41

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 19/05/2020 18:23:26 »

Who put the gas under the plastic?

Enthalpy. Methane is the product of exothermic reactions.

Most of the water is just a few degrees above freezing. It would probably only reach 20 C fairly deep in the spring.

If all the water boils of "only deep in the spring" then it still all boils off.
At 0C the vapour pressure is still over a hundredweight to the square metre.
And if it has significant volatile organics in it, the pressure may be higher.

If you put on your scuba gear and dive down to where it is 20 C, you will be able to see that there is enough pressure to keep it from boiling. Be sure to take your wet suit. It's pretty cold at the top. Also take a radiation meter. You are not as radiation tolerant as Deinococcus Radiodurans. Since you are bored, take along Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch as entertainment. Fortunately the community of Halloysite nanotube creatures at the top has learned how to regulate the nuclear reactor so that it does not create a geyser. They add chloride as a neutron absorber when they detect radioiodine. This is why we need iodine for our thyroid hormones to regulate our growth.

42

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 19/05/2020 00:47:54 »

How come the seals survive the volume and pressure changes?
At 20C the vapour pressure of water is about 1/40 atmospheres or about a quarter of a tonne per square meter.

How come the seals survive the volume and pressure changes?
At 20C the vapour pressure of water is about 1/40 atmospheres or about a quarter of a tonne per square meter.

Because the organic seals are quite small. What you have is a lot of small grains stuck together with plastic.  Porous material can be quite strong. Think of foamed concrete. There are bubbles so volume change is not a problem. Because the interconnections are plastic, it also deforms well under impacts. Most of the water is just a few degrees above freezing. It would probably only reach 20 C fairly deep in the spring.

Is this the genetic study you were speaking about earlier? https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html

The paper you cite is only a thought exercise which proves that you cannot extend Moore's law back that far. I probably referred to,"The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor":   https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016116
Unfortunately Nature is behind a paywall.

43

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 18/05/2020 22:23:42 »

What's the atmospheric pressure here?

The atmosphere is a high vacuum. The gas below the seals is mainly methane.

Do you know that ammonium sulphate is very soluble in water?

Yes, that means it is deposited away from the spring and at a temperature near its ferroelectric point.

44

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 18/05/2020 21:56:27 »

You can have liquid water or you can have ferroelectric ammonium sulphate.
You can't have both. The ferroelectric transition is somewhere near -50C.
And I'm not convinced you can have liquid water until you have something big enough to have an atmosphere to stop it boiling off into space.
And once you have liquid water, and a dense atmosphere, you might as well be on Earth.

In a 3:2 resonance orbit with the early Earth the average black body temperature was a bit above the ferroelectric transition temperature. With day/nighttime variation the transition point would have been crossed every day. The average noon time temperature would have been about 20 C, so the ice/water transition point would have also been crossed. The spring was radioactively heated, so there was a zone near the spring in which the temperature variation centered around 0 C thus making desalination by freezing, the concentration of boron, and water/formamide separation occur every day. Conditions were thus appropriate for the ribose reaction and the winding and unwinding of RNA and DNA.

The UV polymerization of alkanes provided a seal at the surface above the spring. When this was punctured by micrometeorites another layer formed as fluid permeated the dust that had accumulated above it. The new layer was temporarily self sealed by nonvolatile soluble materials. When vapor pressure lifted the layers, fluid spread to the edges and added to the layered area. Water vapor pressure was low because temperatures were near freezing. The hydrological system was thus self regulating.

45

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 18/05/2020 19:49:52 »

Take a look at the high fraction of HCN and HCHO generated by hard UV in the nebulas of molecular clouds. They can also be generated by harder radiation.

Even a large fraction if a very good vacuum isn't much actual material.

You complain that it would be too dilute on Earth yet are happy to source it where there is nothing but "space".

Looking at the photodissociation zones between nebulas and their molecular clouds gives one empirical data for modeling the chemistry of the Solar nebula when it got blasted by a beam of gamma rays from a neutron star merger. The solar nebula was orders of magnitude denser so got useful concentrations and fugacities of HCN, HCHO, and NS. These were absorbed onto smoke from the evaporation of rock. CN was absorbed onto transition metal atoms. The latter chemicals formed polymers on grain surfaces. HCHO mostly formed on surfaces, rather than in the gas phase. NS hydrolized  to ammonium sulphate, which is a grain aggregator and ferroelectric. (Half of the sulfur is also oxidized or reduced in the process.)

