its extra orbital and decreased elctronegativity. Si also differs from carbon in that it can accept electrons to form up to 6 bonds rather than the four that carbon can form. That probably complicates things.

And technically, the definition of 'organic' is any molecule containing carbon, except CO2. So any life form utilizing silicon instead of carbon would no longer be termed organic. Just sayin'.

Tuco_sl said:

And really there's no huge logical leap to say that the Judaic God created N planets with N beings in his likeness. To someone who believes in God showing earthling like life on Mars is acceptable evidence in a divine creator who simply has more diverse interest than Earth. Plus it answers the pretty difficult question of God which is "why create 10^24 planets and only populate one?".

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That's why you will need something so different than us to really shut them up.

The existence of other life forms, that God created us in some way, and that life can exist other places in other forms arenotmutually exclusive ideas.

We could find a living rock on Mars that shits jellybeans and religions will find a way to explain it. Gods plan etc. Nothing is ever going to shut religions up. Religion is all about believing something with no proof or reason.

The only reason we know as much as we do about past species on earth is because they had skeletons and/or carapaces that fossilize well. Micro organisms and soft bodied(for lack of the correct term) species do not fossilize well and are very difficult to study, even here on earth.

Abefroman_sl said:

We could find a living rock on Mars that shits jellybeans and religions will find a way to explain it. Gods plan etc. Nothing is ever going to shut religions up. Religion is all about believing something with no proof or reason.

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Don't shit up the thread with stuff like that. People like you go around and think things like "Religion is stupid cause SCIENCE." Well, I have news for you. First, science and religion can and do coexist for a good deal of people, and second, a good deal of science is inductive and unprovable. These are the axioms that entire fields are built on. And that's okay! We should of course keep functioning as if for any number there exists a number n+1 because to operate differently would be silly. But don't take a dump on someone else's equally unfounded axiomatic belief.

The universe itself either is the cause of itself (unproved and absurd) or something else started it, a God which is also, unproved and absurd, which in turn some religions assert is the "cause of himself."

Let me also state I am not religious. A large number of people believe things with "no proof or reason" including atheists, agnostics, and so on. Just read some of the assertions from people on this forum. I don't want to start a religious debate in the Astronomy thread--just be assured that these things can co-exist not because "religion finds a way to explain it and is all about believing something with no proof or reason," but because there are axioms that are common in their inductive, unprovable nature.

look, i dont want shit this thread because we have ther atheist thread for this kind of discussion, but you reply is so wrong it deserve it

science does not believe ANYTHING. Believe, by its very meaning, is cosidering true something you have not direct proof. Science doesnt do it. We dont "believe" in evolution. Nor we "believe" in relativity

we created them, bit by bit, after testproofed direct experiments that are repeatable at any moment and any condition. And we use them because so far they are most coherent, exact and well costructed theories to explain the reality around us. If what Darwin or Einsten wrote was not backed by direct proof, they would have been forgotten decades ago

That's how it works. A theory is not followed just because it's cool

Everyone of course is aware that they are very incomplete, and the moment something will come that completely contraddict them, we will either improve or trash them and create a new theory to understand the universe better

it's not a matter of believe, it's a matter of observe reality, test it, write down its rules and use this knowledge to do another step ahead

the fact you say that "a good deal of science is inductive and umprovable" means that you:

(1) have no fucking clue of what you are talking about (inductivitity of science)
(2) are not scientist. Or better said, you have no scientific mentality (you think we cant understand something)

I don't think you understand how axioms work.

You do "believe" the Big Bang Theory because it is not reproducible. You "believe" that for all numbers there exists another number, n+1. That is belief. There are no proofs for it that do not rely on wholly axiomatic claims--you believe something arbitrarily.

A favorite of atheists to bring out is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Okay, I can buy that. "All matter exists because it exists," seems like a pretty extraordinary claim. There is no proof for it.

Do you exist? Do others exist? What is the difference between a conscious amalgamation of matter and an unconscious one? What gives it its consciousness?

No one fucking claimed at any point that people are believing things because it is cool. A good deal of science is inductive in nature, deal with it. Better yet take a Logic and Philosophy intro course.

"Axioms are not self-evident truths in any sort of rational system, they are unprovable assumptions whose truth or falsehood should always be mentally prefaced with an implicit ``If we assume that...''

Read Godel's proof.

Tuco_sl said:

Pretty much and no rational person who believes in the Judaic God should raise concern with that statement. Creation is a miracle, which means it's only enabled by a God who happens to be omnipotent. There is literally nothing outside the scope of the Judaic God's power to create.

All you can hope for is provably wrong declarations made by religion to be factually incorrect. A good example is the made-in-6-days-6000-years-ago bullshit.

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And I totally agree with this.