Re: BBC: Universe "too queer" to grasp--- Dawkins ...


"Jonathan Silverlight"
<jsilverlight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:7ZwuV7BQb$5CFwtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In message <dc8p9d$1re$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Paul Bramscher
> <brams006_nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> writes
> >
> >Martin 53N 1W wrote:
> >> Alfred A. Aburto Jr. wrote:
> >>
> >>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4676751.stm
> >> A good quote from that article is:
> >> "Because we exist in such a limited section of the
universe, and
> >>given its enormous scale, we cannot expect to be the
only organisms
> >>within it, Professor Dawkins believes."

[snippage]

> Couple of points - first, Prof. Dawkins said "organisms",
not "complex
> organisms" (much less intelligent). There's a huge gulf
between the
> first life on Earth, which may have appeared soon after it
cooled enough
> and been reborn several times after successive disasters,
and the
> appearance of anything with more than a single cell, which
apparently
> took almost the whole history of Earth.
> And second, in direct contradiction :-) I wonder if
there's any
> environment too hostile for complex life. I've just been
reading some of
> Stephen Baxter's fiction, where he suggests that whole
evolutionary
> histories may have happened in the first microseconds
after the Big
> Bang, and that as the universe cools it may host organisms
for whom a
> single thought takes as long as a species lasts on Earth.

Very true. The problem here is we know so very little about
the manifold parameters of life which allow it to appear.
Could life survive, if it did appear, in drastically
hyperthermal or hypothermal environments (using carbon-based
or some different chemistry)--could it survive in the
ultrastrong magnetic fields and plasmas which permeate the
galaxy? We have no idea. There could be some form of energy
being living in many nooks and crannies of the
galaxy--magnetic life could exist in suns and we would never
know it. We still have much to learn before putting
arbritary boundries on the limits of life...or, for that
matter, intelligent life. ...tonyC

> --
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