This dust was herded by light pressure, pebble dynamics, and electrostatic levitation to pile up over the asteroidal spring where liquid water activated the chemicals. HCN and HCHO formed polypeptides which were electrically separated through temperature variation of the ferroelectric. Many other reactions, of course, were going on in parallel.

46

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 18/05/2020 03:23:10 »

The next step would then require impacts from asteroids in the Solar System to drive material from the rogue planet as it passed through our Solar System. Then those microbe-contaminated samples land in an ocean on Earth and life is jump-started here.

Improbable? Certainly.

Impossible? Hardly.

I think that the problem of whether interstellar panspermia is significantly probable or improbable may be an intractable problem. It is easy enough to debunk the optimists. One paper I read assumed that a vacuum tight fusion crust had formed on a rock. The problem is that when the crust cooled it would be under tension so would fracture under the slightest impact. On the other hand there are so many possibilities that it is difficult or impossible to show that one has considered all the relevant possibilities.

General simplicity strongly supports the Unique Earth Hypothesis. That along with Fermi's Paradox works against interstellar panspermia being highly probable. Neither, however, prohibits the existence of there being some microbial colonies. The Anthropic Principle makes it difficult to determine the probability that it occurred with Earth.

47

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 17/05/2020 23:25:23 »

 

[it's also  unfortunate that you are saying that hard radiation will generate HCN  and HCHO when, in fact, it will destroy them.

Take a look at the high fraction of HCN and HCHO generated by hard UV in the nebulas of molecular clouds. They can also be generated by harder radiation.

48

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 17/05/2020 23:13:14 »

Earlier on there were repeated changes in the format of the forum that tended to hide my posts followed by their revocation, so I am not sure of how much of a consensus there is now.

Could you be specific about what happened? I am not aware of any format changes since you registered here, nor any revocation of your posts.
Have you posted here before using a different identity?

The New Theories icon and link disappeared from The Lighter Side menu and the New Theories list was reduced to one page. This happened more than once. By "revocation" I was referring to the changes being removed within an hour, not to my posts being removed. I have never posted here under a different identity.

I wonder if a general discussion on the likelihood of life originating on a nearby asteroid, and the conditions necessary for that to happen, might be be more productive.

If I had known the opposition to naming the specific asteroid I was to receive, I might have done that. As I explained in my last reply to Bored Chemist the specific location was important to my pursuing my research. Before the Dawn spacecraft visited Vesta I was thinking that an asteroidal location for the origin of life was likely, but I needed a specific location to know what its insolation was and what materials it received from the solar nebula. When I saw the announcement of the detection of hydroxl radicals on Vesta's surface, I immediately understood the scenario and proceeded to research the astrobiology.

49

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 17/05/2020 21:53:02 »

Your job, if you want us to believe your idea, is that you need to disprove the "null hypothese "
(1) You have to show that life didn't start on Earth
(2) You have to show that it didn't start somewhere else in the Solar system  (I think we can agree that much further afield that that is impossible because radiation would destroy the DNA/RNA)

I repeatedly pointed out that the concentrations of chemical precursors on Earth would be too low because of dilution and catalytic destruction.

I said that other asteroids would be too cold, which I take to be obvious, since one has to arrive at a biology with liquid water as the main solvent.

As for interstellar panspermia, dehydration is more destructive to RNA than is radiation alone. At ambient temperature in typical cells the RNA half-life in a vacuum is only a few years.

Until you have proved those, I'm going to continue to state the null hypothesis. And I recognise that there's no way I can do that without  saying "you are wrong".

My more concise proof is by general simplicity, which includes equal treatment in pairs of variables. The physical/social sciences pairing puts the origin of life at a neutral point in the middle. The periodic/chaotic pairing, not having someplace else to be, gets paired with the origin of life. Vesta and Ceres are the main bodies in clearly chaotic orbits because of their mutual gravitational interaction during close encounters. Larger bodies are in longer term periodic orbits. Life starting on a former satellite of Vesta breaks the Vesta/Ceres symmetry. This is the viewpoint from which I arrived at the topic.

