Jones Beene writes: >> Did some other form of life seed that one? Bad answer. Somewhere back in >> the chain, at some point, some form of life had to appear on its own, >> without artificial assistance from any pre-existing form of life. > >The logical error here seems to be in confusing the "physical" (time >delineated) with the "nonphysical" (timeless >influence).
I wasn't talking about that hypothesis. I was referring to the idea that another life form visited earth and left a physical "seed" of some sort, either on purpose or by accident (pollution). Note that people may have already accidentally brought life to Mars. Once it is established, life is tenacious, and it can evolve quickly, as demonstrated by the presence of bacteria in D2O nearly everywhere in the world, discovered by Celani et al. A D2O environment did not even exist before 1940. A variation on this idea is that seeds are broadcast through space by some natural event, like a cosmic dandelion or touch-me-not (Impatiens, I. balsamina -- a flower that expells the seed mechanically when you touch it). That, at least, would be natural in origin, but I doubt that any carbon DNA based species can survive in space, or survive unshielded for the millions of years it would take to cross interstellar space. I am assuming that a space-based Impatiens would still be mechanically or chemically powered, rather than CF powered, so it would travel very slowly. How could it even escape from the star's gravity? This is not a promising SF story. > ID is the characteristic of a nonphysical and timeless influence. There is no such thing. If there were it could not be detected with any instrument, and therefore it, in turn, could not influence events in the real world. Anything which can affect matter can be detected with some configuration of matter. The hypothesis that an object is "nonphysical and timeless" -- invisible in short -- can never be proved or falsified, so it is not scientific. It is like the statement that all positive cold fusion results are caused by unspecified and undetected errors. If you discover a way to detect this invisible force of nature, that will make it a visible force of nature, and I expect you will then find that it works like all the other forces of nature we have discovered: it obeys mathematical laws to as many decimal places as you can measure -- or it is perfectly random at the quantum level, and it expresses no will, purpose, or consiousness. > Secondly, there is no assurance that we even had a physical "beginning" > anyway - or that there really was a > "big bang" ... There is no assurance of anything, but some things are extremely likely, and the big bang is among them. Cosmic space-based Impatiens are at the opposite end of the scale. I would have predicted that bacteria that thrives in D2O (and nowhere else) is extremely unlikely too, but there it is. So, one never knows, do one? - Jed
