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Life, the universe and everything.


Boycie

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No i'm describing a bacterial cell. Loop of dna, simple membrane, etc.

That is still chemically very complex and and biologically very sophisticated even if conceptually elegant and simple.

Any pared down version / protocell will still be a long long way from a droplet of amino acids etc.

Perhaps more akin to a cessna self-assembling than a jumbo jet, but no less impressive.

The 'blob' will still have to be a very clever blob..

I'm not sure we are really that much closer to understanding the origins of life.

Whoever cracks that one will be remembered above Newton, Einstein, Darwin etc.

I used the taboo word "miracle" to describe the evolution of life - you used the even more taboo word "creation".

it doesn't really matter. we inherit a vocabulary of loaded terms.

they key issue is whether life evolves so readily as to be commonplace throughout the universe and whether the evolution of life is a much more rare and special event.

It does seem to be the case that we owe our existance to a staggering series of chance events......a bit like rolling a six probably fifty or sixty times in a row.

It is very, very complex, I'm not saying it isn't! You can see how evolved your "average" bacterium are compared to a protocell so my point was we needn't introduce any additional complexity because otherwise we might as well just give up? If we had to get to that stage from the off then life wouldn't exist.

The chemistry isn't complicated in DNA so much so that it almost has an error of 0 - unheard of elsewhere in the natural or chemical world. The sterochemistry and drive for low entropy of the base pairs means that the process can be carried out trillions of times without a single error. I wouldn't want any non-chemists to think that what goes off is "complex chemistry", its really not, quite the opposite. The problem is its absolutely mind-boggling as to how this all came about and there I do agree with you, how did it start? The formation of a helix makes sense (its a low energy conformation), the four bases (amino acids) were knocking about and their stereochemistry encourages sequencing, the membrane is a very simple lipid structure but putting everything together and having the right sequence of these base pairs sounds implausible to say the least - though not impossible.

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Within what though?

One theory, supported by the Astronomer Royal no less, suggests the existence of parallel universes. So our own universe is like a sheet of paper, with another layered ontop of it much like a realm of paper. They even go on to suggest that black holes have white holes, whereby you can go through one and come out the other in another universe.

As a layman who struggles to comprehend the physics (or lack of known physics) of this, I find it more amazing that this theory is the subject of serious informed debate let alone it actually exists.

Take the massive black hole in the centre of our own Milky Way, we know it's there and have even identified it's affect on the orbit of stars nearby, but we are nowhere near being able to fully understand the processes involved even though it's sitting slap bang in the middle of our own galaxy, let alone others in the universe.

The biggest question in our current understanding is dark matter and the even more less understood dark energy.

They know dark matter exists as galaxies have a greater mass than the mass we can observe i.e. stars, gas and solid matter.

Dark energy is just a theory to explain why the universe is expanding faster than it should be if we just apply our currently known laws of physics. There's another force than just gravity and we know nothing about it.

The hunt for the Higgs Bosun at CERN is meant to complete the Standard Particle theory and hopefully allow us to better understand dark matter and possibly this dark energy (if it actually exists at all).

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In my prayers tonight I will ask god how big he made it, will lreport back when he gives me an answer.

Religion and science can happily coexist.

Revd Dr John Polkinghorne a theoretical physicist who was later ordained as a priest in the CoE. He's not a fan of those Creationists 'http://www.dcfcfans.co.uk/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

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Religion and science can happily coexist.

Revd Dr John Polkinghorne a theoretical physicist who was later ordained as a priest in the CoE. He's not a fan of those Creationists 'http://www.dcfcfans.co.uk/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />

But is he a Rams Fan? 'http://www.dcfcfans.co.uk/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':rolleyes:' />
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Take the massive black hole in the centre of our own Milky Way, we know it's there and have even identified it's affect on the orbit of stars nearby, but we are nowhere near being able to fully understand the processes involved even though it's sitting slap bang in the middle of our own galaxy, let alone others in the universe.

All galaxies are presumed to have a supermassive blackhole at their centre - nothing else has the gravitational field large enough to snare billions or trillions of stars. I'm not even sure what the theory was before this was universally accepted, it'd be like taking the sun away and still expecting the planets to orbit the vacated space.

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All galaxies are presumed to have a supermassive blackhole at their centre - nothing else has the gravitational field large enough to snare billions or trillions of stars. I'm not even sure what the theory was before this was universally accepted, it'd be like taking the sun away and still expecting the planets to orbit the vacated space.

I may be totally wrong on this, but I don't think it's the black holes that are holding galaxies together. Think they include the predicted mass of blackholes in the observable mass, hence they believe it's dark matter that is the unifying force as the observable mass just is'nt enough to hold galaxies together.

It sounds bizarre but we know galaxies cluster as our Milky Way is in the Local Galactic Cluster (and why Andromeda is hurtling towards us) but cosmic inflation is pulling all these cluster away from eachother. At some point it will pull not just our local cluster apart but also the stars in those galaxies.

One predicted future for the universe is not a collapse of the Big Bang theory but it just all drifts apart. Stars will be on their own in vast areas of space and eventually as the stars die, the lights will go out all over the universe and it will just be one vast void of darkness, weak gravity, dust and gas.

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I may be totally wrong on this, but I don't think it's the black holes that are holding galaxies together. Think they include the predicted mass of blackholes in the observable mass, hence they believe it's dark matter that is the unifying force as the observable mass just is'nt enough to hold galaxies together.

It sounds bizarre but we know galaxies cluster as our Milky Way is in the Local Galactic Cluster (and why Andromeda is hurtling towards us) but cosmic inflation is pulling all these cluster away from eachother. At some point it will pull not just our local cluster apart but also the stars in those galaxies.

One predicted future for the universe is not a collapse of the Big Bang theory but it just all drifts apart. Stars will be on their own in vast areas of space and eventually as the stars die, the lights will go out all over the universe and it will just be one vast void of darkness, weak gravity, dust and gas.

Interesting point and I think you're right on that one, having said that I'd still maintain that most galaxies have a supermassive blackhole at the centre (the evidence seems to suggest it) as I haven't really read anything to say otherwise. I can see Dark Matter acting as the glue in something as vast as a Galaxy.

The prediction is bang on, the anology I was always told was that the universe is like a ballon being blown up (the universe is still expanding 13.7 billion years post big bang). Draw two points on the ballon at any one point and continue blowing up and you'll see the two points having not "moved" themselves at all have in fact increased their distance apart owing to the expansion of the ballon (or universe). This is basically what scientists call red shift which explains why the galaxies are moving apart. The further they move apart, the more sparse matter becomes, there'd be literally nothing to manufacture the stars with. Pretty dull place.

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