To accept this viewpoint, however, requires understanding how general simplicity generates the mathematical description of reality starting from changing just one axiom of arithmetic, namely, associativity of multiplication. (Associative means the order in operating on 3 things does not matter; commutative means the order of operation on 2 things does not matter.) This allows past and future events to mutually cause each other, i.e., block time, while making the past and the future at the level of particles distinguishable.

Think about operations that generate steps in time.  Commutivity means taking one step forward in time, then one step backwards is the same as taking one step backwards, then one step forward - both leave you in the present. The past and the future are both involved, however, so mutual causality is allowed. It together with having a finite number of states and the principle of plentitude, i. e., you have to traverse all the states, allows the number of states to be mapped unto time intervals and allows constants in time, e.g., the Hubble constant for the expansion of the universe.

Adding one more step by nonassociativity adds another property. Taking one step forward in time, one step back, and finally one step forward leaves you one step in the future, which is the normal progression of time. This order, however, is different from one step back, then two steps forward, because the canceling pairs of steps are going in opposite directions. If this asymmetry were not present, we would not be here because the amount of matter and antimatter would be the same and they would annihilate each other.

While this approach is relatively concise, it can not be extremely concise because I would have to go on and explain a lot more, e. g., string theory and the Standard Model of particle physics for you to be thoroughly convinced of the validity of general simplicity. For the moment just remember that it is a paradigm shift reversing the order of priority between empiricism and rationalism in fundamental science. It is Platonic rather than Aristotelian.

Since you are a chemist, I will say that it changes chemistry by introducing quasicrystalline components in 3-D space projected down from 12-D hypercubic lattices. These come from data words of the 24-D extended binary Golay code so there is the illusion of separateness of matter and space-time-mass.

50

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 17/05/2020 02:02:34 »

I don't see how that counts as harassment. Being illogical or frustrating is not necessarily being harassing. If you find it to be too much to deal with, there is supposedly some way to put a selected user on "ignore".

Since most people were being too illogical or frustrating, I stopped posting for a while so that I could ignore everybody. Their motivations were unclear.

That is a giant "if". With cognitive dissonance working most supposed evidence is not well-supported.

Then the veracity of the evidence itself can become the subject of debate.

I was debating the veracity of the evidence.

I do not think that people are understanding my comments about cognitive dissonance so I will give a little on the philosophy of science. Every model is a simplification of reality so has a domain of applicability, beyond which it gives bad results. To work with a model and make the effort of detailing it one needs to make a commitment to it. This means ignoring information coming from beyond the domain of applicability. This information sets up cognitive dissonance. One has to set a threshold of tolerance to it, such that the threshold being exceeded is a warning that one is at or near the boundary. One may then adopt a new paradigm and enlarge the boundary within which one is working. It requires much effort, however, to learn or create a new paradigm, including the principles of correspondence with the paradigm of the old domain. As a scientific paradigm matures there are more and more people in the domain and they must spread out to near the boundary to have a niche of their own. For most people adopting a new paradigm is too hard so they are likely to cross the boundary and get bad results. This, however, tends to corrupt the entire community of followers of the old paradigm as they raise their thresholds and lower their standards so as to not lose members.

Creative people have much greater thresholds of tolerance for contradiction so they are able to work near the boundary, understand the nature of the contradictions, and create a new paradigm. Their telling people that there is a new paradigm is a new form of cognitive dissonance.  Since the community has raised its threshold in the meantime, the new paradigm is generally ignored or explained away with internally contradictory arguments. This protects people from having to make the effort to adopt the new paradigm, but sets up positive feedback in raising the cognitive dissonance threshold higher. Eventually something will break, but not before a core group of creative people figure out how to explain the new paradigm, including its principles of correspondence, simply enough to be able to recruit a critical mass of new recruits and resources.

Because it has been 75 years since the post-World War II influx of greater scientific resources, most basic scientific disciplines have reached a high state of maturity in their current paradigms. For 50 years physics has mainly seen refinements on what was developed in the previous 25 years. It is now in a highly metastable state. To break through this quandary I need to reach a critical mass by concentrating on simple arguments to recruit a few creative people well skilled in conventional mathematics and physics and with the necessary resources. They can then do enough of the more difficult principles of correspondence to lower the barrier to acceptance by the larger community. This may require a few unusual people who can help communicate the simple arguments widely enough to reach the necessary number of creative people willing to detail the necessary number of principles of correspondence. The numbers for what is necessary is an open question.

I'm not looking to continue the debate, but I'm just throwing this out there for curiosity's sake: why not consider Ceres as a possible abode for the origin of life? It has plenty of organic material, water ice, and iron minerals. Why couldn't your water circulation system and natural nuclear reactor be present there? Or what about Hygeia, which also has ice and organic material?

We can finish the debate right away. They are all too cold.

51

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 23:07:09 »

Insults or threats are too high a standard a limit when dealing with harassment.

What else did you have in mind?

People trying to force the order of discussion so as to make a logical and coherent presentation impossible. My last post to Bored Scientist addressed this specific  point. I also have made other points to you that you have not taken to heart.

If a good counterargument is presented, the first evidence may not really be well-supported.

Hence why I said "if it is well-supported".
[/quote]

That is a giant "if". With cognitive dissonance working most supposed evidence is not well-supported.

52

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 22:52:49 »

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

OK, stop repeatedly telling us that an entirely hypothetical satellite is the origin of life.

You are the ones repeatedly bringing up the subject without consideration of evidence. I put the subject into the topic title so the discussion of the origin of life would be grounded with a specific location with specific solar radiation and specific solar nebula inputs. I then proceeded to present evidence, most of it only weakly dependent on that specific location. I lot of it was in rebuttal to the generally assumed location, the Earth. After I had shown that an asteroidal site was strongly preferable to a site on earth I could then show that a former satellite of Vesta  was the only asteroidal site strongly favored by the evidence. Since evidence is strongly interconnected, one has to choose some such structure to make the presentation coherent and efficient. Remember that the origin of life was specifically in the title.

Instead of allowing me to proceed laying out the evidence in the manner I thought best for putting together the entire model you demanded that I prove my specific location before tying down the evidence that supported it - a logical impossibility. Logical counterarguments need to attack points within the scientific model, not the presenters model of presentation. While the latter tactic may score points within a debating club, it does not within a scientific forum.

53

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 09:20:29 »

It isn't our duty to protect anyone's ideas from criticism, only from unreasonable behavior like insults or threats.

Insults or threats are too high a standard a limit when dealing with harassment. It's generally repeated small events of incivility that ruin people's lives. I have gotten accustomed to this because I have had unorthodox beliefs since I was a child. It has taken quite a toll on my social life, however.

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred.

I don't think I can agree with that. If an argument is a well-supported by the presented evidence, there is no need to bring new evidence to the table.

Think about that again. If a good counterargument is presented, the first evidence may not really be well-supported. It is incumbent on the first presenter to try to improve their body of evidence rather than just reasserting their first position.

The Naked Scientists have generally been very lenient because we have allowed all kinds of crazy things to be posted here with questionable to zero evidence.

So have I noticed. That is why I started posting here. I needed some type of online feedback, because Covid-19 had shut the UCB campus. On the first science forums I tried, my posts were immediately censored because they were too unorthodox. After a while here I stopped posting because people were not open enough to advanced fundamental science. After the abstract I had presented showed up in a general Internet search I returned to correct it, since it had an embarrassing error in it. I was surprised at the deluge of replies this triggered. I suppose I should not have been surprised. I have gotten thrown off at least one science forum for amateurs because I was too knowledgeable. I would restrict myself to professional forums, but they are generally closed to people who are not specialists.

54

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 06:50:49 »

It showed me how deeply the dogma that Life on Earth started on Earth is protected by cognitive dissonance.

To be fair, I am open to the possibility that life could have started elsewhere. I just have not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it must have or must have not.

In the spirit of the Lighter Side people need to be allowed to present there evidence without being presented with unreasonably high standards for evidence. Though there is going to be a struggle over epistemology, it should not degenerate into a fight. I welcome people explaining what they would consider convincing evidence, though they do not generally know.

That Bored Chemist was not breaking the rules of the forum is a problem of the forum.

So which of his actions do you think should have a rule or rules barring it?

Repeatedly asserting a position without presenting new evidence each time should be barred. Enforcing this rule would require finesse because people nearly always modify their position a little each time. People mainly need to be reminded how they are violating the rule. This could move to barring offending replies. Only in extreme cases should people be barred. Since you were also violating the rule, you would need practice in applying it. It would need to be discussed among the moderators to reach some type of consensus. Earlier on there were repeated changes in the format of the forum that tended to hide my posts followed by their revocation, so I am not sure of how much of a consensus there is now. I thought that you were one of the people protecting me.

55

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 05:58:52 »

Maybe you should get more into the habit of being a moderator and enhancing the discussion. When I replied to your question of "what was my profession?", you ignored my replies and just allowed BoredChemist to continue trashing the discussion.

I got tired of what appeared to be a fruitless effort. If you want to count that as besting me in the debate, feel free to. The research I needed to do in order to be a part of it was illuminating, however. So you have my thanks for that.

As far as Bored Chemist goes, I don't see how he has broken any of the rules.

I must say that the debate was also illuminating, especially when I followed the links you did supply. It showed me how deeply the dogma that Life on Earth started on Earth is protected by cognitive dissonance. This showed me that I must focus on general simplicity and let the origin of life be a secondary topic. It was, of course, fruitless for you to try to change my basic philosophy of science since it arises from practicing fundamental science with good results for decades. That Bored Chemist was not breaking the rules of the forum is a problem of the forum. So thanks for the insight.

56

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 01:49:19 »

No, more likely you are Manchurian Candidates brainwashed by cognitively dissonant academic propaganda.

Ah yes, brain-washing. I guess I should have gotten into the habit of wearing tinfoil hats.

Maybe you should get more into the habit of being a moderator and enhancing the discussion. When I replied to your question of "what was my profession?", you ignored my replies and just allowed BoredChemist to continue trashing the discussion.

57

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 01:17:50 »

What is your cut of the action? If not, why aren't you maximizing your profitable activities?

You think we're getting paid for this?

No, more likely you are Manchurian Candidates brainwashed by cognitively dissonant academic propaganda.

58

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 16/05/2020 00:52:51 »

Instead of responding to impossible demands

Backing up your allegation is impossible.
Maybe you shouldn't have made it.

What was impossible was taking a picture of an object that disintegrated before cameras were invented.

Instead of responding to impossible demands

Backing up your allegation is impossible.
Maybe you shouldn't have made it.

What was impossible was taking a picture of an object that disintegrated before cameras were invented.

OK, so, swimming through treacle here... what evidence is there that the rock did exist (not might have existed, but DID exist)?

Let me ask a socioeconomic question. This forum is sponsored by the Naked Scientists, a capitalist organization of academics that are making money selling their services for presenting popular science. As good profit seekers they do not like competition. So they have set up a "New Theories" section promising that it is "On the Lighter Side" and new theories will not be forced to meet full academic standards. Instead their proponents are subjected to a couple of characters who repeatedly trash the discussion by asserting some version of, "You have NOT presented ANY evidence, because you have not considered all the infinite number of possible alternatives!" What is your cut of the action? If not, why aren't you maximizing your profitable activities?

59

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 15/05/2020 20:43:52 »

Instead of responding to impossible demands

Backing up your allegation is impossible.
Maybe you shouldn't have made it.

What was impossible was taking a picture of an object that disintegrated before cameras were invented.

60

New Theories / Re: Did life originate on a satellite of the asteroid Vesta?

« on: 15/05/2020 19:01:37 »

- hypotheticals in the abstract.

No.
You really have to stop complaining about us mentioning "hypotheticals", when you are talking about a rock that doesn't exist.
Sauce for the goose...

Albert Einstein doesn't exist. I guess I have to stop talking about him.

OK, let's descent to playground level since that's what you want.
Here is a photograph of Einstein.

Einstein.JPG (18.48 kB . 224x286 - viewed 803 times)
Please post a photo of your rock.

Playgrounds are for having fun. Instead of responding to impossible demands I am having fun today surfing through physics and seeing how the many pieces I have learned over the years are unified by general simplicity. I was just reading about the history of the arrow of time problem. The simplest starting point for developing the theory is to point out that elementary arithmetic does not distinguish between forwards and backwards in time when applied to individual particles. We can solve this by dropping the axiom of associativity. The rest of reality then unfolds through the application of general simplicity. The clarification of neutrino physics that I mentioned in my last reply removed the last major conceptual problem blocking me from adopting a more relaxed attitude toward developing my theory.